THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 29, 1995 TAG: 9512290552
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE MATHER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 123 lines
For nine years as a police secretary, Cheryl Ellenwood typed, copied, filed, mailed and sorted all kinds of police reports.
Then, she decided she wanted to write them.
``I got tired of just reading the reports of what happened and I wanted to do more,'' Ellenwood said.
She wanted to join the police academy.
Half her police-officer friends told her to forget the academy, that the job wasn't worth the aggravation. The other half said the rewards outnumbered the hassles.
She wouldn't know which half was right unless she tried the job.
Over the objections of her husband and her father - a police officer in New York - Ellenwood joined Virginia Beach's 21st police academy on July 10.
More than 20 weeks later, her husband and father were among the family members proudly watching her graduation ceremony at Salem Middle School. Now, she says, her husband also supports her.
Wednesday ended Ellenwood's first month of on-the-street training. After two more months with two more instructors, and a passing grade on a final exam, she will be assigned to patrol on her own.
The transformation from civilian staffer to sworn officer hasn't been easy. And she is still learning.
She still types complete words into her police car's computer while veteran officers strip communications to the bare phonetics: ``You'' becomes ``U'' and ``Thanks'' becomes ``TKS.'' And the keyboard's awkward position has reduced her 110-word-per-minute typing speed to a remedial crawl.
She wants to give more breaks than tickets, and still softens at hard-luck stories.
The owner of the red Chevrolet Cavalier that Ellenwood stopped on Bonney Road Wednesday evening told the rookie he got a ticket Christmas Eve for driving with expired tags - expired since the end of October. Ellenwood's in-car computer confirmed the story.
``If it were up to me, personally, I wouldn't write him a ticket,'' Ellenwood said to her training officer, Pam Stewart, riding in the police sedan's passenger seat.
``OK, let's talk about this,'' Stewart said. ``He's had all of November and all of December. And DMV was open all day today, and he didn't take time out of his schedule to go. He is obviously showing a disregard for the officer who wrote him the ticket.''
Two things swayed Stewart against the driver. The first is her 14 years of hearing the same excuses. The second is that Stewart spent several hours in a DMV line Wednesday.
Ellenwood wrote the ticket and saw first-hand something she had always heard: The most gushingly cordial motorist can suddenly turn nasty when he's getting a ticket.
Police learn early that both the most polite and the most caustic attitudes can often come from the same person moments apart.
``As long as the good people appreciate what I'm doing, then I'm happy,'' said Ellenwood, a 27-year-old mother of a 3-year-old girl. ``I don't care what the bad people think about me.''
Ellenwood, a 5-foot-4, 115-pound redhead with a mottle of faint freckles across the bridge of her nose, moved to Virginia Beach from Marion, N.Y., in 1986 when she was 18. She had often visited an aunt in Norfolk and was drawn to the resort city's beach.
She signed on with a temporary-employment agency, where she heard about a clerical opening in the city's Department of Parks and Recreation. She worked there three months before moving in December, 1986, to a secretary's position in the Police Department.
In 1989, she was promoted to a higher clerical position and transferred to the department's Special Investigative Division that targets vice and drugs.
It was there she decided to change careers.
``That was something she wanted. She talked to me about it and I was certainly for it,'' said Capt. William Deanes, commanding officer of the SID. ``I'm proud of her, and proud of anybody who strives for what they want in life, and takes the chance to go for it.''
The SID detectives and staff threw a going-away party for Ellenwood last summer. A few days later, she was one of eight women in the newest class of 35 recruits, an unusually high female complement. In Virginia and across the country, women dominate police clerical jobs, but only one in 10 sworn law officers is a woman.
One of the eight women in Ellenwood's class also worked for the department, as a precinct clerk, but she dropped out after the first day.
The woman dropped out because of the intense physical training, which Ellenwood said was the hardest part of the academy. During one phase of training, Ellenwood badly twisted her knee and nearly had to quit. But she worked to strengthen the injured joint and completed the requirements.
Her secretarial background will be an asset, Deanes said.
``When you stop and look at what a secretary does, not just in police work but in any business, they are pretty much the foundation,'' Deanes said. ``They know the intricacies of the job, the importance of detail and how to do all the paperwork, which is one of the hardest thing for police officers to get used to.''
But after nearly a decade as a secretary, Ellenwood was surprised by how much of her time on the street was taken by routine reports.
``I didn't realize there was so much paperwork to do,'' Ellenwood said as she sifted through a stack of reports for a drunken-driving accident she was helping investigate late Wednesday.
The minor crash on Independence Boulevard near Pembroke Mall was Ellenwood's second DUI case, but this time Stewart let the rookie handle most of the details. Ellenwood supervised the sobriety tests, and then handcuffed the driver when he failed.
At the city jail with her prisoner, Ellenwood offered her first testimony to a magistrate.
The magistrate praised her thoroughness. So did the suspect.
``But you seemed a bit nervous,'' the suspect said. ``Your hands were shaking a little.''
``Even he's critiquing me,'' Ellenwood said, laughing.
Her next two months will be filled with more critiques, from more official sources.
Then Ellenwood will return to her first training officer, Stewart, for a final test. And then she will be on her own.
``I'm happy because I'm not sitting behind a desk anymore,'' Ellenwood said. ``Yes, there's paperwork, but there's also contact with people. It makes every day almost like an adventure. You never know what is going to happen.'' ILLUSTRATION: Colorphoto
Jen Friedberg
For nine years Cheryl Ellenwood worked as a police secretary. Now
she is a rookie police officer on the streets of Virginia Beach.
by CNB