Rey Reynolds is an officer with the Vancouver Police Department in Clark County. He has 37 years of experience in law enforcement. In the video below, Rey shares with Washington Initiative for Boys and Men his insights and stories related to gender and policing – and why we need women in law enforcement. Below is an edited transcript of Rey’s words.
All opinions expressed are Rey’s own. He is not speaking for the Vancouver Police Department or the City of Vancouver.
We note that men are the large majority of police officers in Washington (about 90%), and they are, of course, the large majority of those injured and killed in the line of duty. [See related: Here is how many Washingtonians we’ve lost in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars]
Above is a 7-minute video of our interview with Rey Reynolds. Below is an edited transcript of Rey’s words.
Rey’s female partner on bike patrol
I’ve been in law enforcement for 37 years, and I’ve seen the ebb and flow of having women on the force. Years ago, I used to think that you could just primarily have men. Here’s what I think now: We have an opportunity to have women on the force who excel in various areas.
For a while when I was on bike patrol I had a female partner. She was outstanding. Hand-to-hand skills? Excellent. Knowledge of the laws? Fantastic. As a trainer she was excellent too. And she was able to keep up with me…sometimes [Rey smiles].
I like things laid out nicely, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then I can follow a pattern. I can bounce around when I want, so long as I’ve got a good pattern to bounce off of. My partner was not concise. She was more random. She was more of an out-of-the-box thinker than me. She came up with this idea of videotaping us while we were riding the bikes and then putting it on the internet. “Where’s the Bike Team Today,” she called it. I’m thinking, Who care where the bike team is at? It doesn’t matter to me. We’ve got a patrol to do! Why bother with that? Well, it was a hit. People were following us online. They were all about it!
A story of officers working together
One time a situation happened where a guy is on the river, and he drowns. He’s deep in the water, so they call for a team to come get him out. The sides of the river were really steep, so there was no way to take him up the riverbank. The best idea was for us to put him on a board and float him downriver to the ambulance.
Here you have a dead man – somebody’s father, somebody’s brother, somebody’s son – and you have to hold him and physically take his body out of that situation. So what did the guys do? We started making jokes. We’re laughing as we’re floating him downriver, making jokes — to protect ourselves.
A female police officer comes up and she says, “Listen up. You guys need to respect this man. His family might be up ahead.” And as soon as we came around, the wife was right there. If she had heard us joking and laughing in this super solemn situation, imagine the horror and mental anguish we would have inflicted on her. Thank God that lady was there who had the empathy, who had the emotional awareness. We were calling him a mannequin, and she goes, “That’s not what you need to be saying. He’s not a mannequin. He’s a person.” It checked us very well.
There are times when women have to speak up, and it helps us check ourselves. We can’t speak and laugh and giggle and say all the things we used to say in a male dominated environment, knowing that we’re not being empathetic toward a female who’s in our group. We absolutely have to understand that they’re not thinking that way. And their mental style may be completely different than ours. We must recognize that.
Have we made that transition? I think so. I think we’ve made the transition well. And it helps us to be a more efficient force. Had we not had her there, who knows what complaints would’ve come through? Who knows what damage we would have done to this lady and her family? Now, amongst ourselves as men, joking is how we were protecting ourselves. But see, that’s why I’m saying this female mindstyle is beneficial to us. That’s how we need to respond to each other. Together we are unified, and a much better team.
Specialization
There are some outstanding women detectives who really know how to interview children forensically. That means how to get the right information out of the child, and how to not press the child too much.
Some of the best rape detectives are women. We have men who are rape detectives too, but there’s no question that the absolute best ones we’ve got are female.
We have great female domestic violence detectives. Men are also domestic violence detectives; one of my best friends is a DV detective. He’s excellent beyond a shadow of a doubt. But there was a female detective prior to him, and she was outstanding! She knew different techniques. She knew how to interview people well. She knew some of the things that would lead a family to where you could just about predict that there would be a domestic violence situation. She could interrogate and come up with all kinds of different charges. But she didn’t stop there. She didn’t want to just explode the family. She tried to help the family.
So those are some of the positions I see women gravitating to and excelling in.
I don’t think we have a single female SWAT member. There is a lot of physical mentality in SWAT work. There’s a lot of thinking and running and shooting and all the rest of that. Your heart could be beating 160 or 170 beats per minute, but I could be talking to you calmly, just like this, and maintain total control over my emotions. It takes a very special person to be on the SWAT team, and there aren’t many people who can do it. And it tends to draw in men because of their mental styles. Can females do it? Yes, and I’m sure we’ll have a female officer in our SWAT team.
‘Women officers are absolutely necessary’
Having women in the police force is absolutely necessary. There is no way around it. They round out the force in a way that is outstanding. We were unbalanced when it was all men. We’re getting to the point where we have males and females together, bringing us into a good balance.