Tonya Chapman is a member of a very small and elite group of law enforcement professionals. She is one of 200 women in this nation who are Chiefs of a police department.
Chief Chapman was the first African-American woman to be named a month and a half ago to lead the Portsmouth Police Department. That places her in an even smaller club: a Black female Chief of an urban police department.
In the March 2016 edition of Police Chief Magazine, an article entitled “Policewomen: Their First Century and the New Era” by Peter Horne, Ph.D., pointed out the growth of women in law enforcement has been a slow one. Horne, a Mercer College professor, noted only 1 percent of the nation’s police officers were woman in 1971, and today out of 800,000 people involved in the various form of policing, they make up only 13 percent. – READ MORE