Honoree Maurita Bryant for NABHI Lifetime Achievement Award 2021

If all police officers had the empathy and ethics that Maurita Bryant put to the job, America might have fewer problems today with policing. Bryant, of Homewood, retired from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police in 2016 after 39 years, having achieved the post of assistant chief of investigations, and then retired again in July 2020 from the Allegheny County Police as assistant superintendent of the uniformed division. More than half her years in law enforcement were spent in supervisory positions, a nod to her knowledge and innate ability to be a good cop — a job she never really aspired to until the opportunity arose. Now, she teaches ethics and moral values to cadets at the County Police Academy and teaches implicit bias as part of the Pittsburgh bureau’s Procedural Justice Committee. She has taught for Penn State, and taught overseas, and recently obtained a teaching position with Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “I teach what it takes to be a good police officer, and the pitfalls that you can fall into,” says Bryant. “Even though I'm out of policing I still want to stay connected in some fashion. There’s a lot of education needed — people in the community need to be more understanding of police, and police need to be more understanding of the communities they serve. They’ve got to learn who the people are. “Police officers have to have empathy,” she explains. “You can’t judge everybody by your standards. You might have been very fortunate, and some of these kids, if you knew where they came from, their home lives and the dysfunction in their lives, you’d know why they turned out the way they did. They just didn’t have anybody to love them or help them along the way.” Bryant’s life experiences shaped her perspective and taught her to reach people where they are. One of five siblings, she got married at 16 to her ex-husband Robert, she soon found herself rearing daughters Christine and Juanita largely on her own. He went to Vietnam and although the marriage lasted 10 years, they didn’t always live together. She and the girls lived in Arlington Heights, and Bryant worked minimum wage jobs trying to make ends meet. “I would always leave one job for another with a little bit more money and benefits,” she recalls. “Even though I worked, my pay was so low I got supplemental welfare. I was working in the U.S. Steel Building, cleaning offices on the night shift, in 1975 when they advertised women being hired on the police force for the first time. So I put in an application. ”Under a federal Justice Department consent decree, the city had to hire six white women, six Black men, and six Black women for every six white men hired on the force. When Bryant got a letter saying she’d been accepted into the police academy, the job paid $13,000 a year. “I almost didn’t go,” she says. “I was making $3.25 an hour and had just got a quarter raise, and I was thinking I’d have to quit to go into the academy. I didn’t want to take that chance. The woman who worked with me — her name was Miss Bernice, #18ricco #ncmawards2021 #mauritabryant