The Future of Policing Is a ‘Little Gay Woman’ Named Terry Cherry
Photographs by Phyllis B. Dooney
One Tuesday this past fall, Senior Police Officer Terry Cherry was struggling to connect with some 75 bleary Clemson University students doing their best to stay awake and not make eye contact with the day’s guest speaker. Cherry, who packs a lot of ebullience and authority into a short frame, was deploying nearly all of it to get their attention.
“Who here wants to be a police officer?” she asked. A few tentative hands went up. “Raise your hand if you want to be an FBI agent.” Twenty-some hands went up.
“What does the FBI do?” A long pause. “Anyone? Raise your hand.” Another pause. “Okay, I get this all the time from college students. Everyone wants to be in the FBI. You know why? Television. Not a single one of you can tell me what the FBI does.” By now, sheepish grins were cracking around the room. “You know what they don’t do? They don’t fly around and profile people that are serial killers and eat caviar and drink champagne on private jets.” (What do they do? Lots of counterterrorism and working alongside local agencies, she said with audible disdain.)
Many police departments across the United States are facing a recruiting crisis. Getting a high-resolution picture is impossible, because the U.S. has about 18,000 police agencies and no centralized data collection, but departments across the country report shedding officers, some as part of natural waves of retirement, some in response to the post–George Floyd moment. What made the indifference at Clemson especially notable was that Cherry was speaking to a criminal-justice class, which you’d expect to be full of students interested in careers in law enforcement. Even there, almost no students wanted to work patrol in a city police department. “Normally when I talk about policing, it's like, Oh, I don’t want to be just a police officer,” she said.
[David A. Graham: America is losing its Black police officers]
Cherry’s job is to change that. Or rather, it’s one of her jobs. Cherry is the recruiter for the city police department in Charleston, South Carolina. She’s charged with keeping the department’s ranks full by bringing in new officers, whether fresh recruits or transfers from other
