AUGUSTA, GA – The women who are sworn to uphold the laws in our city do not fit into a certain preconceived mold.

They are mothers, daughters and wives. They take their jobs seriously and can perform their duties just as well as their male counterparts.

“The females at times are better than the males,” laughs Richmond County Sheriff Ronnie Strength.

They don’t take situations for granted and they work hard to protect those citizens who need their help.

Out of 402 officers who work within the sheriff’s department, 42 of those officers are women. In the Richmond County jails, 62 of the 229 officers are female.

Female officers often take on some of the toughest cases involving rape and offenses involving children, Strength said. In those cases, victims are generally more comfortable talking to a woman than a man.

But their work isn’t limited to those roles. They are out there on our streets and in our jails doing everything they can to make our city a safer place.

“They are a necessity,” Strength said of the women that serve in the sheriff’s department.

Lt. Wendy George

On Gordon Highway behind Southgate Plaza, a police substationis nestled in a dimly lit corner of the shopping center.

It’s here that Lt. Wendy George works nights, where she supervises two sergeants and 27 privates. She is also the only female lieutenant working on road patrol.

George, a Hazlehurst, Ga., native with 23 years on the force under her belt, majored in criminal justice in college with the thought of joining the FBI. Looking to gain some street experience, she joined the Augusta Police Department.

“I enjoyed it so much that is has become a career,” she said.

She started out working undercover, posing as a waitress in an establishment where drugs were being sold. She then went on to street-level buying and it was then she had a particularly scary situation encroach.

“[An informant] introduced me to this guy who was a big dealer in this area and I had bought from him several times to where I could go by myself and buy,” George said. “I had gone to his house one day to buy drugs and I was wired and he took me up to his attic and was showing me his house.

“And when we were up in his attic he touched me on my side and said, ‘What’s that?’”

George remained calm as her head raced for an answer. Her team of backup officers were outside, but when the dealer had touched her side, the wire went out and they lost contact with her. George was on her own.

“This guy had tried to kill my informant in previous years,” she said. “The wire went out and the guys didn’t know what was going on and it freaked me out. I just tried to play it off like he was trying to come on to me or something and I just left.”

When her time working undercover was up, she went on road patrol. She also worked in the training department and was the first D.A.R.E. officer in Richmond County. She taught that program for several years and was then promoted to lieutenant and has served in that position for about 15 years.

“For lieutenants, our responsibilities are somewhat different than road patrol deputies,” she said. “The deputies are the ones that are out there, responding to the calls and more actively involved.”

As a supervisor, George will occasionally go out on calls just to make sure that the deputies are handling the calls appropriately.

Working in south Augusta, George sees her fair share of crime including domestic violence, home invasions and armed robberies, of both individuals and businesses, noting an increase in crime over the years. Her job, she says, is definitely dangerous.

“We don’t take anything lightly or for granted,” she said. “The mere fact that you put this uniform on, in itself, can be dangerous because they’re a lot of people who do not like police officers, period.”

As for being a female officer, George says she is not treated any differently by her co-workers.

“They think I am very fair, firm and they respect that in me,” she said. “We laugh together and they know when I mean business.”

Officers in Richmond County, either male or female, must deal with situations that the average person cannot even fathom, she said.

“Having to see the dead bodies or deceased people, whether it’s from a car accident, drowning or murder, that’s hard to see,” she said. “You find a place to put it because you have to go on and deal with life and everyday things.

“Not to say that you become insensitive to that, but you almost become numb because you have to be able to go on.”

Investigator Thelma Gilchrist

Investigator Thelma Gilchrist was one of the first womenhired by the sheriff’s department 37 years ago. In fact, in her early days, pants were shunned and women were required to wear skirts.

“We had to have a protest,” she said.

She started off as a clerk in the records bureau and then worked as a dispatcher. When it was decided that it was time for the women to work the streets, Gilchrist became an investigator.

“That’s when I met my first challenge,” she said.

For 10 years she worked fraud cases and white-collar crimes, chasing down stolen credit cards and people who passed bad checks.

“Back then we didn’t have half the crime we have now; you knew all your criminals. You could look at the handwriting and tell, ‘I know who did this.’ My criminals, I knew them all. I run into some of them every now and then and they say, ‘Hey, remember me?’ They were the nicest group of criminals I ever had.”

After she gave birth to her daughter, Gilchrist returned to work and decided to try her hand at investigating child abuse cases and stayed in that department for the next 19 years.

“Those criminals were nothing like my white-collarcriminals; they were totally different people. I didn’t know this culture existed, people who did bad things to children physically and sexually, and that was very challenging,” she said.

In her years working in that department, Gilchrist said she saw some “horrible” things done to children. She realized her job was taking its toll on her earlier this year when she had a case involving five children who had repeatedly been molested by their grandfather.

The grandfather, a convicted sex offender, entered a guilty plea. While the judge was talking to the man, Gilchrist broke down and started crying.

“That just weighed on me,” she said. “Walking out of the courtroom, I couldn’t stop crying. Every time I think about it I get sad, because I knew that the children had been failed… because that man should have been locked up.”

She compared that particular case to the case of Jaycee Dugard, the California girl who was kidnapped and held captive for 18 years by a man who was also a convicted sex offender.

“This happens all over and I can’t do anything about it because I’m not in charge of what happens to these offenders,” she said, “Then I started thinking I need to get out of this because it’s tearing me apart.”

Just recently, Gilchrist took over pawn shop detail, a job that holds an element of danger that she wasn’t exposed to while working in her previous department. Pawn shops deal with a lot of weapons and most of the employees are armed as well, with bigger weapons than what she carries.

“I have to be armed when I go in because you have a lot of people who steal items and take them into a pawn shop and a lot of these people are not your best citizens,” she said. “It’s more dangerous. I’m more aware of what I do now.”

“A lot of times I’ll go in and I’ll see people with weapons in their hand going in and I don’t know if they are armed or not,” Gilchrist added. “Typically, you see someone with a weapon you tell them to drop it, but you know you have to think in this situation.”

Gilchrist credits intuition to the effectiveness of female officers.

“Women are more aware of things,” she said. “There are a lot of men that are aware but men possess other things that make them great officers, but women you just have to be very thorough and observant and I think, women, that’s what makes them more successful.”

She also admits that things are different for women in the department than when she first started and that she paved the way for other women, working hard to gain and maintain the respect of the public and her male counterparts.

“I’ve been on this job longer than some of these investigators that work with me have been in this world,” she said. “So I think I’ve learned something over the years.”

     Cpl. Bonnie Kalbskopf

For Bonnie Kalbskopf, it seems as if being a police officer was her calling. By the age of 13, Kalbskopf knew she wanted to be an officer.

Too young to join the force right out of high school, she went to college and majored in computer programming.

Working in the Sheriff’s Department for about 13 years now, Kalbskopf has served in many different capacities. From working in the jail to handling a traffic beat to serving in the Criminal Investigation Department to working road patrol, she has done it all. Last year, she was promoted to corporal and assigned to the DUI Task Force.

“The thing I like most about my job is that every day is different,” she said. “I love the fact that I can come in and know that something new is going to happen. Of course, I love the excitement as much as I like to help people. There are few and far occasions where someone actually thanks you, but the times that you make a difference in their life, and that you know you’ve helped somebody is probably the best feeling in the world for me.”

Five officers, including Kalbskopf, are on the DUI Task Force, working anywhere from 80 to 100 DUIs a month. They are on the streets of Richmond County every night from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. looking for traffic violations and signs that a motorist may be impaired.

For Kalbskopf, when someone is pulled over, the investigation begins with interaction with the person behind the wheel and she looks for clues such as slurred speech, lack of coordination or forgetfulness.

“I’ve often had people have their license right in their hand and look everywhere in the car or in their purse and not even realize that they’re holding it,” she said. “Of course the few times where you have the dead giveaways where someone has vomited or urinated or you come up on a car where they’re passed out in the middle of an intersection with their foot on the brake, car in gear.”

In addition to the DUI Task Force, Kalbskopf is also part of a team of negotiators who works in conjunction with the SWAT team, on call 24 hours a day. Part of their training includes role-playing, where situations are acted out based on actual events. It’s a team effort, she assures, not an individual effort like Hollywood often portrays.

“We negotiate as a team,” she said. “We each have several responsibilities that we carry out together. Some of us gather information, some of us record information, some of us speak to the person in need of negotiating.”

Kalbskopf holds true to the Golden Rule, something that was on the wall of her fourth grade classroom at Warren Road Elementary: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

“I have found that out to be a good rule in life at work and in my personal life,” she said. “People just want to be treated the way you want to be treated and as long as you have that respect for somebody it makes things easier all around.”

In fact, a month ago, a jail worker asked her what she did to the people she arrested, that she was the only officer that brought people in happy. Her response was, “I talk to them.”

“Often people I have brought into the jail have actually thanked me, not for arresting them of course, but for just being nice and a lot of times they’ll say, ‘Thank you just for talking to me like a regular person,’” she said. “They are regular people. They made a mistake, that doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person.

“I don’t look down upon people I arrest. They made a bad choice and I’m doing my job. It’s not a personal thing. It’s not a vendetta. I’m doing my job in trying to keep the streets a little bit safer.”

Lt. Terri Teasley and Lt. Sheila Burkes

Once the officers on the sheriff’s department have made their arrests, the perpetrators are taken to jail.

This is where Lieutenants Sheila Burkes and Terri Teasley take over. Burkes, with the department for 22 years, works at the Law Enforcement Center on Walton Way. Teasley, who has 32 years of experience, works at the Charles B. Webster Detention Center on Phinizy Road, both pre-trial facilities.

Burkes ended up in Augusta after her stepfather retired from the Army. In high school she wanted to be a nurse, but found her way to law enforcement.

The structure of her military upbringing prepared her for the road ahead. She supervises 24 people and oversees jailoperations as far as employees, inmate activities, security checks and so forth.

With 390 prisoners in her care, Burkes works from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and says that she thoroughly enjoys her job.

“With the group of people that I have, they make my job a lot easier,” she said. “Everybody does excellent work. We work as a team.”

She hasn’t faced any particular difficulties on the job as a woman, but she does handle situations differently.

“I may be more apt to be able to listen than anybody else, although 390 people is a lot of people for me to stop and talk to when they see me,” she said. “But, in my experience, being able to have that few moments just to listen to them and find out what their concerns are can make a big difference.”

Teasley, originally from Charleston, started out in the records department. From there she worked in dispatch, road patrol, trained dispatchers, served in transportation and as a bailiff before she transferred to Phinizy Road.

“I prefer being out at Phinizy Road,” she said. “It’s a little more controlled environment than the road patrol. It has the potential to be just as harrowing, but it’s a little more controlled.”

While supervising 21 people, even in a jail environment, Teasley said no two days are alike.

“You interact with different inmates, different employees, on a day-to-day basis, so while it may seem the same, it’s not.”

She finds that prisoners treat her the same as they would a man, her years of experience working to her advantage.

“Most of them, when you’ve been here as long as we have, you know a few of them because they are repeat customers, frequent fliers, we call them,” she said. “So they know what to expect from us and they’ll pass it on to the other ones.”

Both Teasley and Burkes speak of the sense of closeness within the department.

“Even if I had chosen going into the medical field and become a nurse, I don’t think it would have given me what I have with law enforcement,” Burkes said. “We are just a family… I think the Lord chose my path.”

Officers share a closeness that the general public cannot understand, Teasley said.

 “When something happens to one, we all rally to help each other,” she said. “We’re very close knit. I don’t think the public understands. I don’t know if I would have understood if I wasn’t in it.”