At the end of this episode, the anonymous narrator authoritatively informs us that "Salary for policewomen is on a par with their male counterparts. There are 143 policewomen in the Los Angeles Police Service. 46 of these hold the rank of sergeant. They have replaced most of the desk sergeants in the detective divisions, thereby freeing their male counterparts for the more hazardous field investigations." As the episode ends, we see two columns of smartly dressed young women, in skirts and perfectly coiffed hair under each hat, as the women optimistically march across a courtyard in the sun, surrounded by greenery and a water fountain during a peaceful if not entirely bucolic day.
Surely an effective recruitment advertisement for women, whatever "on a par" means for actual job duties and pay received. I am among the many who commend Dragnet 1967 onward for its positive portrayal of the police and their role in society. Still I wonder about how long these women stuck it out compared to the male graduates in the same era.
Within 8 years, Charles Townsend of Townsend Detective Agency was bragging about his own employees, former policewomen, that "They were each assigned very hazardous duties. But I took them away from all that." For a more realistic, and sobering, description of what women went through for better working conditions in police forces, there is the 1995 book "Breaking and Entering" by Connie Fletcher. She interviewed many policewomen from many US police forces, and the first sentence of her Acknowledgements is, "I value the candor and courage of all the women who spoke with me." Although she later noted that "most male officers have been neutral or even extremely encouraging to their women counterparts", today's police owe a debt of gratitude to their brave and determined predecessors who struggled for better working conditions.
