Portland’s first woman patrol officer, derided as a ‘token experiment’ 50 years ago, helped forge bureau’s future

“She’s No. 1,” the front page of the Oregon Journal blared on July 27, 1973, under a photo of Rita Sorensen.

Not many people in Portland expected there to be a No. 2.

Sorensen, then 26 years old, was the first woman police officer in Portland to work street patrol, with its daily potential for violence and chaos, the newspaper stated.

She was, as the paper’s sources inside the police bureau put it, “the token experiment.”

There’s nothing unusual about women patrol officers today. The Portland Police Bureau currently has more than 50 women working patrol, around 20% of the total, according to the bureau.

But five decades ago, few cops could have imagined such a future. In 1973, the 42nd class of the Oregon Police Academy had 41 graduates. Only four of them were women.

The expectations for those four women were limited: office work, traffic duty, maybe tracking down teen runaways.

For most police departments around the country, a woman taking on a patrol assignment was out of the question.

And yet Portland, with young, liberal Neil Goldschmidt newly elected as mayor, plunged forward – prompting pushback from critics who thought this was going too far.

“Officer Sorensen is not only attractive and alert but is reported to be a ‘crack pistol shot,’” Oregon Journal columnist Doug Baker wrote a week after Sorensen hit the streets on patrol. “Nevertheless, the consensus among the police is that the experiment won’t work.”

Many people believed women simply “didn’t have the physical strength for the job.” A woman patrol officer surely wouldn’t be able to handle, say, an unruly drunk.

An unnamed “veteran Portland patrolman” told Baker that “women just aren’t designed for certain jobs, just as men aren’t designed for others. Do you ever hear of a truck driver taking a job as a manicurist?”

Considering such widespread doubts, Rita Sorensen was a surprising choice. She was a small woman – 5-foot-3, about 120 pounds. And she had almost no experience, having come out of the police academy only a few months before.

She was a bit surprised herself.

“I was new,” she said in a recent interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

***

Sorensen never intended to be a trailblazer.

She grew up in semi-rural part of Connecticut, a dreamy girl who collected butterflies. Her father was a carpenter.

After graduating from a small, liberal-arts college in Maine, she helped a friend drive out to California, and then, following a whim, made her way up to Portland. She decided to stay in the gritty industrial town, which meant she needed a job.

“I applied for everything out there,” she recalled.

That’s how she ended up as an office aide in the Portland Police Bureau’s Women’s Protective Division, typing up reports, organizing files.

This was a typical job for a young woman in the early 1970s, even one with a college degree.

But the times were changing – fast.

Shortly after Sorensen arrived in Portland, The Oregonian wrung its hands over “women’s lib syndrome,” a term used to describe homemakers and secretaries who felt unfulfilled.

Sorensen’s supervisor at the Women’s Protective Division saw something in the new office clerk, and, noting evolving attitudes about women in the workplace, told the division’s captain: “She has an extreme amount of initiative that needs to be channeled, and this can be taken the wrong way.”

Without quite realizing how it happened, Sorensen found herself at the police academy, where she excelled in the classroom and also on the shooting range.

The lieutenant who evaluated her called her a “marvelous prospect.”

In the official Portland police photo of the academy’s graduating class, Sorensen stands in the center of the front row. She’s the only woman, dressed in a white blouse and dark skirt, surrounded by two-dozen men in uniform. She didn’t get a uniform – they were made for men, and so none fit her.

As a trainee, she landed in the Detective Division, and she quickly cycled through assignments in Larceny, Fraud and Auto Theft. When detailed to Morals, she spent nights posing as a prostitute, wearing some of her old high-school clothes.

One evaluation said she was “developing into one of my most competent officers.”

Then, on July 26, 1973, the day before the Oregon Journal put a photo of her on its cover, she arrived at Central Precinct to work Night Relief – an overnight patrol shift.

She still didn’t have a uniform. Sorensen had to wear her polyester Women’s Protective Division pants “that zipped up the back, with no pockets.”

She bought a white dress shirt that she thought looked professional.

To complete the ensemble, someone came up with a small blue jacket – a castoff from a post-office employee.

This was slightly embarrassing, but it wasn’t just that. When she joined other officers one day in a search for a suspect, she realized that, with her white shirt, shiny pants and no hat, she didn’t look like the other cops there. Which meant a fellow officer potentially could mistake her as a threat.

She asked if a patrol uniform could be specially tailored for her. Her sergeant took it under advisement.

***

When Sorensen joined the Portland police, the bureau had only a handful of sworn female officers. And one of them – the late Penny Harrington, who would eventually become chief – was making waves. Harrington had filed a string of complaints demanding the bureau open up more opportunities to women.

Sorensen knew Harrington slightly from overlapping assignments in the Women’s Protective Division and found her remarkable, with a photographic memory and a “forceful” personality.

“She knew what she was doing,” Sorensen said.

Sorensen, for her part, didn’t have a forceful personality; she was naturally shy. When she was chosen to work patrol, she worried that Harrington’s hard-charging approach to helping women officers get ahead had poisoned the atmosphere.

“Considering Penny, I figured there’d be irritation among the guys, so I wanted to make myself likable,” she recalled.

That meant she laughed along with the gibes regularly directed her way.

One day, wearing her makeshift uniform, she arrived for roll call to find that a Playboy magazine cartoon had been put up on the squad-room door. It showed a policewoman with a perturbed expression on her face – and one breast exposed. The caption: “It happens every time I reach for my shoulder holster.”

Sorensen took a beat, scanning the room, then joked: “Can anyone loan me a shoulder holster?”

Laughter exploded around her, she recalled.

Not that every officer could be won over by her willingness to play along with sexist jokes.

“Sometimes they’d tell me they weren’t really pleased with women being officers,” she said. “And I’d say, ‘OK, I’m glad to know that.’”

Out on the street, she learned the job by doing it, discovering “you have to be ready for anything.”

But as she branched out from her initial, on-the-street coach to other patrol partners, her monthly evaluations for the first time took a downward turn.

One officer flatly refused to partner with Sorensen.

Another, who did hit the streets with her, said that, “because of her sex, she is not taken seriously by the public at large,” and that this made him uncomfortable.

Paul Fontana, a lieutenant at Central Precinct at the time, agreed with this assessment.

“Are we expected to deliberately permit her to be exposed to the street violence to ‘prove’ it is no place for females?” he wrote in an inter-office memo.

He continued in the typed, three-page letter:

“The common statement of our Patrolmen is, ‘When I need help, or when I call for cover, I want and need another man, not a female that I might have to end up protecting!’ This feeling has absolutely nothing to do with Miss Sorensen beyond the fact that she is an average female. There might be ‘Amazons’ that could qualify for this assignment, and we’ll recognize them if they are hired.”

Fontana didn’t expect any “Amazons” to be hired.

Sorensen tried to stay focused on doing the job, on being ready for anything.

After a couple of months, she had settled in, earning kudos from her sergeant for assisting the undercover narcotics team in a bust, “in spite of car trouble and no radio [that put her] in a possibly dangerous situation.” But she also had begun to have doubts.

Some of the men on patrol had been helpful to her, but too many weren’t willing to accept her, she said. This made her wonder if she actually had an affinity for policing.

She returned to the Women’s Protective Division, but now that work – handling rape cases, which prosecutors often seemed quick to abandon, and shoplifting cases – wasn’t satisfying either.

Soon to get married, she decided to make a change. She submitted her resignation to the bureau in the spring of 1974, writing that she feared the job was making her “too cynical and calloused.”

The “token experiment” hadn’t lasted long, as critics expected, but apparently it had proved something anyway.

Before Sorensen left the bureau, a couple of young women planning to take on patrol assignments came to her for advice, she recalled.

Their seriousness impressed her. These were not women who would put up with sexist jokes. They weren’t going to go along to get along.

And she noted they were wearing the “regular uniform.” Newly delivered, she was told.

— Douglas Perry; dperry@oregonian.com

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