Washington, D.C., police chief Cathy Lanier at her swearing-in ceremony, 2007.
Photo courtesy of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department
At 14, Lanier became pregnant by a 24-year-old man, and her mother took an unusual approach to the question of abortion. First, she sat the girl down with a cousin who was a nurse and had her explain the options. Then Helen told her daughter, “This decision is going to affect you for the rest of your life. You’re the only one who can make it.” Now Lanier says, “To this day I couldn’t tell you what my mom’s preference was. If she’d said, ‘Have an abortion,’ or ‘Put it up for adoption’—or had even let me see that was what she wanted—and I had [done that], it always would have been her fault. So her response, in my opinion, was the best a parent could do.”
Lanier married her boyfriend. When she left the hospital with their son, Tony, she says, “I’d never babysat, never held a baby.” The marriage did not last. At 17 she moved back home with her child, earned a high school equivalency diploma and began a series of jobs—waitressing, clerical work, selling awnings—while taking classes at the community college. By then Lanier’s grandmother, Mary Dawson, also divorced, had moved in. “Nanny was always there to help Mom,” Lanier recalls.
Battling Sexual Harassment
In 1990, at age 23, Lanier became a police officer. Her brother Mike had taken her out on a few ride-alongs, sparking her interest; the department’s tuition reimbursement program sealed the deal. But she quickly realized this was exactly the right place for her: “Even as a patrol cop, if you work hard, if you focus, you can make major changes in people’s lives every single day.” She has fired her gun only once—at two charging pit bulls. But the early years were not without challenges. Today’s force is close to 25 percent female, but when Lanier joined up, it was strictly an old boy network, she says, and sexual harassment was a given. As she puts it: “It wasn’t a few bad apples in the barrel, it was a bad barrel.” One lieutenant in particular, she says—“a real pig”—drew a bead on her, pressing up against her, making inappropriate comments. Finally, she filed a complaint. The department sustained the complaint but chose not to take disciplinary action because the cutoff time had passed. Furious, she and another female cop filed a civil suit. The case was settled in 1997, with each woman receiving $75,000. The lieutenant was demoted and eventually fired.
