Person of the Week: D.C.'s Female Top Cop

March 9, 2007 — -- No one has worked harder on a tougher beat than Cathy Lanier. She is about to become the nation capital's chief of police -- the first woman to achieve that post, and, at 39, the youngest.

"There's never been a female chief here in Washington, D.C.," she said, "so the thought [of becoming chief] just didn't enter my mind."

Lanier was raised by a single mother and dropped out of high school at 14 to have a baby. She married the father but was soon divorced and became a single mom at the age of 18. Somehow, she managed to get her high school equivalency diploma.

"My mother kinda raised me to handle things one of two ways," she said. "If the situation's tough, you can sit back and think about how tough it is, or you just think of it as a challenge and move on. So I just never sat back and felt sorry for myself and thought it was something that would end my life. Never felt sorry for myself."

There wasn't time, raising a son while working full-time as a secretary and a waitress. Eventually, she became a cop and a college student.

"I came on the police department when I was 23, and the police department [had] a tuition reimbursement program," she said. "And that was my best chance for college, because I never could have afforded it any other way."

But the job was extremely demanding. Walking the beat in the nation's capital can be dangerous.

"I've been involved in a few physical altercations," she said. "I joke all the time, but it really is true I grew up in a house with two older brothers, so if nothing else I learned how to take a punch pretty well. But it's part of the job."

Competing with the male majority on the force never fazed her.

"And I actually outperformed most male police officers," she said. "I made more arrests than most police officers in my district consistently for about five years."

Rising through the ranks, she faced sexual harassment from the men in her precinct -- yet another obstacle Cathy Lanier has had to overcome.

"Severe harassment," she said. "Physical contact. It was done very out in the open. I was -- I hate to say I was fortunate in a sense. But most sexual harassment goes on behind closed doors. But the culture of our department at that time was that it wasn't even hidden. It was done out in the open. And because of that, there were a lot of witnesses."