Women are starting to take a seat at the
table where once only men sat. Women currently
occupy 127 of the 535 (23.7%) seats in Congress,
107 out of the 435 (23.4%) seats in the House of
Representatives, and 25 out of 100 (25%) seats
in the Senate.
Across the United States 21.8% of the Mayors
are female. While these numbers are nowhere
near an equal representation of gender, it is a
tangible and exciting start.
persuasive or can maybe communicate a little better, but
there were certainly times when I was scared,” said the Chief
Deputy.
She continued, “Honestly, mine... I worked a large portion
of time undercover in Narcotics and Prostitution and
those were probably, for me, more concerning situations because
you’re on your own, to an extent.” When asked if she
volunteered for that job, she replied, “It was something I was
interested in, the undercover. I was more interested in narcotics
and stuff, but there were not as many females that worked
undercover at that point, so I had to do the prostitution ones,
which... that was just gross.”
Now in her current position, Chief Deputy Lusczynski
made it abundantly clear that times have changed as she has
worked her way up. She said that the organization has the
goal to “support females in all aspects of the agency, and encourage
them to apply.”
“In law enforcement, it’s predominantly male. Our Sheriff,
in our organization, and our philosophy is to be diverse
and represent the community that we serve.” She went on,
“We want to focus on hiring females and diverse communities.
We have a lot of diversity IN our community and we
need to hire Hispanics, African-Americans, females, anybody
and everybody that we can and we don’t want it to be limited
to white males. We’ve really focused on it, in not just hiring,
but in giving people the opportunities for promotion. And,
focus on. We don’t promote somebody to meet a mark or to
doing the job.”
Chief Deputy Lusczynski began to expertly rattle off the
facts. “This changes from day to day, but we have 3,594 employees.
1237 are female, so that’s about 34%”. She broke it
down, “Now, where we need to improve is in Law Enforcement
where there are 207, in Detention there’s 162, and there’s
886 in Civilian, because we have a lot of civilian positions
here. Those are more support services, so we’re focusing. Of
supervisors, we have 32 of 207 Law Enforcement Supervisors,
those are the ones on the street or in detective divisions,
and 27 of 162 in our Detention facilities.”
12 • AUGUST 2019 813.682.9364 FLORIDA WOMEN MAGAZINE
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