Women in law enforcement:
Honoring a hero, refl ecting on her service
A recent tragedy brought to mind the issue
of women in law enforcement and reflections
on their service.
NYPD Officer Miosotis Familia, 48, a 12-year
veteran, was assassinated by cop-hating gun-
man Alexander Bonds as she sat in an NYPD
mobile command post in the Bronx early on
Wednesday, July 5.
Her family was quoted as saying, “She was
CHERIE
CASTELLANO an especially warm woman who fiercely loved
Cop2Cop her children and went to work every day to
protect us. She was a loving mother, daugh-
ter, sister and aunt to all of us. We will miss her
so. Our mom, Miosotis Familia, was our pride. We love you,
Mom.”
Words cannot express the horror that this murder reflects
for law enforcement officers and their families across the
country. Complaining does not seem like enough, but action
to change the brutality against law enforcement officers con-
tinues to be minimized by our media today. Thank God for
programs like Concerns of Police Survivors (C.O.P.S.), who I
am confident are currently providing support and will do so
for the long haul for this heroic family. Nothing can bring her
back, though, so it is never enough.
Women in law enforcement are a small percentage of the
workforce in our country, but the numbers are increasing.
Besides the highlighting of these heroic women in tragic sit-
uations like Officer Familia’s, there may often be a unique ex-
perience for women in managing stress in law enforcement
on a daily basis.
In nearly 20 years of supporting law enforcement
officers in times of need, I can honestly say the majority of
officers we have helped at Cop2Cop have been men. Our
Cop2Cop statistics indicate that four times as many men as
women are served by our team, but there is a similar discrep-
ancy of women on the job, so that seems reasonable.
According to a study done in 2009 at Kansas State Univer-
sity by Professor Don Kurtz, “When male police officers need
to de-stress, they might trade war stories — but likely not
with their female colleagues.”
He continues, “Telling war stories is almost exclusively a
male endeavor. It’s quite often in a group social setting, and
officers talk about stressful events that happened. What’s in-
teresting is that they remove the fear and emotion that go
along with it and replace it with these superhuman qualities.
“I found that women felt excluded from war stories. If they
started exaggerating the stories in the way that men did, they
could be questioned. So it becomes a male-only way of man-
aging stress.”
Kurtz suggests that in some ways women have a better
chance to deal with violent cases because it’s more accept-
able for women to be upset or vulnerable.
“For male officers to show emotion, it was career suicide,”
he said.
But the guys don’t necessarily have it easy. They are of-
ten discouraged from showing emotion when dealing with
stress and are expected to uphold the overtly masculine idea
of what it means to be a law enforcement officer.
Kurtz looked at data from a survey of officers in the Balti-
more Police Department. As a follow-up to this part of the
research, Kurtz also interviewed officers from three police
departments. He found that male and female law enforce-
ment officers have different sources of stress and different
ways of dealing with it.
Some of the cases that men find the most stressful, Kurtz
said, were likely to be given to women.
One of the biggest differences that Kurt z found was the
role that family played in law enforcement officers’ stress.
Whereas a family life can help male officers deal better with
stress from the job, women may not have the same support
in their own families.
“Women settle into the role of caretaker and come home
to a second shift,” he added. “The strange hours of police
work can be seen as more acceptable for men than women.
Although family conflicts can be distressful for men, the fact
that a male officer is seen as the breadwinner makes it more
OK for him to miss a birthday party, for example, so he can
go to work.”
So much like all working women, having two jobs is a
“norm,” and women in law enforcement use their resilience
to manage both worlds. Protect and serve the community,
then protect and serve their families. Both male and female
officers share that role in service to others.
Now there is one law enforcement family without their
matriarch returning at the end of her shift. The eldest of
slain NYPD Officer Miosotis Familia’s three children called
the veteran cop the “pride” of the family.
On behalf of all of us at Cop2Cop, we offer our condolenc-
es and prayers for the family of Officer Familia and honor
her service as a model woman in law enforcement and a
modern-day hero.
www.njcopsmagazine.com
■ JULY 2017 77