Oakland Struggles to Boost Number of Women Officers Amid Worsening Staff Shortage

Early on a Tuesday morning in September, eight men and women lined up against a bright blue and yellow wall in a back room of the Oakland Police Department’s downtown headquarters.

Wearing gray T-shirts with their last names printed on the back, they shouted, “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir,” in soldier-like unison when high-ranking officers nearby gave orders or asked questions.

The recruits were part of OPD’s 195th police academy — the first in more than a year after a major budget shortfall forced the city to pause basic training.

Kimberly Galvan, one of three women in the class at the time, paid close attention as a defense tactics instructor explained how to drop to the ground and inch across the mat — a move that, if done well, could help the trainees avoid injury while on patrol.

In an interview with KQED just outside the room, Galvan recalled a male officer who had a positive influence on her growing up in Oakland. But, she said, she rarely encountered women in law enforcement.

“I never had any female police officer role models,” Galvan, 32, said.

As an adult, she was drawn to public service and became an OPD dispatcher. As she answered 911 calls and heard female officers responding, it occurred to her: Why not become a police officer herself?

“It inspired me, honestly, to want to take that next step in doing this,” Galvan said.

Six weeks after her interview with KQED, however, Galvan was no longer in the academy. A spokesperson for the department said she did not pass one of the training courses required.

The class, which started with 26 recruits, is now down to 14, including one woman.

For her part, Galvan plans to join the 196th academy, which begins today, the spokesperson said.

This will be her third attempt.

Oakland is among a growing number of law enforcement agencies that have pledged to boost the number of women in their ranks. The effort is spearheaded by the 30×30 initiative, which aims to have women make up 30% of police recruits nationwide by the year 2030. More than 400 agencies have signed the 30×30 pledge, committing to reporting data on staffing, rooting out discrimination and examining procedures for hiring and promotion.

But many agencies, including OPD, have struggled to meet that goal.

In 2021, when OPD signed on to 30×30, 15% of the department’s officers were women.

Four years later, that number remains largely unchanged.

The department has created a lactation space and accompanying policy and is developing workshops for women interested in OPD jobs, said Sgt. Michael Romans-Rowe, who oversees the agency’s Background and Recruiting Unit.

“We’re looking at panels that will have command staff, officers, retirees that are able to bring their perspective to a woman that’s interested in joining law enforcement and specifically with our agency,” Romans-Rowe said.

Meanwhile, the department is facing a worsening staffing crisis.

As of Nov. 21, OPD had 625 officers. With 102 on some form of leave — military, medical or administrative — that means 523 officers are actively working. Meanwhile, five to six officers on average leave OPD each month, according to the department.

An independent firm recommended in April that Oakland have 877 police officers.

“It is likely that OPD’s percentage of female officers has remained relatively unchanged [due] to factors such as natural attrition, the budgeted reduction in overall sworn staffing levels, and the recent hiring freeze,” Romans-Rowe said.

Oakland isn’t alone. A 2019 study found 63% of surveyed police departments reported receiving fewer applications for sworn positions than in prior years. San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments are down 500 and 161 officers, respectively. The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office has nearly 200 vacancies, and Santa Clara County’s sheriff’s office is short 138 officers.

“In those first couple of years after the police murder of George Floyd, the profession was in crisis in a lot of ways. In some ways, I think, it continues to be,” said Maureen McGough, founder of the 30×30 initiative. “30×30 offers a promising and somewhat different path towards a partial solution for some of those problems.”

For decades, McGough said, police departments tended to focus their recruiting on candidates with military backgrounds or criminal justice degrees.

“Those are important populations. But there are other populations that are service-oriented with empathy and a desire to serve their community and great interpersonal skills — things that we know make good officers,” McGough said.

Still, experts like Mary Dodge, professor of criminal justice at the University of Colorado, Denver, say that despite efforts to change the status quo, many agencies have struggled to boost the number of women in their ranks.

“I’m not at all surprised by the 15% number,” Dodge said about Oakland’s level of female staffing.

“Despite all the research we have and everything that says that women make good officers — they can do the job as well as men — nothing changes,” she said. “You really have to, at some level, attribute that to this hyper-masculine environment that they’re entering, even in 2025.”

‘You belong in business suits and heels’

When Margaret Dixon was a young mother in 1980, she saw an advertisement featuring a female police officer.

“I’ll never forget,” she recalled. “It said, ‘Woman. Wife. Cop.’”

“I fit all those categories,” Dixon said. “I was a woman, I was a wife. I was athletic. So I was like, ‘Wow, let me just try this.’ And I’m glad I did. It’s the best decision I could have made.”

Dixon enrolled in Oakland’s police academy and worked for the department for 25 years.

On a recent fall afternoon, she walked through a Merritt College classroom where she now advises the school’s Administration of Justice program, mentoring young women interested in careers in policing, corrections, and other justice-related fields.

“That’s why I’m so positive about really trying to get other women to do it, because I think if they get into it and see what they can bring to the job, they’ll be happy that they did,” she said.

An Oakland Office of the Inspector General report tracking OPD police academies and field training found the percentage of female recruits remained unchanged between 2019 and 2022.

Dixon believes there needs to be more female police officers so women see the job as something they can do.

“There are girls, young ladies, that want to do the work, but they don’t feel welcome because all they see is men,” Dixon said. “Women have to tell other women that — you can do this job.”

One of Dixon’s students, Veronica, recently took the Berkeley Police Department’s physical agility test but didn’t pass. KQED is not publishing her last name so she can speak candidly about the hiring process without harming her job prospects.

“The image of law enforcement doesn’t look like me. It doesn’t look like a single mom,” Veronica said. “It looks like a huge, masculine man.”

Veronica had always wanted to be a homicide detective, but when she started pursuing the career, she felt discouraged.

“I even have male family members who have told me, like, you won’t be able to do it,” she said.

Lack of support from her community has made breaking into such a male-dominated field harder, she said. It has felt like she’s doing it on her own.

“You go to a lot of these events and a lot of these training exercises, you look around and it’s like you’re one of maybe two [women], and it’s scary. It’s really intimidating,” Veronica said. “And you’re looking at them like, you know, maybe they were right. Maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I should go get that desk job they told me to get. Oh, ‘You belong in business suits and heels.’ And it’s like, that’s not what I want to do.”

As she prepares physically and mentally to retake the test and apply to other academies, support from people like Dixon has helped, Veronica said.

“I want to see women because it makes us feel more able. Like I’m capable of the job. I see you’re here.

That means I can do it,” she said. “You have to stay encouraged.”

OPD Deputy Chief of Police Lisa Ausmus said she thinks the department has evolved since she first joined in 2000.

“We’ve just learned as a department to be better, to recognize people,” Ausmus said. “I see women in leadership roles now. I’m one of three deputy chiefs.”

Ausmus said other women have had success at OPD, and are part of the DEA task force, SWAT teams and investigations.

“The officers here – man, woman, color, not color, it doesn’t matter. All they want to know is, Are you going to do your job?”

What women bring

Supporters of increasing the number of women in policing emphasize the different skills they bring to the job.

“There is a strong and growing body of scientific evidence that shows that there’s a unique value in how women police,” McGough said.

“They use less force and excessive force,” she said. “They get better outcomes for crime victims, especially gender-based violence. They’re named in community complaints and lawsuits proportionally less often. They’re perceived as more trustworthy by diverse communities and especially communities who are impacted most by police activities.”

Bill Terrill, professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, said that while the majority of research tends to reflect those positive outcomes, data on the use of force and gender is somewhat more complicated.

One study that Terrill co-authored found women and men used physical force similarly, he said.

“When we looked at it,” Terrill said, “whether you’re male or female, if you’re faced with a physical threat, you’re going to use physical force. Gender doesn’t come into play.”

Some of 30×30’s recommended actions for police departments have to do with ensuring hiring assessments reflect the knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences required to be an effective officer.

“We’re really confident that as agencies do that, they’ll naturally see an increase in the number of women who are drawn to the profession and the number of women who pass assessments,” McGough said.

According to 30×30, agencies that reported recruitment data to the organization over two years achieved, on average, a 28% increase in the representation of women in recruit classes.

In Oakland, the percentage of women who have completed police academies in recent years has varied from class to class, with women making up as little as 5%, and as much as 25% of recruit graduates since December 2021.

While OPD’s academies have funding to train at least 33 recruits, recent classes have consistently graduated fewer.

A new task force launched by Mayor Barbara Lee’s office is hoping to address that.

At a September press conference, Rev. Damita Davis-Howard, Lee’s director of public safety, stood alongside other members of the newly formed task force, including representatives of the Oakland NAACP and City Councilmember Charlene Wang.

“Not only do we want to recruit folks from our own neighborhoods, from our fair city, Oakland, we also want to make a special effort for dispatchers, but also women, women of color,” Davis-Howard said.

In addition to women and native Oaklanders, the task force also wants to attract members of the LGBTQ community, Wang said.

Davis-Howard told KQED in an interview that the task force’s initial focus has been on increasing the number of people who sign up for, and finish, Oakland’s police academies, and that it plans to shift its focus to officer retention next.

The task force, she said, is not limiting its recruitment efforts to any one group.

“I think that if you do it for everybody, you’re going to reach that 30 by 30, right? Because I believe that all demographics are capable of doing this job,” Davis-Howard said.

“We are looking at the whole package, from beginning to end. I’ve had folks call, understanding the mayor’s initiative to enhance recruitment, and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this program over here. I could help folks get physically fit for the academy.’ Or another program that says, ‘Hey, we can offer support to folks who are in the academy,’” she said. “What we want to do is make the extra effort to actually get folks in, prepared, stay — and stay here in Oakland.”

Other Bay Area agencies have also struggled to recruit and retain enough officers.

“Law enforcement is upside down right now. We have more vacancies than we have quality applicants,” said Piedmont Police Capt. Chris Monahan.

Monahan surveyed nearly 600 female officers for his doctoral research. Among the biggest challenges they reported were perceptions that policing is a man’s world and balancing work with family life.

Monahan said he brought a recruitment booth to a UC Berkeley women’s basketball game to try to find women interested in policing. It didn’t yield high results. The department may also try recruiting at Valkyries’ games next season.

Monahan said he has been so desperate to find candidates that he recruited his dog groomer and the boyfriend of a woman whose mother keeps a horse on his property.

“When you’re down 20, 30 people, your drive is not women, women, woman — or man, man, man, for that matter,” Monahan said. “Your drive is candidate, candidate, candidate. Who can I find? Who can get through a background? Who can get through a police academy? Who can go through a field training program? Who can work on midnights for several years before they become a detective or a motor officer or a SWAT operator or whatever the case may be.

“Does Piedmont support 30×30? Absolutely. Is it the end-all, be-all of my life? It can’t be.”

Refilling the pipeline

As Lee’s task force tries to refill OPD’s ranks, a pipeline from Merritt College that has been dormant since 2023 is gearing up to restart in the spring.

The pipeline, or pre-academy, is designed to expose students to the training that takes place in the police academy, said Mildred Oliver, a retired OPD sergeant and co-chair of Merritt’s Administration of Justice program.

Students receive training in areas where many recruits fail out of the academy, such as driving, shooting and defensive tactics, Oliver said.

As a recruit herself in the late ’90s, Oliver recalled a female captain in OPD’s training division who held meetings just for female trainees.

“That made a huge difference,” Oliver said. “Because she understood that we were dealing with other stressors than our male counterparts.”

“It’s a male-dominated field and a lot of women either come in feeling like they are not valued or not strong enough to do the job or they may feel like they have to prove themselves and sometimes go overboard,” she said.

Oliver retired from OPD in 2019. That year, she sued the department alleging race and gender discrimination, a hostile work environment and retaliation in connection with the department’s handling of the Celeste Guap scandal, in which multiple Bay Area officers were accused of exploiting and having sex with an underage girl. Oliver was assigned to investigate as a member of the Internal Affairs Division.

“The OPD made Sgt. Oliver its scapegoat by removing her from the investigation, blaming her for its limitations, and launching a course of conduct to harass and retaliate against her,” an amended complaint in the lawsuit reads.

The city awarded Oliver a $50,000 settlement last year. After attorneys’ fees, she said, she “didn’t see a dime.”

But Oliver said she’s not bitter. Today, she’s doing the work she was called to, but on her own terms, she said. And she still encourages students to pursue jobs with OPD and other agencies.

“I’m still gung-ho about getting them into the career because it’s a great career,” she said.

When it comes to recruiting and retaining women, Dixon believes OPD could do more by inviting women to tour the department and meet female officers.

“It’s got to start at the top,” Dixon said. “Do you really want more women, or are you just going along with the fad because it’s 30-30?”

She believes the department should begin working with young people before they’re actually in the academy, she said.

“Right now, you got one or two women in the academy. Maybe one of them will make it, maybe none of them will make it,” Dixon said. “Why are you hiring them, and they’re not making it? Do you really want them? Or do you want to just say, well, we hired two, but neither one of them made it. Why didn’t they make it?”

The profession, she said, still isn’t doing enough to show women they belong.

“Why are we at this place now? Why are we here? Because of the work we didn’t do? And the work that we continue not to do,” Dixon said.