The Aurora Police Department is looking to attract more women to its ranks as representation within the profession lags locally and nationally.
APD leadership on Monday announced the department is joining “The 30x30 Pledge.” Agencies who sign on to the pledge are aspiring to ensure that by 2030, at least 30% of people in their police recruit classes are women.
“This pledge means that the Aurora Police Department is actively working toward improving the representation and experiences of women officers in our agency,” APD’s interim Police Chief Art Acevedo said in a news release.
Today, 11% of APD’s sworn officers are women, according to the city, trailing the national rate of 12%. Among police leadership in the U.S., about 3% are women, according to the 30x30 Initiative.
The initiative is a coalition of law enforcement leadership, researchers and professional organizations working to further representation of women in policing. More than 250 agencies of varying sizes are partaking in the 30x30 pledge. The initiative is affiliated with the Policing Project at NYU School of Law and the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.
Its inception began in 2018 when Chief Ivonne Roman with the Newark Police Department consulted Maureen McGough with the National Institute of Justice about “the chronic under-representation of women in U.S. policing,” the 30x30 website says. Roman, McGough and NIJ staff then gathered more than 100 women for a research summit, which produced the “Women in Policing: Breaking Barriers and Blazing a Path” report.
The report identified numerous practices that women who participated in the summit considered promising. Those included creating family-friendly policies, improving and enforcing harassment policies, re-examination of physical fitness standards, learning about barriers women in law enforcement face from research in other fields, and learning from agencies with high representation of women in their forces.
In addition to recruiting more women to the profession, the initiative calls on law enforcement agencies to create diverse and inclusive workplaces for officers of all backgrounds. The 30x30 website says “women of color in particular will often face compounding experiences of bias and discrimination based not only on their gender, but also their race or ethnicity.”
“We are grateful to Aurora for committing to being a part of this growing movement,” McGough said in a news release. “We believe strongly that advancing women in policing is critical to improving public safety outcomes. We look forward to having more agencies follow APD’s lead by signing the pledge and improving the representation and experiences of women in policing.”
APD is using several strategies to recruit more women. Those include:
• Informational academies for women
• Targeting recruitment within organizations, activities and events that support women
• Offering women realistic previews of the job
• Heightened support during the recruitment and application process
• Providing resources and strategies to help women during physical testing and the academy process
• Increased appearances of women in internal and external marketing and recruitment campaigns
• Highlighting achievements of women currently within APD
• Promoting a work/life balance
“We are proud to be among the many agencies in the nation to make this critical commitment to growing that number over the next seven years,” Acevedo said in the news release, “which will greatly benefit our department and the community we serve.”
