BLAZING A TRAIL IS NEVER EASY
Carolyn Hutchison
 

Carolyn Hutchison, chief of the 33-member Carrboro, NC, Police Department, isn’t one to gloat, but she admits that she sometimes wonders what became of the Fayetteville police officer who came to her high school government class to talk about policing. Curious, Carolyn raised her hand and asked him how he felt about women in law enforcement. Without hesitation he replied: “There’s no place for them.” 

A self-described Army brat known to never back down from a challenge, Hutchison’s career plans were set. In her quest to prove him wrong, getting her foot in the door of policing was more difficult than her climb to the top. She joined the Carrboro Police Department in 1984 only because Durham PD turned her down three times. Although she can’t say for sure it was because she was a woman, since the official reason was that the department feared she would leave to go to law school, she enjoys the irony that at the time of her promotion to chief, she became the fifth woman chief in the state and that one of those chiefs was Theresa Chambers, chief in Durham before she was named chief of the U.S. Park Police, the first woman to head a federal police agency. 

Thirty-nine and a 14-year veteran of the department when she was named chief in November 1998, Hutchison still isn’t sure why Carrboro Chief A. Sid Herje hired her after spending most of the interview trying to talk her out of the job, saying she’d soon be bored with small town policing. A 1981 Duke University honors graduate with majors in both sociology and Spanish, hers was becoming a case where education was proving more harmful than helpful. She had been ready to give up her search in North Carolina when the Carrboro job was offered to her. It was a good fit; she was neither the first woman (there were two when she was hired and there had been others previously) nor the first college-educated cop. Carrboro, located in the Research Triangle area that includes Durham and Chapel Hill, is a university community with a well-educated citizenry and well-educated police officers. Although a degree is not a requirement for the job, it is also not particularly unusual for an officer to have a degree.

What was unusual, though, was Hutchison’ ability to speak Spanish. The community has a large Spanish-speaking population and she remembered having been one the few officers who could communicate in Spanish. “Actually,” she recalled, “like most non-native speakers of any language, I could understand more than I could say, but the fact that I tried and apologized for my mistakes showed I was trying to help and that I had respect for the people I was talking to.” One man was so thrilled that he asked then-Det. Hutchison to marry him. Her negative reply needed no translation.

Her experiences at the academy were typical of women who entered policing in the 1980s; she was one of only four female recruits in a class of 26, but this, too, presented only another challenge to be overcome. Her career within the department, though, was relatively smooth. Not only had there been female officers before her, there had been a female sergeant. She was the first woman captain and is now the first woman chief. She recalled that, in fact, if anything, she had been initially overprotected, with the chief putting her “where I couldn’t do too much damage.” Her first assignment was the Christmas parade, where she also learned her first lesson. She had not anticipated the weather, and she promised herself right then that she would dress appropriately for any assignment. 

Promotions and training

She received steady promotions and reached the rank of captain in 1991 and took advantage of training, gaining certifications in a vast array of skills from crime prevention, to child abuse and neglect, to fingerprinting and tactical crime analysis. In 1988 she earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as interim chief for about four months after the prior chief retired. Selected as one of the six finalists whittled down from 50 applicants for the position, her selection was announced on Nov. 10, 1998 and she was sworn in a week later. 

“It’s pretty terrific,” she said, “to become chief of the only department you’ve ever worked in, for a community where you live and are well known. My Dad is a retired Army colonel, we traveled a lot, so I have enjoyed living in a small community and really digging in.” Indicating her enthusiasm at her selection and her feelings for the department, one of her first acts after being selected was to send a memo to the entire department inviting as many staff as possible to attend her installation. 
One of the ways that Hutchison is involved is through Dream Makers, a program that matches Carrboro police officers with local elementary school students. Hutchison was paired with a young girl who visited her family weekly, having dinner, and possibly going out to a movie or to see a women’s college basketball game. Most of the youngsters come from single-parent homes, and Hutchison and the other police mentors provide another adult influence for the students. Hutchison attributes her desire for community—and much of her feistiness—to her upbringing, noting that in addition to moving around the world, she is the oldest of five children and the only girl in the family. 

One of her brothers, who attended her swearing in agreed, remembering that she was always competitive. Her mother, who traveled from Indiana to pin the chief’s badge on Hutchison while her father stayed home, also agreed, admitting that she never thought the chief’s job was out of her daughter’s reach—“if she wanted it.” She regrets that her father was unable to attend also. Her parents were living in the Midwest and the town manager wanted her to be sworn in quickly after her selection. The logistics of her father’s job as well as the costs of flying resulted in her brother Steve, who came from the Washington, DC, area, acting as his stand in.

Bumps in the road to the top

Yet it was not as clear sailing as it first appears. Hutchinson overcame a vocal cord disorder called spasmodic dysphonia that results in her having a voice that she says others describe as “weak, quivery, soft, etc.” “Whatever you would call it,” she said, “it’s not the sort of voice that you’d call ‘commanding’ and it’s not the sort of voice the public expects from a police officer, much less the police chief.” Having offered this self-assessment, Hutchison also admitted that she is more conscious of it than others, but said that others certainly notice it. 

Hutchison created another situation others certainly noticed when she became pregnant prior to becoming the chief. While pregnant police officers are no longer a novelty, Hutchison was living with a female partner. Although her sexual orientation had never been discussed with Chief Ben Callahan, the man who was her predecessor, she said she recalled his telling her she was “stupid.” “As you might imagine,” she said, “he wasn’t too supportive,” although she did say that he ultimately warmed to her daughter. She said her real mentor and friend is the chief who hired her. 

Hutchison’s family arrangements became something of an issue again two years into her tenure as chief when she publicly battled to retain domestic partner benefits for her partner and their children. Hutchinson and her partner had been together for ten years when Jack Daly, a candidate for state auditor in 2000, challenged Chapel Hill’s and Carrboro’s 1994 decision to allow unmarried employees to extend health coverage to their dependents. The costs to Carrboro were small; in fact, Hutchison was the only town employee who registered for the partner coverage. But the benefits to her family were huge, because they made it possible for her partner to be a stay-at-home mom to their two children.

Hutchison went far more public about her private life than she had ever intended to. She, her partner and their two children, including a son who is her partner’s biological child and the daughter who is Hutchison’s biological child, were photographed frequently in local newspapers. She attacked Daly’s campaign as “ignorant, mean, self-righteous and incendiary,” noting that her partner and their two children were as dependant on her as any other parent and children were on their family’s primary wage-earner. 

Although Hutchison would have preferred to remain out of the limelight, she realizes that she is one of the few openly gay police chiefs in the nation. Recently, another, Chief Ron Forsythe of Suison City, Calif., a bedroom community between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area, announced that he and his partner no longer wished to leave the county when they wanted to go out together. Like Hutchison, he indicated that his community, where he has been chief for nine years, has been “quietly tolerant.” 

A tolerant town

Carrborro can best be described as something more than quietly tolerant. Despite the stereotypes that some might hold about a small, southern town, Carrboro has appeared on websites of the gay-friendliest communities in the country. Hutchison’s sexual orientation was not an issue in her selection to chief, but this may have been at least in part because when the town’s mayor ran for re-election he was unopposed and there was also virtually no mention that he was a gay man. Living up to their reputation, community leaders and residents supported Hutchison not only in her appointment as chief, but also in her battle to keep her benefits. Residents, she said, and newspaper clippings confirm, preferred to focus on her accessibility, her management and people skills, and her outreach to the community—especially to Hispanics—during her years with the department.

The chief attributes part of her community orientation to her own negative experiences with police. First, of course, there was the unnamed Fayetteville police officer, but there was also the Fort Bragg military police officer who gave her and a friend a difficult time because they looked like hippies. She recalled: “I lived on the base; my friend had come by bus to visit me. We both had long hair, and he wore a backpack and was lugging a sleeping bag. This MP demanded that I get into his car, but I refused and told him he could follow me home and talk to my father, the base commander. He did follow me home, but he never had the confidence to meet my father. When he saw me go inside, he drove away. That’s not the kind of person who should be a police officer.”

As chief, Hutchison has the authority to decide what type of person to hire and filling vacancies in the department was one of her top priorities. Within four months of being named chief, she had hired three officers and was making moves to fill the captaincy she had vacated. Rather than relying on chance, she used an outside assessor to measure the skills of the two candidates for the position. Upon reaching full staffing, the department’s next priorities are community outreach, crime prevention programs, and Spanish-language training for the department’s officers. Almost twenty years after she was hired in part for her language skills, the department still has only two or three officers who speak Spanish. In fact, one of the new officers she has extended a conditional offer of employment to is a Hispanic woman who does not speak Spanish. “I’ve warned her that the community is going to expect her to be able to speak Spanish,” but at the same time, Hutchison has decided that it is easier to teach language skills than to wait for someone like herself to come knocking on the door. It’s probably a wise decision!