Trooper Down! (15 page)

“Then Dee came by in her patrol car, saw that I needed help and said, ‘I'll take care of him, G-153.'” And she escorted the passenger
back to the car and made him get in. That one incident gave me a lot of respect for her because I know that in a tight spot, she'll at least try to help. And that's the main thing.”

At five feet five, Dee is slender but sturdy, with light brown hair and a no-nonsense approach to life. Growing up as a tomboy in the small town of Waynesville, North Carolina, she was naturally athletic, and played sports through high school before attending East Tennessee State University, where she earned a degree in criminal justice.

“I knew I wanted to go into law enforcement, but at the time North Carolina didn't have any female troopers,” she said. “So I realized it was going to be a big challenge.”

And a challenge it was.

“We were up at five-thirty every morning doing push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and a four-mile run. If you failed one academic test in a major subject or two minor tests, they sent you home. Two girls flunked out because of that. The remaining girl went through school for ten weeks, then failed the firearms test because she couldn't hold onto the gun.”

That made Dee the sole woman among thirty-seven male cadets.

“The guys could have given me a hard time,” she said. “But they were basically good to me. I'd help them study, then we'd go out and get a drink or sit around and talk. It was like having thirty-seven brothers. There was still an underlying feeling that women didn't belong on the patrol, but I wasn't treated any different from any other cadet.”

Her first—and current—duty station was Buncombe County, where she immediately gained the distinction of being the only female trooper in the western part of the state. Since so few women were in the highway patrol, the only uniforms available were those designed for men.

“I'd tuck my shirt in and the pocket would go down into my belt. Then the neck would hang out. I was in the patrol office one day and a major looked at me and said, “You got any more shirts?” I told him no. “Well, I want you to go right now and order something that fits,” he said. She now wears tailor-made shirts and a bulletproof vest adapted to female curves. Everything else about her uniform is standard, including the heavy-soled lace-up shoes, black socks, gray pants, and campaign-style hat.

Public reaction to a woman highway patrol officer ranged from unspoken acceptance to disbelief.

“The first day on the job I arrested a man for drunk driving. I put him in the back seat and his response to my questions was, ‘Yes, sir, no, sir,' until I finally said, ‘You might want to take another look, mister. I'm not a sir. I'm a ma'am.'

“‘Oh, I'm so sorry!' he said. ‘In that case, can I kiss you? I ain't never seen a female patrolman before!' And he started coming over the front seat. My training officer, sitting beside me, burst out laughing. He was enjoying every minute of it.

“Another time, I arrested a sixty-year-old man for drunk driving and he drew back his arm like he was going to strike me. I said, ‘Buddy, I don't think you want to hit a police officer.'

“‘I wouldn't hit you,' he said. ‘You're a lady. Besides, you might shoot me.'”

It's Dee's opinion that female officers have an easier time on the road than male troopers because of men's more aggressive natures.

“A drunk starts cussing a man and it's instinct that he wants to fight back,” she said. “But I don't have any macho image to protect, so if there's any way I can avoid a fight, I'm gonna do it.”

Which doesn't mean she hasn't faced life-threatening situations on patrol.

“One night I had a guy draw a sawed-off shotgun at me. Then he changed his mind and threw it down on the ground. When I picked it up I noticed it had a shell in the chamber. It didn't bother me too much at the time, but later I thought, instead of throwing that gun down, he could have killed me! That's when I got scared.”

Like other troopers, Dee works swing shifts, rotating days, nights, and weekends. The erratic hours, plus the fact that she's a female highway patrol officer, puts a damper on her social life. She has never been married.

“When men find out I'm a trooper, they say ‘You? You mean,
you 
are? Boy, you must be tough.'

“I've tried dating people in law enforcement,” she said, “but the only thing we do is talk about our jobs.” In the future she hopes to marry and start a family, but says she'll choose “a banker, lawyer, or construction worker,” rather than a cop.

For now, Dee wants to complete her master's degree in sociology
and climb the promotional ladder in the highway patrol. It's a good career, she maintains, despite its ups and downs.

“I have a lot of freedom and I enjoy that. I can go anywhere I want to within my assigned area and stop whenever I want to. Our main responsibilities are the state highways, but most accidents occur on rural roads, so that's where I like to patrol. I also get to know a lot of people in the country, people I can wave at or talk to regularly. These are the folks who can make you or break you when you need help serving a warrant or getting directions. I also like the satisfaction that comes from helping people. Once I found a boy sitting by his car because he didn't know how to fix a flat. So I did it for him.

“I pick people up when their car runs out of gas, or call a wrecker for them when they need it. Or I'll stop and talk to kids and answer their questions about my gun, my uniform, anything they want to know. I love that part of the job.”

Her advice to other women considering a career in the highway patrol is to first get all the education they can.

“My only regret is that I didn't finish my master's degree before I came on the patrol. I don't think anyone can have too much education. There's always something new in the world to learn.”

What Gail Cloer learned when she joined the highway patrol in 1986 was that she had more gumption than she thought. A single parent with a nine-year-old child to support, Gail was going nowhere in finding a career until her mother suggested she try law enforcement. So one summer she joined the Sylva Police Department as an intern and found that she loved the work. Afterwards, she enrolled in a technical college and earned a degree in criminal justice.

“Until I worked at the police department, I had no prior contact with the highway patrol,” said Gail, a tall, striking blonde. “But as I got to know different troopers, I realized how professional they were and I thought, ‘This is for me.' From then on, it got into my blood and joining the patrol was all I thought about.”

Getting in was fairly easy for Gail since the patrol was recruiting females and minorities. Staying in was difficult.

She began cadet school when she was twenty-six, in January 1986. She still rolls her eyes at the memory of those first few weeks.

“People tried to tell me how hard it would be. But it's something you can't explain to another person. The biggest adjustment was stepping out of the world where I had control and going into one where I was told what to do and when to do it. I was in shock for two weeks. The first night I was there, I thought, ‘What in the world am I doing here? What have I gotten myself into?'”

At first the men cadets paid little attention to her and to the two other females enrolled. But toward the end of school the women began to hear taunts and chauvinistic remarks.

“They'd say things like, ‘You have no business being here,'” said Gail. “‘You should be at home.' Some of it was joking around but some of it was serious too. The men tried us. But if we came right back at them, they accepted us. They just wanted to see what we were made of.”

One of the women cadets excelled in physical training, but struggled through parts of the book work. Another breezed through the academics and had difficulty with the physical training. Gail was somewhere in between. But none of it was easy.

“I learned that to become a trooper you have to want it more than anything else in the world. There were times when I had to really reach inside myself to get through. If it wasn't for my family's support I'm not sure I could have done it.”

For Patricia Anne Poole, a twenty-four-year-old cadet, the sense of comradeship she expected from the highway patrol was sometimes hard to find.

“I'm not saying I didn't get support from the other cadets, because I did. There were times when I wondered if I'd get through another day and someone next to me would say, ‘Yes, you can.' But if an instructor talked to me, some of the guys said I was kissing up to him, which was the furthest thing from the truth. I'm in this job for my career and myself. I didn't come here to see how many troopers I could get. But because I'm a female, that's what a few of the cadets thought.”

Her family opposed her decision to become a trooper, partly because of her diminutive size. At five feet five, she weighs just over 121 pounds.

“‘You're gonna get killed,' they told me. ‘It's not a place for a woman.' But when I hear things like that, it makes me want to do
it even more. So I told them I was going to join whether they liked it or not. I want to be happy in a career. After that, they were all for it.”

“I admire Poole,” said W. F. (“Butch”) Whitley, one of her classmates. “There were a lot of guys who couldn't cut it, while she progressed.”

During Gail Cloer's first few weeks on the road she learned lessons that never came up in school.

“My training officer and I were called to a wreck one night at a place named Hanging Dog, a rough section in Cherokee County. I arrested the driver for driving while impaired, a big man about six-three, 250 pounds, rough-looking. I put handcuffs on him and took him to jail while my training officer stayed behind to write out the report. The man lost his temper a couple of times on the way but I talked to him and calmed him down. Later, my training officer asked if I had any trouble and I said, ‘No, he seemed to be a pretty nice guy.' Then he starts telling me how this man was once arrested for kidnapping a social worker and how many fights he had been in, that he was into drugs, etc.

“And I thought, ‘My lord, I really let my guard down. Anything could have happened.' But the experience stayed with me. I became more aware that people can appear to be one way and turn out to be something entirely different.”

One of the biggest misconceptions female troopers encounter among people they work with is that women law enforcement officers are homosexual.

“A deputy in my county was trying to fix me up with a male friend,” recalled one lady trooper, “and I kept telling him my social calendar didn't need any help, but he kept on. Then he said, ‘I've been hearing some things from my friends who are asking some questions.' I knew what he was getting at so I just looked at him and said, ‘Every female who comes on the highway patrol has been called a lesbian at one time or another. That doesn't bother me. I've been expecting it. But we're not lesbians. And we're not out to prove anything. We just want to do our jobs and be accepted.' He didn't say anything more about it after that.”

Often patrolling alone in isolated parts of the county, Gail is not afraid to admit she worries about her safety.

Her greatest dread is stopping a van with tinted windows.

“You can't see inside those darn things and there's no way to know what's going on.”

She handles fear by setting it aside till later.

“I deal with it after I get back in my patrol car, especially after I've been in a chase. I don't always realize I'm afraid until I get out of the car and find that my knees and hands are shaking.”

At the same time, she's prepared to protect herself.

“I don't have any problem with drawing my gun whenever it's necessary. I like myself too much to get hurt.”

Still in the process of proving herself as a new trooper, Gail has built up a sense of trust among her co-workers by “doing my job the best way I can.” Along with Dee Parton and the handful of other women troopers across the state, she hopes that eventually female patrol officers won't be such a novelty in North Carolina.

“Unfortunately, not too many women want to be troopers,” she admits.

That wasn't the case with Leah Weirick.

Interested in law enforcement since she was a teenager, Leah was influenced by an uncle who was a city cop and an aunt who was a detective.

“I'd see her name in the paper whenever a drug bust occurred and I guess that impressed me.”

She chose the highway patrol for a career because she considered it “top of the line” in law enforcement. After graduating from cadet school in 1986, she was sent to Bryson City, a remote mountain town in the westernmost part of North Carolina. She was twenty-three and single.

Athletically built, with cropped brown hair, clear gray eyes, and a pretty smile, Leah was stunned when she heard about her new assignment.

“I couldn't believe it,” she said. “I had been told that no females would be put in this part of the state because people in this area just weren't ready for women or minorities. It was like the patrol wanted us to come out here and prove ourselves. There's not always a backup trooper readily available either, so I worked lots of times completely alone in places where help was an hour away.”

As the new trooper in town—and a female at that—Leah felt she had to work twice as hard to prove herself. Community reaction to “that lady trooper” was mixed at best.

“I'd walk up to investigate a wreck with my training officer, carrying a clipboard to take notes, and people would ask if I was a secretary. Or they'd call me ‘Honey,' and I'd have to look at them a certain way until they backed up and said, ‘Excuse me, I mean ‘Ma'am.'” 

Dressed in uniform, bulletproof vest, and wearing a hat and sunglasses, she is often mistaken for a male officer.