Meet Dorothy Schulz - a retired police officer, published writer, college professor, a regular contributor to our web page and the best source for information on women in policing that you can find today.

For a woman who wanted to be a newspaper reporter covering the Supreme Court of the United States, Dorothy Moses Schulz has fashioned a career that has taken a lot of twists and turns, none of which have led to Washington, D.C.

True to her girlhood dream, after attending high school in New York City’s Borough of Manhattan, she majored in journalism at New York University. She had breezed through high school in three years and didn’t spend much longer in college, commuting from her home in upper Manhattan to NYU’s Washington Square College in Greenwich Village. After finishing her undergraduate studies at age 19, Schulz became a newspaper reporter in the suburban towns of northern New Jersey as—she likes to say—a call girl, since she worked for the Paterson Morning Call covering such things as school board meetings, local courts and police activities plucked from the blotter. It was during this time she married her husband, David, a classmate at NYU who was a journalist with the Associated Press. He was stationed in West Virginia, so Dorothy moved there and worked as a copy editor on the Charleston Gazette. 

After living and working for a year or so in the Kanawha Valley, the couple returned to New York City. With no particular plans, Schulz started graduate studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a move that would have a major impact on the rest of her career. Receiving a master’s degree in criminal justice, Schulz then moved from writing about cops to working in the criminal justice system. Her first position was supervising 600 sworn but unarmed peace officers at New York City’s Human Resources Administration, where they provided uniformed patrol in more than 70 locations throughout the city, including income maintenance and job centers and a number of institutions for children and teens who were non-criminal wards of the juvenile courts. 

Workin’ on the railroad

The challenge at HRA failed to fulfill her appetite for “real” law enforcement, so Schulz moved into railroad policing with Conrail, the then-government-run freight system based in Philadelphia. She held several positions in headquarters and worked in uniform and plainclothes, including a number of undercover assignments that, considering the type of investigations the railroad undertook, often were more reminiscent of the wild West in the 19th century than the east coast in the 20th. Boxcar thefts were common, but the laid off worker who was shooting staff members throughout the upper Midwest in the hope that he would create enough vacancies to be called back to work was unique to the railroad environment. “Basically,” she recalled, “he was trying to shoot his way back up the seniority roster, and it took a while before shootings in a number of states could be linked to such an unusual motive.” 

With police commissions from the 18 states and the two provinces of Canada in which Conrail operated, Schulz had assignment in places as far flung as Jackson, Mich., Elkhart, Ind., and Buffalo, N.Y. In yet another reminder of the old west and its Saturday morning TV portrayals, David used to joke that her business cards should have said, “Have gun will travel, wire Schulz” rather than Paladin. For those too young to remember, the reference is to a prime time western series that starred Richard Boone as a black-clad gunfighter who was a West Point-educated gentleman with fine tastes and business cards with a chess knight and the words “Have Gun Will Travel Wire Paladin San Francisco.” The show ran from 1957 to 1963 and had a catchy theme song, but Paladin never had a first name! “A few years ago,” Schulz said, “I met a graduate student in Omaha, headquarters of the Union Pacific, who told me she had met a UP cop at a party and he told her that he could travel through most of the country on police work. She suspected he was lying. I assured her that although he may well have been trying to impress her, he was not lying and that what he told her was absolutely true. I knew that from experience and from leaving notes on the refrigerator door for David about where I was off to on some caper or other.” 

Moving back into her uniform with captain’s bars, Schulz then supervised the night tour at freight yards stretching from central New Jersey to Selkirk, N.Y., near Albany, sometimes visiting both ends of the territory on the same tour. Here, too, some of the situations were similar to municipal, county or state law enforcement. Although protecting the U.S. mail after a derailment in which a number of railcars went off the tracks into the Hudson River in sub-zero temperatures didn’t seem amusing at the time, it and similar unlikely situations later made for a number of entertaining stories. 

The 10 years she spent with Conrail was fortuitous, however, since it allowed her to transfer to Grand Central Terminal in her home town. The facility and rail lines of the former New York Central, Pennsylvania Railroad and New York & New Haven railroads were being operated by Conrail prior to being consolidated as becoming part of Metro- North Rail Road. Schulz eventually became commanding officer at Grand Central itself, an assignment she thoroughly enjoyed for many reasons; including that it offered her a parking spot in midtown Manhattan for her motorcycle. “Imagine, a New York City girl with keys to the Terminal; it seemed pretty special. Even though Jackie Kennedy had fought to have the Terminal declared a landmark so that it wouldn’t be torn down the way Penn Station was, I don’t think even she had her own set of keys,” Dorothy said.

Returning to a writing career

While policing took up a lot of her time, it did not occupy all her thoughts. Off duty, Schulz resumed her education and pursued at doctoral degree at New York University. The dual challenges took their toll, so she left the railroad to complete her studies. Not that she stopped working. While pursuing her degree, Schulz spent a few years as director of security for the Fashion Institute of Technology, part of the State University of New York. She learned a lot about Caribbean policing from her staff, many of whom had been police officers in Jamaica, Grenada, or Guyana, and she also improved her fashion sense beyond dark blue uniform pants and light blue uniform shirt. She received her PhD in 1992 and her doctoral dissertation was published, with minor changes, as a book entitled From Social Work to Crimefighter: Women in United States Municipal Policing (Praeger, 1995).

Her studies completed, Schulz accepted a teaching position at John Jay College, where she is now a tenured full professor in the Police Studies Department. Reflecting her early ambition to be a writer, Schulz has continued to publish articles in general interest magazines, police publications and scholarly journals. She writes the View from the Top columns for NAWLEE’s website and has attended many of the conferences, including the first one a decade ago. She has also remained involved with the International Association of Women Police, whose conference she ran in 1987 in New York City. On occasion, she advises transportation system and facilities operators on safety and security issues, an area that has become particularly active since Sept. 11, 2001. 

Still, she found time to conduct research for another book, research that was funded in part by NAWLEE and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. This “seed money” as she refers to it, provided the basis for data that was incorporated in her newest book called Breaking the Brass Ceiling: Women Police Chiefs and Their Paths to the Top (Praeger, 2004). Based on historical research, questionnaires and interviews, the book describes the careers of women police chiefs and sheriffs from the 1920s to the present. Many of the current chiefs profiled are NAWLEE members.

“When I started writing the history of women in policing, some of the men I knew joked that I’d be lucky to fill a pamphlet. When I said recently that I was writing a book on women chiefs and sheriffs, the CEOs of their agencies, even many women doubted I’d be able to fill a book. I’m happy to have proved them wrong,” she said, “because it is very important for people in law enforcement and for those thinking about entering the field—men and women—to know that women have been in policing for 100 years and have held leadership positions for almost as long. Women are not the new kids on the block.”

When she isn’t reading, writing, teaching or thinking about policing, Schulz enjoys cooking, traveling, museum hopping and otherwise enjoying life in Manhattan. As for another book, well, she is thinking about something on women in federal law enforcement, but the real labor of love is a history of railroad policing the notes and documents for which are now filling two file cabinets in her not-very-large Manhattan apartment. Also, she and David, who is a business journalist, have been approached about writing a textbook on retail security and current initiatives involving public police and private security cooperation to prevent theft, counterfeiting of name-brand goods, and internal fraud, including phishing and identity theft.