By: Las Vegas Now Staff
She was the first female police officer to join the Henderson force 25 years ago. Next week, Deputy Chief Jutta Chamber will make history again as she becomes the first female Henderson Chief of Police. She will take over for retiring Chief Richard Perkins.
When patrol officer Chamber first hit the streets back in 1983, Henderson was still a sleepy little town with fewer than 50,000 residents. Obviously, a lot has changed in the 25 years since then.
“When I started here, we had just 30 officers,” she said.
But with a current population of nearly 300,000 residents, Henderson's police force has grown to nearly 400 officers, 150 civilian police and 50 corrections officers, “We have just exploded in size as a department and as a city.”
And overseeing all that growth will soon be Deputy Chief Chamber's full-time job. Chamber will become Henderson's first female Chief of Police on September 8, 2008. But she is quick to dismiss the significance of her gender, saying it has never been an issue during her rise through the ranks of the Henderson Police Department.
“This decision was based on my ability to do the job and keep moving forward, and I really think the criminals in Henderson could care less that there is a female police chief,” she said.
Deputy Chief Chamber says women make up about 10-percent of the Henderson police force now. With 1.3 officers for every 1,000 residents, Henderson's cop-to-pop ratio is lower than Metro's, yet so is the city's overall crime rate.
“We have the lowest crime rate per population in the state of Nevada for a city of our size, and that's because of the great work by the men and women of the Henderson Police Department,” she said.
On average, Henderson has seven murders a year, but just one so far in 2008. Keeping Henderson's crime rate low is the incoming chief's top priority.
Deputy Chief Chamber says domestic violence and drugs have long been Henderson's biggest problems and as chief, those two issues will continue to be an important focus in Henderson's crime prevention efforts.
Chief Chamber says she's never had to fire her weapon but she's broken up more than her share of bar fights over the years. 25 years ago, Henderson was so small, that only two police officers patrolled the streets every night — one took everything east of Boulder Highway, the other took everything west of it. So clearly, a lot has changed since then.
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