By Chris Hedges, The New York Times
West Trenton, N.J. -- THE first day Lt. Col. Lori A. Hennon-Bell showed up at the New Jersey State Police training center in Sea Girt, she had made the mistake of wearing high heels. She was swiftly burdened with her bundles of gear and bedding and wobbled, to the amusement of male instructors, double time to her barracks with the other female recruits.
“No one told me wearing high heels was not a good idea,” she said. “It was a new world to me.”
That incident, in 1980, was one of many that would, rather than defeat her, fire her resolve to challenge a system that was often inhospitable to women. She was a member of the first class of 116 female recruits, almost all of whom dropped out, including a large contingent who left the day after being berated by an instructor who disparaged the notion of women in the state police force. By the time she graduated, 30 women were left. Seventeen members of the original class are on duty today. Her endurance is all the more surprising given that she took the entrance exam with her sister and sister-in-law only because they had offered to buy her breakfast if she accompanied them.
In the long and often lonely battle for acceptance and respect, she faced down discrimination at trooper stations, where her male colleagues ignored her or made sexist comments."The word ‘sexual harassment’ did not exist,” she said. “We didn’t know what to call it. My instinct is always to fight back when they try and break my spirit.”
The grit may come in handy. Lieutenant Colonel Hennon-Bell, 42, is not only the highest-ranking woman in the New Jersey State Police, but last week she was also put in charge of its new homeland security branch. She will oversee the deployment of about 500 troopers in specialized units in the event of a terrorist attack, which she, like most officials, says is “probably inevitable.”
“We want a unified command,” she said. “We want to be poised for action, to be proactive and to respond as quickly as possible. There were terrorist cells in New Jersey that planned the 9/11 attacks. One plane was hijacked after taking off from New Jersey. The hijackers carried New Jersey ID’s. These people are very active here.”
The range of potential targets, including the huge chemical plants in the north of the state, makes the job one of the most important in the organization. She was appointed because, as Col. Rick Fuentes, the state police superintendent, said, she “has great administrative skills and can pull this reorganization together.”
SHE has also been tested, not only as a law enforcement officer, but also as someone who broke down walls and barriers, a task never included in her job description. The road to her position as a deputy superintendent, one of four who serve below Colonel Fuentes, is one that women entering the force today will never know, she said.
“The culture has changed,” she said, “although part of my job as a lieutenant colonel is to make sure it stays changed.”
When asked to detail what she experienced when she began as a trooper, then only 19, she paused, chose her words with great care and spoke slowly. “They were trying to undermine my professional authority as a law enforcement officer by putting degrading photos and memos on bulletin boards or using degrading language,” she said.
But those who took her on tangled with a wildcat. Early in her career, when she entered a house where a burglary was taking place and was not backed up by her male colleagues, she bluntly told the station commander, “This isn’t going to happen.”
“I told him, ‘You don’t have to like me, you don’t have to eat with me, you don’t even have to speak with me,’ ” she remembered, “ ‘but you have to treat me as you treat my counterparts.’ ”
She, and the handful of women with her, slowly began to bend the organization, although there are still only 104 women in the 2,600-member force. As she rose through the ranks she organized female troopers and met with recruits to prepare them for the rigors of the physical training and the climate of the State Police Academy, especially what she calls “the military bearing.”
“We held a meeting of female troopers recently and the complaints were not the ones I experienced when I began,” she said. “They were the complaints anyone could have on a job.”
She smiles, sometimes wryly, over many of her past encounters. Her uniform is crisp and pressed and her hair pulled tightly back in a braid, but her personality dispels the physical austerity. Her laughter fills the room.
She is married to another trooper, Capt. Thomas Bell. They live in Princeton and have two daughters. Her older daughter, Harlyn, 7, who wants to become either a trooper or a veterinarian, was with her last week when she was named to her new post.
Because she dropped out of college to join the state police, she had to finish her education while she worked, earning a bachelor’s degree in administration of justice at Thomas Edison State College and a master’s in administrative science at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
“I would have waited to finish college,” she said, “but since I was green I often did not understand what was happening. I put up with things that if I was more mature might have made me walk away.”