It's been two years since George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis.

Two summers ago, in the middle of the pandemic, we saw a protest across the nation, the likes of which you had to see since the 1960s.

We still haven't fixed the police.

The growing calls for justice as demonstrators and grand rapids demand the arrest and termination of the still unnamed police officer who shot 26-year-old Patrick Leoya.

But there's an organization out there pushing for a big change to police departments across the country.

There's a growing body of research that shows that there is a very compelling, unique value to women officers.

They say hiring more women police will foster greater trust in law enforcement and even reduce incidents of excessive force.

On the show today, we're going to ask if something as simple as hiring more women can fix policing. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. It's today explained.

Today, today explained.

When I was growing up, I really saw officers in uniform that looked like me.

Women make up 12-13% of police officers in the United States today, something like 3% of leadership positions in law enforcement.

Growing up, I didn't really see that many Hispanic females or even females in general on doing police work.

But there's a program out there right now trying to change those numbers, not just change them, like overhaul them.

They want women to make up 30% of police forces across the country, more or less double the amount of women in law enforcement right now.

Correct. It's the 30 by 30 initiative.

Maureen Magoff is leading the charge.

To completely revise police policies and strategies so that they adequately support women officers and really transform agency culture.

It's a national grassroots effort that I launched with my co-founder, Yvonne Roman, who's a former captain out of the Newark Police Department.

I was working with Yvonne on a different project and she pointed out sort of the growing body of research about the value of women officers and the persistent underrepresentation and challenged the USDOJ to do something about it.

We brought together women leaders in policing from across the country all the way down to women officers who'd been on the job for less than a year.

Researchers, policymakers and really tried to understand what do we know about women in policing, what is their unique value, why are they so underrepresented and what do we need to do in order to fix it?

It felt like we were in high school throwing a party and we weren't sure if anybody was going to show up. And then one of the first guests was the NYPD.

...