By Victor Greto
When Deborah Berry first became a police officer in the late 1970s, people tended to stare at her.
Not because of her thick red hair. Not even because she looked like the kind of person who naturally radiated the potential to become a police chief in 20 years.
Berry was a female police officer during the age of disco, leisure suits and gold chains.
“I was driving in my police cruiser up [U.S.] 441,” she recalled, “when a motorcyclist riding beside me just kept staring at me. I looked ahead of him and saw he didn’t see the truck stopping in front of him. I tried to signal him to watch, but he just kept staring at me.”
The motorcyclist ended up under the truck. Berry later asked the man, who was not hurt, why he didn’t notice her signaling him about the danger ahead.
“He said he kept staring at me because he’d never seen a woman police officer before,” Berry said.
Times change. Sort of. If anyone stares now, it’s not in disbelief but rather polite respect at her 24 years of accomplished police work, which brought her up from a 911 telephone operator who made $8,000 a year to the rank of captain and the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s first female district commander.
Berry, 45, is marking the completion of her first year as chief of the Sheriff’s Office district that includes Weston, the new town of Southwest Ranches, the unincorporated Pine Island Ridge and Rexmere Village neighborhoods bordering Davie and the unincorporated neighborhoods flanked by Cooper City.
Since she has become chief, Berry has added 12 new positions, including five sheriff’s deputies, five community service aides and two motorcycle officers. The latter patrol for traffic violators.
Like most police chiefs across both the county and the country, Berry points with pride to the fact that crime has dropped in her district.
But there are two issues that come up the most in a relatively calm but growing city such as Weston, she said, and on which she has concentrated her efforts for the past several months: traffic and youth.
“We constantly get traffic complaints,” Berry said.
She said she added the two motorcycle officers to relieve her zone deputies from spending too much time hunting and tracking speeders. The city, she said, also has added two radar speed detectors on wheels, which clock motorists to show them how fast they’re going.
Berry said the new traffic unit works with the city’s consulting traffic engineer and the county’s traffic management department to pinpoint “traffic hot spots” around the city. She said she also does presentations to homeowner associations to educate residents about how the city handles speeders and the options they have to combat the problem themselves, including the installation of speed humps.
By July, Berry said, she will have a youth counselor on her staff who will act as a magistrate and facilitate relatively petty youth problems, from fights at school to the “the bully at the bus stop, for instance,” she said. “We would like to coordinate with people before they get into the system.”
Berry said the Sheriff’s Office also has been concentrating on teen loitering, specifically around recreation and pool areas.
As for her rise to police captain and appointment as the district commander, Berry modestly said, “it was just all part of a process.”
After she took the position last year, she said, she received “overwhelming media attention” as well as numerous phone calls, both of which emphasized the fact she was a woman.
“I never looked at it that way, that I was the top female in line for police chief,” she insisted. “I was just part of five others on a list for the assignment.”
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Berry was born in St. Petersburg, and her family moved to Broward County when she was 3. At first, she didn’t want to be a police officer; she wanted to be a veterinarian. She still raises Labrador retrievers at her home in Southwest Ranches with her husband, a pilot for the Sheriff’s Office.
It takes money to be a veterinarian, she said, so, while attending Broward Community College, Berry applied for and got a job as a 911 operator with the Sheriff’s Office. It was 1975 and the 911 emergency phone system was something very new.
“I was there the first day it became operational in Broward,” she said.
From that beginning, she steadily worked her way up through the ranks.
Berry became hooked on the excitement of the work, and, because she’s a night person, loved working the 3 to 11 shift. Operators had to ride with sheriff’s deputies every Thursday to learn the area they covered.
“On those trips,” she said, “I discovered these [people encountered on calls] were just normal people with problems, and you had to solve them.”
Berry then decided she wanted to be a police officer, and worked for the Lauderhill Police Department as an officer while she attended the police academy. She became part of the Sheriff’s Office in 1981 when the agency absorbed the Lauderhill police force.
“It was so exciting,” Berry said of her first few years, but she ran into a few problems from several people, including those whom she was helping.
“I want a real police officer, give me a man,” Berry said some people would say to her.
She said she was also teased by fellow officers, but is unsure whether it was as much about her being a rookie as it was about her being a woman.
Regardless, she got promoted steadily through the ranks over the years, and left the road when she became a detective, at times working with the juvenile and the economic crimes unit. She went back on the road when she was promoted to sergeant and headed a squad in the unincorporated neighborhoods southwest of Hollywood. When she got promoted to detective sergeant, she was put in charge of property crimes and narcotics cases. She eventually was assigned to sex crimes and sex abuse cases at the Sheriff’s Office main complex in Fort Lauderdale, where, she said, she tackled more complex cases.
“I like complexity,” Berry said. “I’m a good organizer, a good writer of reports. Over the years, I’ve became more officially involved with people.”
In 1992, she took on more administrative duties as executive officer of the sheriff’s Tamarac district, a position where officers are groomed to become captains. Three years ago, she was promoted to captain and supervised the Sheriff’s Office’s countywide operations.
“It’s all a progression,” she said of her stream of promotions.
She refuses to speculate on any further progression.
“My career has always been about opportunity,” she said. “I’ve never planned it all out. I work, I work, I work and it just happens.”
From signing something as innocuous as a requisition order to starting the negotiations for policing a new municipality, Berry said her district commander’s assignment has kept her hands full. Though she begins her day as early as 8 a.m., she often works into the evenings by attending homeowner association meetings or other meetings in the community.
Forget about vacations, she said. She may take extended weekend trips with her husband to dog shows, but that’s about it.
At the rank of captain, and as chief of the sheriff’s Weston-area district, Berry said she once again has the best job. Still, there are moments when she thinks back on her years cruising the streets.
“Sometimes I miss the slap of the handcuffs,” she said. “But I go on the scene of major calls.”
She can do that. After all, she’s the chief.