KVIG Informative

For eighty years, the department now known as the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department could not say with confidence which woman on its force came first. The gap in the record says less about either woman’s career than about how little the department bothered to write down about women’s work at the time.

Lauraine Painter joined the Las Vegas Police Department as a clerk in 1944, replacing a clerk named Sue Morris, according to her own written account of her years there. By March 1945 she was being described as a policewoman, and her duties included searching female suspects taken into custody.

Painter later wrote that she carried a gun and a badge but was never issued a uniform, and that she was paid a patrolman’s wage of $150 a month. She left the department in 1945 to work at a law firm and stopped working altogether in 1948 to raise a family. She died Dec. 2, 2006, at 90.

Annabelle Plunkett started with the department as a police clerk and stenographer and became a part-time policewoman by 1945, when she was 20 years old. A newspaper account from January 1948 named her the department’s first “official” policewoman, a title the department’s own history has repeated since.

Plunkett did not receive formal police training until 1955, the year the department created a juvenile division; like most policewomen of her era, she was assigned mainly to juvenile and communications work rather than patrol. A local civic club named her Police Officer of the Year in 1968, and she complained publicly in 1971 that no policewoman had ever been invited to take the department’s sergeant’s exam. She retired in 1973, the year the city and county merged their police forces into the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and died July 27, 1989, at 63.

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Metro’s own department historian, Lt. Dennis Larsen, has examined the competing records and has not settled which woman came first. Historian David Millman, who has also researched the department’s early years, has noted that the line between a police clerk and a sworn policewoman was blurry in the 1940s, since both jobs could involve the same duties.

Larsen has suggested that Painter’s brief tenure, compared with Plunkett’s three decades on the job, is part of why her claim was overlooked for so long. Neither woman ever worked patrol. The department did not put a woman on street patrol until the mid-1970s, roughly three decades after either woman first wore a badge.

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The gap between a badge and a patrol car has closed since. Command rank moved slower. Retired Deputy Chief Kathy O’Connor has said that only 13 women served on the entire force when she was hired in 1985. As of 2021, only five women in Metro’s history had ever held the rank of deputy chief.

Painter and Plunkett both left policing decades before anyone thought to ask which of them got there first. Metro now keeps a police museum exhibit meant to honor both women rather than pick one, which is its own kind of answer: the department recorded so little about women’s work at the time that even its own historian cannot say for certain who did it first.