Shortly after Dermot F. Shea was appointed New York City’s police commissioner, he summoned one of the department’s highest-ranking women to his office and told her there would be some changes.
The woman, Chief Lori Pollock, was in charge of the department’s data-driven, crime-fighting strategy and had asked to be considered to become the next chief of detectives. It was a coveted promotion that two of her predecessors had received, including Shea.
Instead, Pollock was reassigned to head the Office of Collaborative Policing, a role she considered a demotion.
So she retired last week, and on Monday filed a federal gender-discrimination lawsuit in Manhattan accusing the police commissioner and the department of systematically denying women the opportunity to compete for senior leadership positions.
“After I replaced him, he moved on to chief of detectives and now he’s the police commissioner,” Pollock, 56, said in an interview. “How is it that the only woman to have served in that capacity was demoted?”
Pollock’s lawsuit frames her demotion as part of a long history in the Police Department of excluding women from top positions. She has raised questions about whether women were ever given a fair chance to earn those jobs.
The Police Department did not respond to questions about the merits of Pollock’s lawsuit and why she was not promoted. A spokeswoman, Sgt. Jessica McRorie, said the department would review the lawsuit.
“The contributions of women, both in leadership roles and in their representation in the uniformed and civilian ranks, across the Police Department, cannot be overestimated,” McRorie added.
Police officials denied similar allegations of gender discrimination in a lawsuit filed last year by two white, female chiefs who said they were forced to retire in 2018 to make room for younger minorities and men.
Although women make up 18% of the department’s 36,000 uniformed officers, a female officer has never been appointed police commissioner, chief of department, chief of detectives or chief of patrol in the 175-year history of the agency. (Alice McGillion, a civilian, briefly served as first deputy commissioner in 1989.)
The scarcity of women in the upper echelons of the police department is not unique to New York. While women are half the population of the United States, they make up 12% of the nation’s police officers, less than 10% of police supervisors and about 3% of police chiefs or executives, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Women have led police departments in big cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, but agencies in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles have only been led by men.
The lawsuit filed in New York City said that there is evidence that gender is a factor in decisions about discretionary promotions.
Women made up 15% of front-line supervisors promoted on the basis of exams, but less than 10% of the managers promoted at the police commissioner’s discretion, according to a department report prepared in July.
Only 39 of 416 officers who held ranks above captain in the New York Police Department in July were women, the report said.
Five women, including Pollock, have come close to reaching the top rank, attaining the rank of three-star chief. (Only the chief of department, the highest-ranking uniformed officer, has four stars.) But by the end of the month, all but one of those women will have retired.
Pollock said she hopes her lawsuit will force the Police Department to be transparent about the criteria and selection process for senior promotions.
Joanne Jaffe, who was chief of community affairs before she stepped down in 2018, said the main reason women were not in key positions is “power and access.” She noted there were close friendships between the police commissioner at the time, his chief of department and several of the commanders they had promoted.
You need people at the top that are fair, genuine and sincere,” she said. “And if their own cliques are at the top, then how do you break through that?”
Jaffe was one of the plaintiffs in the earlier lawsuit, along with Diana Pizzuti, the former chief of personnel. The Police Department has characterized their claims of discrimination on the basis of age, gender and race as “baseless,” maintaining the staff changes they complained about were made on merit.
Experts who study women in law enforcement say they face invisible barriers to advancement, sometimes referred to as the “brass ceiling,” a play on the glass ceiling metaphor commonly applied to other fields.
Those obstacles include outright harassment on the job, but women also struggle with a lack of mentorship and networking opportunities, experts said. Family obligations also play a large role, because women are more likely to be primary caregivers and sometimes cannot meet the expectation that they be available around the clock.
“The nature of the work and societal issues really are holding women back a lot,” said Dorothy M. Schulz, a retired professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has written extensively about the careers of women executives in law enforcement.
Pollock’s reassignment was part of a reshuffling of top commanders by Shea when he took over late last year that included the appointment of the first woman to lead the counterterrorism division and the first African American to lead the detective bureau.
Shea tried to persuade Pollock that the job heading the collaborative policing office, which oversees partnerships with other government agencies and with community-based organizations, was a pivotal role, in part because she would shape the department’s youth programs, the complaint said.
But the transfer stripped her of authority, staff and management responsibilities, and she no longer reported directly to the police commissioner, according to the complaint. Her replacement at the crime control strategies office, considered a plum assignment, was a man, she noted.
“For me to get where I am was like climbing Everest — it took 33 years to get almost to the top of Everest to be replaced for no reason,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t even have a voice anymore. It’s uncanny to me.”