{"id":139886,"date":"2014-09-30T20:17:34","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T20:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=139886"},"modified":"2014-09-30T20:17:34","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T20:17:34","slug":"nations-police-sex-discrimination-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/nations-police-sex-discrimination-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nation\u2019s Police Have a Sex-Discrimination Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Kathy Spillar<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri police officer last month prompted the Department of Justice to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/national-security\/justice-dept-to-probe-ferguson-police-force\/2014\/09\/03\/737dd928-33bc-11e4-a723-fa3895a25d02_story.html\">launch<\/a>\u00a0an investigation into Ferguson\u2019s policing practices. (This investigation comes on the heels of a separate federal probe into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2014\/08\/11\/us\/missouri-ferguson-michael-brown-what-we-know\/\">the killing<\/a> of Brown).<\/p>\n<p>The new investigation will look at departmental practices that may have led to Brown\u2019s shooting and to other civil rights violations in the last several years. Five current and one former Ferguson police officer are\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/national-security\/justice-dept-to-probe-ferguson-police-force\/2014\/09\/03\/737dd928-33bc-11e4-a723-fa3895a25d02_story.html\">currently facing<\/a>\u00a0federal lawsuits alleging the use of excessive force.<\/p>\n<p>Attorney General Eric Holder <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/holder-announces-federal-initiative-to-study-bias-build-trust-between-community-police\/2014\/09\/18\/ac4c0cc2-3f77-11e4-9587-5dafd96295f0_story.html\">also recently announced<\/a> a new federal initiative to study racial bias and reduce tensions between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.<\/p>\n<p>While conducting its investigations, we implore the Department of Justice to also examine how the gross underrepresentation of women in the Ferguson Police Department\u2013and in police departments nationwide\u2013aggravates excessive use of force problems and deteriorating police-community relations.<\/p>\n<p>As I\u2019ve written previously, research nationally and internationally for more than four decades has found that women police officers not only do the job of policing equally as well as men, but are not as authoritarian in their approach, use force less often, possess better communication skills and are better at defusing potentially violent confrontations than their male counterparts.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/msmagazine.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/30\/the-nations-police-have-a-sex-discrimination-problem\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathy Spillar The death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri police officer last month prompted the Department of Justice to\u00a0launch\u00a0an investigation into Ferguson\u2019s policing practices. (This investigation comes on the heels of a separate federal probe into the killing of Brown). The new investigation will look at departmental practices that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":130603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-139886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}