More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Nuisance laws fine and evict people when too many 911 calls are made to a specific address. They are often enforced against victims of intimate partner violence who call 911 for protection from their abusers.
This denies women and other victims of domestic abuse one of the most fundamental rights of citizenship—the right to freedom from unwarranted injury at the hands of fellow citizens.
Penny Harrington—the chief of the Portland, Oregon Police Bureau in the mid-’80s and the first woman to lead a major U.S. city’s police department—died at her home in Morro Bay, Calif., on September 15, 2021, at the age of 79.
Harrington became a police officer in 1964 in Portland and headed the Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Center for Women and Policing at its founding in 1995. Harrington served in Portland in the Women’s Protective Division and began to challenge discriminatory policies after a few years in the force. She became chief of police in 1985 and was the first woman in America to lead a police department in a major city.
Locking people up doesn’t make your community safer. However, helping people when they come home from prison does. We have to call for policy changes that end senseless collateral consequences for those who are system-impacted.
April may be Sexual Assault Awareness Month, but every month—indeed every day—should be a time of awareness of the scourge of sexual assault and the pain inflicted on its victims.
It’s time to improve the systems already in place and to enact legislation that gives survivors the support, protection and justice they deserve.
Discussions about policing rarely center women or members of the LGBTQ community.
Monday’s “Race, Sex and Policing” panel and documentary “Women in Blue” grapple with the challenges involving women, policing and incarceration.
With the national conversation around police reform still resonating loudly around the country, documentary film “Women in Blue” shines a spotlight on the women within the Minneapolis Police Department working to reform it from the inside by fighting for gender equity.
Join Ms. for an exclusive screening of “Women in Blue” on Thursday, February 4 at 4:00 p.m PT / 7:00 p.m. ET. Then, stick around after the film for a live Q&A discussion.
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Black and brown people are too often killed with impunity by police. Now may be a tipping point and we should not squander this opportunity to make fundamental changes in policing.
The fact is that women in law enforcement respond differently. We are not talking about a few token women—but when gender parity is realized, policing fundamentally changes.
Only 12 percent of the nation’s police officers are women; that number has remained stagnant for more than 25 years. (That’s what happens when officers are recruited for physical strength, rather than critical thinking and communication skills.)
“Could George Floyd’s death have been prevented had there been women police officers on the scene? It’s likely.”
In Minneapolis, the July 2017 killing of an unarmed woman named Justine Damond resulted in Minneapolis’s first female police chief Janee Harteau being pushed out, threatening the gains women had made in the department.
Following three female police officers, “Women in Blue” charts their progress and efforts to remake the department to become more inclusive.
