Busting the Brass Ceiling: How a Heroic Female Cop Changed the Face of Policing

Product Description

NOT THAT LONG AGO, WOMEN WEREN’T ALLOWED TO ADVANCE IN LAW ENFORCEMENT AMONG MANY OTHER PROFESSIONS. HEROES LIKE FANCHON BLAKE CHANGED ALL THAT.Fanchon dreamed of becoming a top cop. She knew she was going places. She had already made a mark in the Army. Why not try a career in law enforcement? In 1948, she joined the LAPD, sure her efforts and talent would be rewarded. Instead, despite long hours and high achievement ratings, she was not allowed to promote.Due to increasingly anti-female sentiment, it would take her nineteen years to finally make sergeant, at which point LAPD policy barred her from rising any further simply because she wasn’t a man. Worse, the police chief came up with a plan to eliminate women from the department altogether.
The tenacious police officer tried to challenge the increasingly discriminatory agenda from within. Then she went to the press. When those efforts failed to effect change, she realized there was one last way to try and prevent the LAPD from tacitly becoming an all-white boy’s club. Someone would need to take them to court, and that someone might as well be her.
So, she filed a legal complaint, thereby initiating one of the country’s landmark discrimination cases with little to no help from anyone. The historic class action lawsuit would take seven years and wind up changing the face of policing around the country not just in terms of women, but in terms of people of color as well. In the meantime, however, Fanchon’s betrayal of the codes of silence and loyalty would not go unpunished.

Review

“A valuable–and at times, frightening–documentation of the accepted code of misbehavior safely ensconced behind the “blue wall of silence.” Page after page, readers see Blake enduring in-your-face hostility and quiet snickering with resolve and courage. It makes her ultimate victory that much sweeter. An inspirational, detailed, and informative police account with current relevance.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“Fanchon Blake has been a hero of mine for many years…The class action she spearheaded helped end institutionalized sexual and racial discrimination practices not just in the LAPD or law enforcement in general. Because of the precedent it set in civil rights law, Fanchon’s crusade for women’s rights has impacted–and improved–workplaces across the country. We owe her our respect and our gratitude.”

– Joseph Wambaugh – #1 New York Times bestselling author of police and crime books

“What Frank Serpico did to blow the lid off corruption in the NYPD, the late Fanchon Blake did to expose sexual discrimination and harassment in the LAPD by filing her historic suit in 1973…Both an absorbing memoir and disturbing look inside police abuse of power against its own officers.”

– Connie Fletcher –
New York Times bestselling author 

“Having experienced discrimination myself, I identified with Fanchon’s experiences and trauma when she challenged the system. It’s a riveting story and one that needs to be told.”

–
Tom Bradley, 38th Mayor of Los Angeles

“Fanchon Blake’s story illuminates how ugly and wrong, how corrosive and destructive, is discrimination. She shows us how difficult discrimination is to dislodge, yet she inspires us to work diligently to end it.”

– Congresswoman Pat Schroeder

From the Author

By the time I met Fanchon Blake in 2010, she was 88 years old and had already been working on her manuscript for years. There wasn’t just one draft, there were multiple drafts of multiple chapters, including a 25,000-word section about her involuntary recall by the Army to Japan and extensive personal material ranging from her romantic missteps to her battle with alcohol. Inherently she knew she needed someone to help her focus her book. That was not always the easiest task. Fanchon was feisty as hell, and nothing if not stubborn and determined to see things done her way. In the end, however, she realized that her determination to fi