Person of the Week: Ella Bully-Cummings

Nov. 14, 2003 -- Ella Bully-Cummings is making history at a time when her city — and her state, the federal government, and every cop on the beat — is waiting to see if she has what it takes to be Detroit's first female police chief.

Bully-Cummings remembers how she first realized women could become police officers.

"I was a young teenager and I was the cashier at a ticket window at the Mercury Theater," she told ABCNEWS. "I was sitting there selling tickets one day and I saw a police car pull up and a female in full uniform stepped out of the police car … and it struck me as really strange because all your life you grew up thinking that this was a man's job."

By the time she was 19, she too wore a police uniform. She had become a cop in Detroit, the 10th largest city in the country.

Now 46, Bully-Cummings has just become the police chief — the boss of 4,700 cops.

"Because I am a female, I have the weight of all the women of the world on my shoulders right now," she said. "My biggest challenge is getting to understand that, as a woman, there is no difference between me running the police department than a man."

That's not her only challenge. She is up against a police force so troubled that the Department of Justice has ordered it to reform itself — while Washington watches every move.

Bully-Cummings also believes that growing up in Detroit was a challenge in itself.

"I never had a room of my own," she said. "When you sat down for dinner, you had to make sure you were there so that you had food. When you wanted to say something you had to be loud so that everyone could hear you over the other children. But it was also a time of closeness for me."

The second-oldest in a family of seven children, Bully-Cummings seems to get much of her strength from her family. Her father was in the service during World War II and met her mother in Japan. After the war, her dad worked as a television repairman and later died in 1998. The family struggled financially.