Part 2 of 2

by Jonathan Gramling

Pia Kinney-James, the first African American female to serve as an officer in the Madison Police Department, is a home-grown Madisonian whose life is a microcosm of the Black experience in the Madison area.

When she joined the department in 1975, Kinney-James was driven by a desire to care for her children and to try to change the Madison Police Department from within. And there was a lot of change to be made from the perspective of being a woman as well as being African American.

“Did they just work in the office,” Kinney-James queried about the first women to work for the department. “Yes and no. When the police women were hired, there were restrictions for them. It was totally different than what the males had to be hired. But they worked as police women, working with female offenders and juveniles only. They were not allowed to train in firearms. They didn’t carry guns. They were not allowed to go to the academy. They had a bus token and a set of handcuffs. That’s basically what their gear was. They had to wear skirts and nylons. And if they made an arrest, they would go out and do their interviews. But if they made an arrest, they had to call for a male squad car to come and pick them up and bring them back to the station. They weren’t allowed to drive. They weren’t allowed to shoot. In fact, former Chief Bruce Weatherly said way back when, ‘I will never allow women to show they can’t hit the broad side of a barn.’ He also said that he would never hire any ‘n-words’ on the Madison Police Department and he stuck to his word on that. They had to file reports, the males didn’t. They had to have college degrees. The males did not. They couldn’t be married at first. And if they did get married and got pregnant, they were fired. And they were only allowed back in after the baby was born if there was an opening. Several females filed suits because they were doing as much, if not more than the males in terms of investigations and evidence collecting and doing their own reports and things like that. It was a discriminatory practice that they filed a suit for. They did win their suit and they got back pay as well as a new title.”

Kinney-James became the first African American female uniformed officer. But again, that doesn’t mean that things were equal.

“We had to wear a male uniform because they had no female uniforms,” Kinney-James said. “And so we wore what the men wore, which was a dark blue uniform. If we were working the wintertime, we always had to have long sleeves and a tie. We wore eight-point hats. There were stained combat boots that they wore. It took a little getting used to. But they did it. Out academy was six-months long.”

When Kinney-James completed the academy, she went through some field training. And it seemed that Kinney-James was assigned to a particular officer who would, by his actions, “encourage” Kinney-James to quit.

“The guy they gave me — I learned later on — was purposely assigned to me knowing he was a racist and sexist as***le,” Kinney-James said. “It was to see if I could handle him. If I could handle him, I could handle the rest of the department. But that first night — we were working the night shift — he wouldn’t speak to me for the first two nights. And he didn’t let me drive the squad car. So he wasn’t really training me. He was just allowing me to be in his squad. That was one of the times that I considered quitting. That was probably why they placed me with him in the first place.

“We came to an understanding that if I was going to be able to learn something to take back to the academy like anyone else, he needed to start talking with me. And these are the three things that he said to me. ‘I don’t like women on the police department. I don’t like Black people on the police department. And I don’t like people on welfare on the police department.’ I was trying to stay off of welfare, so I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I only have two strikes against me instead of three.’ And I couldn’t change those two aspects of being female and being African American. On the third night, that began out two-week session on what I was supposed to learn from him. He also timed me going to the bathroom. He said I took too much time and if we got an emergency call, I would be dilly-dallying in the bathroom and he would have to leave. I did a demonstration. I had to do him a physical demonstration and say, ‘I have to undo my gun belt. Put the gun belt on the floor. Undue my belt, unzip my pants. Pull my pants down. Pull my long johns down. Pull my underwear down, do my thing and then reverse and do everything back up. It took some time where you, all you had to do was ‘zip and flip.’ I said, ‘In order to help speed up my process, I am going to need a urinal and it will have to sit between me, you and the shotgun.’ He finally said, ‘Okay, take all the time you need.’ He was such a jerk. But he was trying to make it funny. He smiled about that. That’s the kind of crap I had to put up with and I wasn’t even on the street yet. I seriously considered quitting. And my parents tried to talk me out of it anyway. They did not want me to become a police officer. They were fearful of the men I worked with, not the people causing trouble. They were worried about the racism in the police department. They were right on that.”