After 40 long years of being an all guys club, the Los Angeles SWAT Unit, who was thefirst of its kind and paved the way for SWAT teams across the country and in Hollywood, is finally accepting women into its program, or woman, should I say. Jennifer Grasso, 36, has entered into the team’s intense 12-week course, and if she survives, she’ll be the first woman accepted into the SWAT program. However, she won’t be the first that’s tried to get in.
Nina Acosta, a former police officer who worked in the LAPD’s Metro division, tried out to become a SWAT officer twice in the 1990s. She passed the intense fitness tests, but was never selected to enter the training program.
“There could have been only one reason and that was because I was a woman,” Acosta says in an NPR interview with Mandalit del Barco.”I did very well in the tryouts. And when we got the tapes, because they taped the whole process, it proved exactly what I knew all along, that I had beaten most of those guys in the head to head competition.”
Because of this, she sued the LAPD in 1994 for discrimination and was awarded more than $2 million in damages.
Acosta is quoted as saying that the lieutenant in charge was “very arrogant about saying women do not belong in SWAT.” She was told that “you guys can work in the field and work in juvenile detectives or work the front desk and all that stuff, but SWAT’s where all the men play.”
SWAT, which stands for “Special Weapons and Tactics,” was developed in 1967 as a response to the Watts riots and the first operations were conducted north of L.A in Delano, Calif., in the San Joaquin Valley. A report issued by the LAPD, following a shootout with the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974m contains one of the firsthand accounts by the department regarding SWAT.
In recent years, the celebrated SWAT unit has faced crises, including a case in which an infant was killed during a SWAT standoff with her father. This year, SWAT lost its first team member, Randal Simmons, 51, in the line of fire.
Photo by conner395 via Flickr
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