The U.S. Dept of Justice regularly performs comprehensive surveys of state and local law enforcement agencies, collected in volumes called Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics.
John Lott Jr. has looked at the actual data, published in Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime.
It turns out that, far from “de-escalating force” through their superior listening skills, female law enforcement officers vastly are more likely to shoot civilians than their male counterparts. Especially when perps won’t reveal where they bought a particularly darling pair of shoes.
Unable to use intermediate force, like a bop on the nose, female officers quickly go to fatal force. According to Lott’s analysis, each 1% increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7%.
Adding white female officers also increases the number of civilians accidentally shot by police. By contrast, adding males to a police force decreases accidental civilian shootings. Adding black males decreases civilian shootings by police even more. Private citizens are much less likely to accidentally shoot someone than are the police, presumably because they do not have to pursue suspects down dark alleys to make an arrest.
In addition to accidentally shooting people, female law enforcement officers are also a lot more likely to be assaulted than male officers — as the whole country saw in Atlanta last week. Lott says: “Increasing the number of female officers by 1 percentage point appears to increase the number of assaults on police by 15% to 19%.”
Of course there are many explanations for why female cops are more likely to be assaulted and to accidentally shoot people, such as that our patriarchal society encourages girls to play with dolls. But we must also consider the fact that women are smaller and weaker than men.
In a study of public safety officers, female officers were found to have 32% to 56% less upper body strength and 18% to 45% less lower body strength than male officers. (But their outfits were 43% more coordinated). See Frank J. Landy, Alternatives to Chronological Age in Determining Standards of Suitability for Public Safety Jobs.
Acknowledging reality wouldn’t be all bad for women. For one thing, they won’t have to confront violent felons on methamphetamine. So that’s a benefit right there. Also, while a sane world would not employ 5-ft-tall grandmothers as law enforcement officers, a sane world would also not give full body-cavity searches to 5-ft-tall grandmothers at airports.
