Personally, I have never met a policewoman who wore a uniform or carried a gun. In England and on the Continent uniforms are the rule, but except in rare instances on special kinds of patrol, policewomen in this country dress like other business or professional women. My own opinion is that the right kind of woman does not need a uniform any more than other social workers do. As for clubs and guns, if she has difficulty in making an arrest, she can always call a man officer to her assistance; after all, you have to leave a little leaway for the male impulse to protect the weaker sex, even in a police department.

When Alice Stebbins Wells of Los Angeles, first regularly appointed policewoman in the United States, asked for the privilege of addressing the International Association of Chiefs of Police at Grand Rapids in 1914, there was acid comment on the part of the men. One burly officer remarked, "Call the patrol wagon; another nut gone wrong!" They couldn't see why any woman should want to work around a police station; in fact, they all but put Mrs. Wells out of the meeting. So forcefully, however, did she present the argument that women and children, and especially wayward girls, were best served by women officers, -- that many of those who arrived scoffing remained -- convinced.

In personality and appearance, Mrs. Wells was the exact opposite of the cartoonist's model. Educated, refined, wholesome, with a background of years of experience in social work, she was a fitting leader for the more than six hundred American policewomen who today, twenty years after her difficult ground-breaking, carry out their protective-preventive social service in two hundred cities. Almost all of her early followers were drawn from the ranks of social workers; so rapidly did the movement spread, however, that before long police departments in some places were appointing women with no other qualifications than those deemed necessary for a good police matron. Civil service examinations did not insure adequate training, so at the 1922 meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Francisco, a minimum standard was adopted, providing for "graduation from a four-year course in a standard highschool or the completion of a least fourteen college entrance units of study, and not less than two years of experience, recent and responsible, in systematic social service," with provision for substituting nurses' training or teaching or commercial experience for social work in certain cases, the assumption being that the police department would arrange for courses of study in social service after appointment. The present tendency is toward a standard requiring a college degree and social work experience before appointment. The Department of Criminology of the southern branch of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1918 offered the first course to women police.

Since then several other colleges and schools of social work have added similar courses. An institute on police administration at Riverside, California, in the summer of 1929 was well attended by both men and women.

In Berkeley, our rules and regulations specify that no woman police officer shall be appointed who is not a trained social worker, preferably with the stress laid on psychiatric training, as evidenced by a certificate of graduation from a recognized school of social work or the equivalent from a college of the first class and some practical experience in work with individual delinquents. I think we can confidently look forward to the time when all policewomen will be very highly qualified; the top-notchers today are unsurpassed by any group in social work.

At the same meeting which set the educational standard, the International Association of Chiefs of Police adopted the statement that "the primary function of policewomen is to deal with all cases in which women and children are involved either as offenders or as victims of offense." When rightly interpreted, this simple formula includes social as well as legal investigation, prevention as well as treatment. What this may involve we can best illustrate by spending an imaginary day with a woman police officer.

Perhaps her first call is to arrest a member of her sex who has been out on an all-night drunk. She takes her to the Detention Home, where she is left to sober up before further work can be done on the case. On the way back to the police station, the policewoman makes several calls to secure information to be used as evidence and to obtain such facts as will assist in the rehabilitation of women, girls or children whose cases are pending. Arriving at her office, she finds a runaway girl who has been referred to her department by one of the men officers. In her first interview with this potential offender, she attempts to make friends with her and at the same time to find out the facts about her past, necessary for any future plan.

At noon the policewoman attends a luncheon meeting of a woman's club, where she has been asked to discuss the functions of women police, for since the time of Mrs. Wells, who made 136 addresses in a single month during her first year of office, public speaking has been an important part of the work. We note in passing that the lady cop is well-gowned as any of the women who have come from a morning's work downtown, and that she holds her teacup as daintily as though her only contacts with the police department were by way of the traffic signals on busy street corners!

The afternoon has perhaps been reserved for calls on "pre-delinquents," boys and girls under twelve who present the most hopeful material for constructive effort. Quoting from the rules and regulations of our Berkeley Police Department:

In the preventive or pre-delinquency work with the children and youth of Berkeley, those means must be used which shall give scientific treatment to the problem involved, this to include presentation of cases to the child guidance clinics and carrying out recommendations for same; contact with various social agencies of the community and attempt to remedy defective conditions in home and neighborhood, the objective being that of improvement and development and the gradual eradication of criminal, immoral and degrading tendencies. The important work of "investigating neighborhood conditions, hotels, public dance halls, restaurants, skating-rinks, and other places of public assembly" involves night duty. Since police departments hold rigidly to the eight-hour day for both men and women, this task falls to another woman officer, unless the department has but one policewoman, in which case suitable provisions are made for time off.

You see now that the policewoman is a link between social work and the police. There has been some apprehension in the past that policewomen are attempting work already performed by case workers in private agencies or by probation officers. With regard to protective-preventive functions, it seems to me the simple rule holds that unless a private agency in the community is adequately handling the rehabilitation of children and young people who have failed, this work falls naturally to policewomen. And there are undoubtedly some functions that are best performed by an officer with power of arrest.

The rule holds in all well-organized police departments that the head of the Women's Bureau is directly responsible to the chief of police and has the same rank and pay as the male heads of the Bureau on Crime, Traffic and so on. Her subordinates receive the same salary as male officers of equal rank; a recent census made by the International Association of Policewomen showed that the great majority of policewomen ranking with patrolmen were getting between $1,200 and $1,800 a year. In one American city with very high standards for its Womens' Bureau of forty officers, the woman police commissioner directing the work receives $3,840, three women sergeants receive $2,520 each and 37 policewomen from $1,800 to $2,220 a year.

Mina Van Winkle, president of the International Association of Policewomen, has said that Where Womens' Bureaus exist and function properly, they are acting as a socializing agency to the whole police force, resulting in a more intelligent attitude on the part of policemen toward the men, women and children requiring their attention.

Eventually, of course, all police officers, men as well as women, should be college-trained, with a background in social science and behavior problems. Policemen as well as policewomen should be investigating delinquency with an eye not only to its legal implications, but to its social, psychological and psychiatric phases as well; they should know the fundamentals of human behavior and play their part in remedying social and economic conditions leading to crime. The problems confronting the police are the most difficult social problems in the world. Professional training is taken for granted in the case of public health officers, engineers and superintendents of education. To an even greater degree, professional training is essential to both men and women in police work.

In Berkeley we are attempting to provide all our officers with a background of scientific training. Other police schools are trying to meet similar needs. Beginnings are being made for institutes and graduate schools of police administration. The fact remains that at present it is easier to get women than men with training in psychiatry and social work, and for this reason it is likely that policewomen will continue to carry the main burden of preventive work while at the same time doing all they can to socialize the police departments with which they are connected, and where their influence is greatest.

Whether composed of women only or of both men and women, the Crime Prevention Division carries the most important task of the Police Department. Too much time is being wasted by policewomen in working with the end-product of bad social conditions. Instead of concentrating on prostitutes whose habits have long since been formed, they should be spending the major part of their time with young moldable "pre-delinquents," drawing upon child guidance clinics and other social agencies for help in redirecting children who have made their first mistakes. This implies coordinating all the health, welfare, recreational, educational and character-building agencies of their city so that they may see the problem of delinquency whole and give their concerted effort toward its elimination. In Chicago, for example, a Crime Prevention Division composed of thirty to forty highly trained policewomen with the backing of the civic organizations and the aid of the city's 6,000 policemen and 10,000 paid and unpaid social workers, could almost wipe crime out of existence.