Excerpts from an oral hisory of

Senior Commander
Deborah Gilbreath Montgomery

Part III - First Woman Goes On The Streets

As it turned out, the people that supported me the most were the rest of the guys in my academy. Because they knew I got no special breaks, they knew I did everything they did and most of them had uncles or fathers or nephews or people that were over in the police department, and so when those guys were checking to see what was going on, I was getting good reviews from the guys I was working with even though the people on the other side had some issues with it.

I finished the academy and was to do the field training. I said, you know what, I can do this job and a woman can do this job. And, I thought, in the academy you don’t have bullets in your gun and I said, you know, I’m just going to go on this FTO [field training officer] piece, so I can put bullets in my gun and drive the squad car and turn the red lights and siren on, I mean that was my – god, if I went through this twenty-one weeks of – I need to be able to do some of this stuff.

For me the hardest situation to deal with was dead people. Chief McCutcheon sent me to two death education classes. I just couldn’t believe when I walked into a place and you had a DOA, dead on arrival, a person laying there that it wasn’t a person, it was just a frame.

Everybody would laugh at me and they’d say, “They can’t hurt you, they’re dead.” But dead people were my biggest – I had numerous calls and it never failed, I always had the goriest calls. And when I get there I’m the first car on the scene, I’m by myself.

I worked a lot by myself, early on during recruit time you had a partner, but then later none of the guys really wanted to work with a woman and so I had a lot of shifts, the majority of my career, where I was a one-person unit on Rice Street when everybody else was a two-person unit.

You want to know what was the hardest part being the first woman and the first Black woman in the Department?” Well, you know everybody wants to be accepted and you’re always trying to do your best, you’re always trying to work hard. I wrote excellent reports, to this day I’ve always been complimented on my report writing abilities. City attorneys and everybody talked about the detail and stuff that I had in them. But, you’d like to think that somebody is going to invite you to coffee. A lot of times you just did a lot of things by yourself.

I did my job, people knew I was doing my job. But they weren’t running to be my partner.

I could at least depend on certain guys to come back me up, make sure I was okay. My sergeants could tell by the tone in my voice if I didn’t feel comfortable, or the dispatchers upstairs, some of them could tell by the tone of my voice that maybe they ought to send a squad by to check on 211. I mean, I was never beneath asking for help, if I knew it was a situation I didn’t feel comfortable in. But sometimes you’re just not real sure and you don’t want other officers to start thinking you were afraid. But usually by my voice people would say they could tell when I wasn’t as comfortable as I should have been.

I just wanted to do the best I could and to move on and not dwell on a lot of that stuff. There’s times when I felt somebody should have come or they should have come faster when they didn’t. But it’s all subjective if they didn’t back me up, when someone should have. But you learn to get beyond that.

I was on the job for twenty-eight years, I worked Rice for sixteen years, between being eleven years on patrol and then I got promoted and I was a street boss out there, and then I went into the juvenile unit. After I came on in 1975, in 1977, they hired ten women and, so, at that time they started rotating women through different units, in homicide, fraud and forgery, and accident investigation.

Then from 1991 to 1998 I went on an intergovernmental mobility. I was the Assistant Commissioner of Public Safety for eight years under [Governor] Arnie Carlson. I was over the budget and State Patrol and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and Fire Marshall. Then I came back and was promoted to lieutenant and I got put in the juvenile unit under Mike McGinn. When Mike retired I got promoted to commander and I was commander of the juvenile unit. Towards the end of my career, I got promoted to senior commander and I was a watch commander, which is the equivalent of being the chief when the chief isn’t in the building. That’s kind of what I did.

I think the thing I did best was developing young people. When I was a commander of the juvenile unit, I had young officers, and I made a concerted effort to hire minorities to bring them into juvenile. I had Hispanics, I had Asians, I had Black officers to work as school resource officers.

Other than in law enforcement I am most proud of being a mother and raising a family. I always carry a picture of my family with me and show them off and say, “You know, look at all of them.”

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