Thursday, April 23, 1998 | 10 a.m.
Metro Police is in the middle compared with police forces nationally when it comes to the number of women officers, according to the National Center for Women and Policing.
Metro is also right in with the national average when it comes to the number of women in supervisory positions, the center says.
Officials with the center, who are meeting this week at a convention at Bally's hotel-casino, however, argue that the national average for theses statistics -- which is about 8 percent for supervisors and 12 percent for street officers -- is still way too low.
"The increase of women in law enforcement remains stuck at an alarmingly slow rate," Penny Harrington, director of the center, said. "The gains for women in policing are so slow that, at the current rate of growth, women will never reach equal representation or gender balance in law enforcement agencies."
Nearly 20 percent of agencies reported no women in top command positions, according to the study, and nearly 80 percent of agencies have no minority women in the highest ranks.
Women also hold 66 percent of the lower-paid civilian law enforcement jobs, the study showed.
Top command in the study was defined as chiefs, deputy chiefs, commanders and captains. Supervisory positions were those of lieutenants and sergeants.
Twenty-five percent of the Pittsburgh Police Department's force is made up of female officers. But that's because the department is forced to hire women under a consent decree, Harrington said.
In Las Vegas, Metro Police statistics released for the study show 8.9 percent of women on the force are in supervisory positions. The study called for figures for commissioned police officers. Metro, however, included noncommissioned officers in its report, Harrington said.
Without those positions, the number of women in top command and supervisory positions would drop to about 2 percent, according to Metro's numbers.
Metro has one female captain, as well as a noncommissioned female captain in the Clark County Detention Center, which Metro runs. It also has one woman lieutenant on the patrol side, and one lieutenant at the jail.
The percentage of women in Metro line positions -- detectives and street cops -- is 11.7 percent of the total force, according to the numbers provided by Metro for the study.
Doug Spring, director of personnel for Metro, said the department is "constantly looking at diversity and trying to improve those numbers."
"We have been doing a lot of recruiting recently with women's organizations," he said.
Nationwide, the report shows that women have increased their ranks to 11.6 percent in 1997 from a low of 2 percent in 1972.
From 1990 to 1997, however, the increase was roughly 2 points.
"With very few exceptions, women remain under-represented among patrol officers and are virtually absent from the decision-making ranks and positions of authority in police departments across the country," Harrington said.
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