More Sexism Than Ever at Sonoma County Sheriff's Department.

More Sexism Than Ever at the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department

......Male deputies openly bragging about driving women out of the department, male deputies boasting about turning their backs on domestic violence victims, unrelenting retaliation against female deputies who report harassment, department protection and promotion of the perpetrators, spiteful, anti-women, written policies, failures to back up female deputy calls for help, unwanted kissing and intimacies from male deputies..............

These are just a fraction of the allegations in the most recent sex discrimination lawsuit
http://www.justicewomen.com/complaint_real.pdf
against the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department filed March 23 in federal court by Lauren Ferrara, a recently resigned deputy, and by corrections seargent, Robin Smith.

In addition to Sheriff Bill Cogbill, the lawsuit names more than a dozen assistant sheriffs, captains, lieutenants, and sergeants as defendants, many of whom are repeat offenders named as perpetrators in prior sex discrimination cases. Promoted over the years, instead of being fired, these career offenders now fill much of the department's upper ranks.

This new lawsuit comes just three months after all thirteen of the department's female deputies jointly signed a 14 page letter of protest and calls-for-changes to Sheriff Cogbill.
http://www.justicewomen.com/cc_letter_to_department.pdf
The letter comes after the women exhausted other remedies to correct the "sexist" and "abhorrent" work atmosphere described in their letter.

Together, the lawsuit and the letter paint a disturbing picture of a rogue department galvanized around anti-women hostilities, from the top ranks down. Moreover, they cap a decade of department failures to correct its archaic disdain for women, despite constant pressures on the department to do so by women's rights groups, and by numerous warnings from state and national officials.

Of the 243 sworn law enforcement deputies in the department, only 13, or a meager 6% are female; less than half the national average of 13% female sworn officers for a department of comparable size. Moreover, there is not one female deputy of any rank in the department.

A Decade of Shame

Over the last ten years, the same Sheriff's Department has already paid out over a million and a quarter dollars in at least ten other sex discrimination claims. Most of these lawsuits were filed by female deputies. But in the most renowned case, in June, 2002, Sonoma County Sheriff's department was ordered to pay a million dollars to the children of slain domestic violence victim, Teresa Macias, for the department's sexist and racist disregard of Teresa's more than 22 calls to the Sheriff for help.

During these same ten years, there have been ongoing efforts by women's groups, and numerous warnings by justice officials, to break up the virulent male monopoly that grips the department. But despite petitions, scores of demostrations, two US Department of Justice investigations, an attorney general report, and grand jury and other commission reports, Sonoma County Sheriff's Department ends the decade more locked into its neanderthal male rule than then when the decade began.

Women's aspirations inside the department remain crushed. Many top quality female officers are driven from the department. Others are never hired in the first place. Women crime victims who call the department for help continue to receive dangerous and contemptful responses. And the community safety is compromised, and robbed of the many proven, essential benefits women bring to policing.

*****************************END*****************************