The following is a conversation between Captain Ivonne Roman of the Newark Police Department, Founder of Women’s Leadership Academy, and Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving on AM 970 The Answer WNYM in New York City.
Captain Ivonne Roman
Denver: Despite overwhelming evidence that female police officers have a positive influence, women make up just 12% of police forces nationwide – a figure that has remained stagnant for the past 20 years. There are a number of reasons for this, including physical fitness tests that some believe are designed to exclude them. Championing the cause for more female police officers is Captain Ivonne Roman from the Newark New Jersey Police Department. She is also the Founder of the Women’s Leadership Academy and an executive board member of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing.
Good evening, Ivonne, and welcome to The Business of Giving!
Ivonne: Thank you for having me here.
Denver: Let’s begin with the big story, the one that everyone has been talking about – and you’ve helped bring national attention to – and that is the change in the fitness test in New Jersey, and the impact that that has had on female recruits. What has been going on?
Ivonne: I noticed it around 2014 or 2015. The City of Newark had laid off approximately 167 officers in 2010, and I was charged with conducting a personnel analysis. I found that another 600 officers could retire by 2020 if we didn’t start an aggressive hiring plan. The plan was approved, and what I noticed was that as recruit classes were cycling through academies through the entire state of New Jersey, that women were failing at rates between 60% and 80%, and no one could explain why.
As I started looking at the data, I found that women were stagnated in policing across the nation at about 12.5%. I got myself trained as a physical fitness instructor to see if I could determine what was going on in the academies. I then learned that a new policy was implemented in 2017 that required all recruits to meet the physical fitness standards within 10 workout sessions. After that policy was put into place, the next two classes that we sent, 80% of the women were dismissed from the Academy.
I then started looking at the research on physical fitness exams. I learned that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that if women do not pass at the rate of 80% of the male pass rate, then the test, on its face, is invalid. The only way that the agency can defend against that is if they could prove that the test is based on a bona fide occupational qualification. When I started to review what the women were failing for, an overwhelming amount of them were failing for the push-ups exam, and the push-ups have never been validated as being work-related.
Denver: Who made this change?
Ivonne: That was the Police Training Commission. They had been planning it about a year, a year and a half. It went into effect January 1, 2017. But for some reason, the rate of women being dismissed from the Academy had started climbing in 2015, and it reached that 80% mark after 2017 when they implemented that new policy with the 10-workout sessions.
…those 10-workout sessions have never been validated. It’s not based on science. It’s not based on physiology. The people who actually designed the Cooper test said that they’ve never heard of anything like that, and there’s no way possible that someone who couldn’t perform that exam on the first day could perform that on the 10th day.
Denver: Why so few sessions? I mean, this goes on for a while at the Academy. Why were they given so little time to improve?
Ivonne: There has been no reasonable answer for that. USA Today conducted an investigation where they gathered 10 years of records, and they spoke to numerous individuals at the Police Training Commission. It seems that that was a decision made amongst the commissioners at a meeting. They thought that 10 sessions was sufficient to have someone pass those fitness standards.
Their test is based on the Cooper test. The test that they implemented in 2017 had been found to lead to disparities in Pennsylvania just a year before. They implemented that test, knowing that it had been challenged, and that they lost that challenge… the Pennsylvania State Police. So, they figured they’d add the 10-workout sessions to give people a little more time.
But those 10-workout sessions have never been validated. It’s not based on science. It’s not based on physiology. The people who actually designed the Cooper test said that they’ve never heard of anything like that, and there’s no way possible that someone who couldn’t perform that exam on the first day could perform that on the 10th day. If you give them a sufficient time, men and women can build body mass, especially upper body mass. Women have less testosterone than men so it will take them a little longer to be able to pass that test, but that 10-workout session just doesn’t exist anywhere else in the United States.
It’s very hard to fail out of the military because they’ll assign someone to you to make sure you pass that test. So why are we holding our police officers to more stringent requirements than our own US military? We’re not training soldiers; we’re training public servants.
Denver: So now that this has come to everyone’s attention – the USA Today did cover it; you gave a TED talk about it – what kind of activity has that generated at the state level in New Jersey?
Ivonne: There is talk about reviewing the standards again. The opinion on the Police Training Commission Board seems to be divided. One individual that was interviewed said that if it’s leading to disparities, that they would address it, that they weren’t aware that this was leading to disparate outcomes. Another individual that was interviewed said that the Academy is “not a day spa,” and that if they come in and they’re not able to perform, it’s not their job to get someone to that level where they can pass the tests.
But I argue that the military does the complete opposite, and the law enforcement community has deep respect for the military. The military guarantees you that if you come in on Day one, and you pass the background and the physical, and it shows that you can be trained, that at the end of that 12 weeks, they will turn you into a soldier… that you will pass that test. It’s very hard to fail out of the military because they’ll assign someone to you to make sure you pass that test. So why are we holding our police officers to more stringent requirements than our own US military? We’re not training soldiers; we’re training public servants.
What I found is that the sweet spot is around 2 & 1/2 to 3 months where they’re able to pass this test. The Academy is 5 months long. What this means is: Had they not been fired, they would have passed this test.
Denver: What’s the impact been on these women who have failed the test? I would imagine in many cases, they quit their jobs to do this.
Ivonne: Really tough stories. Women invested about $2,000 in fees and equipment. They quit their jobs; they cut all their hair off…to be fired within the first 2 & ½ to 3 weeks. A lot of them couldn’t return to their jobs. It’s been a challenge, but these women really wanted these positions. So they came to me so I can train them to pass this physical fitness test, and they went back, and they’ve been successful.
What I found is that the sweet spot is around 2 & ½ to 3 months where they’re able to pass this test. The Academy is 5 months long. What this means is: Had they not been fired, they would have passed this test. Let’s consider all the money that was spent: the background check, the medical, the psychological…It was a huge investment… just to kick these individuals out between 2 & ½ and 3 weeks when law enforcement is admittedly experiencing a recruitment crisis. It’s national news.
Denver: Are we looking at a class action suit here?
Ivonne: The women that are in my group did not want to sue. They wanted to prepare and re-enter the Academy. The newspaper article mentions a class action suit; I don’t know which women are involved in that program. In my program, the women that joined my group decided to re-enter the Academy. I’ve had women that it was either their second or their third Academy, and they’re thankfully all police officers. I had my biggest group graduate on July 25. I had 17 women pass the Newark Police Academy.
Captain Ivonne Roman and Denver Frederick inside the studio
Denver: We’ll stay tuned to this story. It is incredibly important and interesting.
In addition to these physical fitness tests, are there other systemic obstacles, both in New Jersey and across the country, that limit the number of women who become police officers?
Ivonne: When I started this program, it was based on my observation on what was going on in the Newark Police Department. I’m also a PhD student, so I wanted to study it in a scientific way and control the group to just Newark Police Department. But because so many women were facing the same challenges across so many different law enforcement agencies in New Jersey and even federal agencies, I had to open it up. So, I’m training women across different agencies: I’ve trained Newark, Irvington, East Orange; the State Police; I have an FBI recruit; I’ve done DEA; Juvenile Justice.
A lot of chiefs will argue that women don’t want these jobs; they do. They travel to Newark even though they live far away; some travel as far as an hour in order to get these sessions. They need to be supported. So, when chiefs say that they want to recruit more women, I argue, “Does your recruitment message mirror the culture of the agency and the Academies that they’re going into?”
Denver: Almost all these chiefs are men, I presume. I think there are about 450 police departments in the state of New Jersey. How many female police chiefs are there?
Ivonne: A very small amount, I think about 10. Nationally, they’re about 3% of police chiefs.
…women are less likely to be named in a lawsuit, less likely to be named in a citizen complaint. They use less force. Research shows that their mere presence on a scene also lowers the use of force among other officers.
Denver: I mentioned in the opening the positive impact and influence that women police officers have, and how they make communities safer. Tell us a little bit more about that research.
Ivonne: So, I started looking at the research. I like to give evidence-based facts, statistics that have been researched, not my own personal opinion because it’s easy to dismiss someone’s opinion. You have to support it with facts.
What the research shows is that women are less likely to be named in a lawsuit, less likely to be named in a citizen complaint. They use less force. Research shows that their mere presence on a scene also lowers the use of force among other officers. Women have great interpersonal communication skills. They naturally de-escalate. They don’t have to be trained to do that.
These are traits that some men possess also, but they’ve been innately found within women. I think, culturally, we’re more communicative, and that translates to the role of policing.
Denver: And from what I gather, that’s not tested to the levels that physical fitness is, in terms of your interpersonal skills and how you communicate and things of that sort, and it’s certainly equally, if not of greater importance.
Ivonne: I would say it’s of greater importance, especially now where there’s these strained relationships between policing and community. I just came back from a NOBLE Conference and one of the chiefs said, “You know, a lot of people, what they have is their pride, and they will defend their pride.”
So, I’ve had instances – and I don’t like to use anecdotes – but I’ll talk to someone, and I might not be able to help them, but I hear them out. And they’re so grateful, even though I wasn’t able to resolve their problem. They’ll say, “Wow! You don’t act like a cop.”
Denver: No, you listen.
Ivonne: Yes. And that’s a shame…because it takes so little to just give someone an ear, let them vent, right? And you may be able to resolve the matter just by hearing them out, even though you couldn’t fix exactly what it was that they called you for.
Denver: Absolutely.
You have founded the Women’s Leadership Academy. What’s the mission of that organization? What kind of programs do you offer?
Ivonne: We started that because of the number of women that were failing the Academy. I realized that 10 workout sessions just wasn’t enough. Physiologically, it’s not enough time: we have less testosterone; we have less muscle mass. But I know that they can be trained.
A lot of women don’t know what’s going to be required of them. So, I bring them in, and I provide a first assessment that runs them through the tests that they’re going to take at the Academy, and we figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are. We meet on a weekly basis, and once a month I’ll retest them. But during the week, they have to post their workouts, and we hold them accountable through this chat group.
But more importantly, it’s the mentoring. It’s for them to figure out what is the career trajectory; what to expect; what the interview is like; what the background check is like; what items they should have prepared in order to meet these background requirements. A lot of men have family members that are police officers; women don’t usually have that access to that information, and that goes a long way to helping someone enter policing.
Denver: Well, you’ve created a sisterhood, and so often they feel like they’re out there by themselves. But when they can sort of commiserate and share stories and tips with each other, it makes all the difference in the world.
Captain Ivonne Roman inside the studio
Ivonne: The relationships are beautiful. I consider a lot of them my friends. They’ve been to my house; I’ve been to their house. These relationships really don’t exist within police departments because there’s too few women. Or maybe there’s this concept of “othering” where you’re a minority; you align yourself with the thoughts of management, and you’re scared to speak out and advocate for yourself.
So, part of what we do here is creating these relationships so that we also have a network that recommend each other for training, recommend each other for positions…because that’s how someone gets ahead. That’s how someone gets on the right track for leadership, if that’s what you want.
Denver: Absolutely.
Well, as you mentioned a moment ago, much of policing has been done based on old assumptions and stories and anecdotes, and sometimes things that just seem to make sense. But you are an executive member of the board of the American Society for Evidence-Based Policing, and you’re looking at these practices in a much more scientific and rigorous way.
So, let me ask you about a couple, starting with broken windows. First, why don’t you explain to our listeners exactly what “broken windows” is, and what evidence has shown where it’s been practiced?
Ivonne: Broken windows was a theory by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. It was a magazine article published in The Atlantic in 1983, I believe. The theory says that if you address minor offenses, that crime would go down; that when people feel that there aren’t guardians on the street, that it allows violent crime to fester. The theory said that police should intervene in establishing order in a community.
As chiefs embraced this theory, most famously in the NYPD, arrests increased dramatically in offenses such as: vagrancy, loitering, public consumption of alcohol. New York City at the time was innovating greatly, and there was a stagnation in policing where there was no innovation going on. So they embraced the broken windows theory along with CompStat. So, crime went down in New York City. A lot of people took notice because New York City was a very violent city, and now it’s one of the safest largest cities in the world.
The assumption is that broken windows was the driver of that, but there have been many studies examining whether it was broken windows or not, and it’s mixed reviews. Many studies find that this was not related to broken windows; that you can’t separate broken windows from CompStat; and that crime was going down nationally, even in cities that did not implement broken windows.
And then there’s the question of the harms and the over-incarceration of individuals. Broken windows is practiced in areas that are experiencing disorder, which tend to be black and brown communities, and the way that broken windows is enforced is usually through arrests. Though James Q. Wilson and George Kelling didn’t advocate for mass arrests in the original article, it can’t be denied that it was counted and measured as arrests, even in an article that was written by George Kelling in defense of broken windows. The argument goes that it’s the ivory tower elite that are attacking broken windows, and that they don’t have a fundamental understanding of the needs of police departments.
George Kelling and an individual named William Sousa, I believe, wrote a paper and they said, “We will prove once and for all that broken windows works.” In a 10-year period, for every 28 low-level offense arrests that were effected, one violent crime was prevented. In the span of 10 years, 60,000 violent crimes were prevented. I’m not a statistician, but I pulled out my calculator, and I multiplied 28 arrests times 60,000 violent crimes over a 10-year period. That came out to about 1,680,000 people being arrested. So that means that 1,620,000 people weren’t responsible for violent crimes.
So, you have to ask yourself: Do the ends justify the means? Is it okay to lock up 20 individuals… and in that net, you have 27 guppies and one shark? You have to ask yourself: What is the impact to that community that’s arrested and re-arrested over and over again? The impact of the fines that accumulate, your driver’s license suspended? The impact to your criminal record and your employability? What happens to these communities that are experiencing this disorder policing?
Chiefs love it, and they’ll say, “Well, it’s so elegant in its simplicity.” Its simplicity is what makes it so dangerous.
Chiefs will argue that it helps them combat crime and problems with problematic juveniles, but you don’t need the curfew law to do that. If you have probable cause or reasonable suspicion, you can make that stop without the curfew law, and you can ground it on the Constitution instead of a status offense of being out late.
Denver: That’s exactly right. And that’s true with just about everything. People find that one stat, and it validates what they want to do. But you have to look at it holistically and all those unintended consequences that people never take a look at.
What about juvenile curfew laws? Are they a good way to reduce juvenile crime?
Ivonne: Every summer, you’ll usually have a wave of police chiefs announcing that they’re having a juvenile curfew implementation over the summer. The scare about juveniles came about with John Dilulio. He was a Princeton professor and he came up with the theory of “superpredators” in 1990. He said that there was going to be a wave of homicidal juveniles that would make the Bloods and the Crips look meek by comparison.
It never materialized, but it led to these laws where you could charge juveniles as adults; you can put them in jail for life. Actually, starting in 1990, the violent crime for juveniles plummeted, and it keeps plummeting. If you look at the trend lines for juvenile crime…if it continues, it will fall off the map. It will go to negative, which is impossible. But these laws that were enacted – these curfew laws to curtail these “superpredators” – were never taken off the books.
What it does is… it introduces juveniles into the criminal justice system for status offenses. Status offenses are crimes that wouldn’t be a crime if you were an adult. So being outside after 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. would be a status offense. In some agencies, that status offense leads to an arrest; an arrest means you’re fingerprinted and photographed. You’ve just entered this child into the juvenile justice system for being out late.
Chiefs will argue that it helps them combat crime and problems with problematic juveniles, but you don’t need the curfew law to do that. If you have probable cause or reasonable suspicion, you can make that stop without the curfew law, and you can ground it on the Constitution instead of a status offense of being out late.
Too often, officers are stigmatized for admitting anything that may be emotional or mentally draining. They’re expected to be these machines, and the minute that they mention that they may be suffering some kind of mental issue, where early on they can get help, many agencies’ first response is to take their gun and force them to go into a hospital for screening.
Denver: On a very sober note, another New York police officer killed himself last week, continuing a rash of suicides that have claimed eight lives this year. It’s hard to comprehend that more police officers now are losing their lives to suicide than are in the line of duty. Speak to that, Ivonne. What’s being done? What still needs to be done?
Ivonne: So, for a long time no one was tracking how many officers were committing suicide. I was training in Boston in 2016, and someone from the Boston Police Department had told me that in that month, four or five – I don’t remember if it was four or five – officers had committed suicide. It’s getting more attention, and it’s getting funding from the National Institute of Justice and the National Institute of Health. Even the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, the first pillar is increasing trust and legitimacy, but the sixth pillar is officer wellness and safety.
If you have officers that are well-taken care of and they’re healthy, everyone benefits – the police department, the community. Too often, officers are stigmatized for admitting anything that may be emotional or mentally draining. They’re expected to be these machines, and the minute that they mention that they may be suffering some kind of mental issue, where early on they can get help, many agencies’ first response is to take their gun and force them to go into a hospital for screening.
So, if there’s this huge stigma assigned to it, officers aren’t going to come forward and admit that they’re suffering vulnerability.
Denver: They’ll suck it up.
Ivonne: That’s a very common practice. And then their peers will tease them and tell them that they’re part of the rubber gun squad…Why aren’t we allowed to be human? Our officers are not machines. They internalize trauma day in and day out. They’re acting as guardians; they have to hold it all in and control this scene. But ultimately, that has to let out in some way.
We need to give our officers a more positive avenue to release this. We need to give them access to mental health, and we can’t continue to stigmatize it…because it will lead to this rash of suicides. We have to allow officers to seek the help that they need; the agency has to support them, and we have to remove the stigma about asking for help.
Denver: How does the public’s perception of the police – and there’s been some pretty tough stories lately in the news – affect the morale of the force?
Ivonne: The morale definitely is impacted. You can see it on officers, how they’re reacting: they feel that they’re not being supported; they feel that at times, the media is quick to judge before all the facts are coming out.
I believe that there’s a need for criminal justice reform, but I also believe that there’s been a villainization of an entire workforce. There are bad apples, and they need to be rooted out, and they need to be identified. Police agencies have to be more proactive in that so that officers that are trying to do the right thing can do their job without this friction that’s occurring.
So, there is definitely an increase in individuals challenging police officers on minor traffic stops, and the potential is there for escalation. We have to find a way to resolve these issues. But definitely, when you speak to any officer across the United States, they’ll say that there is an issue with them feeling safe and supported.
Denver: Let me close with this, Ivonne. For a young woman, maybe in the process of making a career choice and thinking about becoming a police officer, what advice would you give her?
Ivonne: So, I mentor…right now, we have about 150 women in my group, and I’m very honest with them. It’s a great job; if I had to do it all over again, I will. But was it easy for me? No, it wasn’t. I had to work twice as hard for half of the recognition. There is the part of being sexualized always. I once was given an award for crime reduction in my precinct, and I was introduced as the “most beautiful captain in the police department.” That completely diminished my accomplishments, and it detracted from what I had achieved.
It’s a great job. I’ve been a police officer; no day has been identical to the one before. I’ve been given incredible opportunities. I’ve been able to test all the way up the chain of command. I even served as chief of police. But I want women to go in knowing what the climate is and what we can do together to change that…because I believe that change comes gradually, with gradual pressure. It’s having these uncomfortable conversations about my own experience and what they can expect. And then they know how they can act; they know how they may react, they know what the laws are; they know what their recourses are, and that they know that they have a support system that will help them. That’s what this organization offers. It’s a great job, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Denver: Well, Captain Ivonne Roman of the Newark Police Department and Founder of the Women’s Leadership Academy, I want to thank you so much for being here this evening. You gave a splendid TED talk covering a lot of this. Where can listeners go to watch it?
Ivonne: You can go to ted.com, Ivonne Roman. So, if you go on to ted.com and enter my name Ivonne Roman, you’ll find the talk.
Denver: It’s only six minutes, but it’s six minutes of gold. Thanks, Ivonne. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Ivonne: My pleasure being here. Thank you.
Denver: I’ll be back with more of The Business of Giving right after this.
Captain Ivonne Roman and Denver Frederick
The Business of Giving can be heard every Sunday evening between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Eastern on AM 970 The Answer in New York and on iHeartRadio. You can follow us @bizofgive on Twitter, @bizofgive on Instagram and at www.facebook.com/businessofgiving.