Black History Month
Ella Bully-Cummings
1958 -
Nationality: American
Occupation: Police chief, Lawyer
Ella Bully-Cummings became chief of the Detroit Police Department in November of 2003. A longtime veteran of the force, which is the tenth largest in the United States, she became the first woman to lead it in its 138-year history.
First Generation of Women Cops
Bully-Cummings was born in Japan in the late 1950s to a Japanese mother and an African-American father, who was stationed as a soldier there. The family moved to Detroit before Bully-Cummings turned two, and would eventually number seven children. At the age of 16, she was working at a local movie theater when she saw a female police officer for the first time, which impressed her tremendously. She entered the police academy in Detroit in July of 1977, at a time when many big American cities were opening up their ranks to women and minorities. The new hiring practices were the result of discrimination lawsuits filed during the height of civil-rights movement, and ethnically diverse communities like Detroit were under court order to integrate their ranks.
Bully-Cummings was 19 when she joined the force. She spent a decade as a patrol officer, and had a tough time during her first few years on the job. Sometimes, her male colleagues faked an illness to avoid being assigned to a shift with her or any other female officer; in other cases, if an incident arose while on duty, an officer would immediately radio for back-up cops to the scene. But Bully-Cummings stuck it out, and was promoted to sergeant in 1987. She held several other posts over the next few years, and also took college courses in her off-duty hours. After earning her undergraduate degree in public administration from Madonna University in 1993, she enrolled in classes at the Detroit College of Law at Michigan State University.
Left Troubled Force
In 1995 Bully-Cummings advanced to the rank of inspector, and became the commanding officer of the DPD's crime prevention unit. A year later, she was named commanding officer of the public information section as well, and won high marks for the new community-awareness programs she launched. In 1998, the same year she earned her law degree, she was made a precinct commanding officer, but retired from the force a year later to practice law.
Bully-Cummings took a job as an associate attorney with Miller, Canfield, Paddock & Stone, one of the city's leading firms, but three years later a new chief of police, Jerry Oliver, asked her to return. He named her assistant chief in May of 2002, making her the first woman ever to hold the job on the Detroit force. But the DPD remained a troubled institution, and came under U.S. Department of Justice scrutiny for an array of administrative and civil-rights violations. In the fall of 2003, the DPD suffered another blow when Oliver was caught trying to board a plane with a loaded gun in his luggage. He was fired, and replaced by Bully-Cummings.
"If You Can't See It..."
Bully-Cummings commands 4,700 sworn officers and civilian employees of a force that works under the eye of a Department of Justice monitor. She is one of number of women named to lead police departments in major U.S. cities, including San Francisco's Heather Fong and Milwaukee's Nan Hegerty. But unlike those cities' blue ranks, Bully-Cummings leads a force that has an unusually high percentage of female officers. Bully-Cummings believes that ongoing efforts in Detroit to keep recruiting women, along with the symbolic high visibility of such officers, help keep the city's ranks at just over 25 percent female. Recalling her own first impression of seeing a woman in a police uniform, she told USA Today writer Donna Leinwand, "If you can't see it, you can't dream it."
Further Reading
Periodicals
- Detroit Free Press, July 11, 2004.
- Toledo Blade, April 30, 2004.
- USA Today, April 25, 2004.
Online
- "Ella M. Bully-Cummings, Esq.," Detroit Police Department Web Site, http://www.ci.detroit.mi.us/police/dept/chief/cop.htm (July 19, 2004).
- "Not Just a Man's Job: Detroit's First Female Police Chief Faces Big Challenges," ABC News, (July 19, 2004).
Source
Biography Resource Center. Gale.