On the night beat with female deputies, a rare breed among local police

The small crowd disperses when the women pull up.

The women, two of them, park next to each other. They watch as a dozen or so people hanging out at the MM Food Mart scram.

It is late on an April night and the convenience store, across Montpelier Avenue from the old Colonial bakery in the heart of Macon’s Unionville neighborhood, is a popular loitering spot.

The two women know it well.

They are Bibb County sheriff’s deputies.

“Everybody scatters,” Deputy Samantha Morera says. “A lot of drug activity. Prostitution. A lot of hanging out. ... Once we pull up, they usually walk off.”

She and Deputy Sahkera Wooten, guns strapped in holsters on their hips, keep watching.

They stand by their patrol cars outside the green-and-blue store, which has for ages been a gathering place that sells snacks and beer and lottery tickets in an impoverished, crime-stricken pocket of the city.

The deputies talk about work and what it’s like to patrol Macon’s west side.

Their beat is District 4.

“The mall district,” they call it.

It includes Lizella and Bloomfield, and it stretches south from Thomaston Road clear down to the county line.

Morera and Wooten are rare women.

About 30 percent of the 700 deputies working for the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office are female. But only about 1 in 10 of the deputies on patrol are women.

“Most women think it’s too dangerous out here on patrol,” Wooten says. “They don’t want to deal with people out here in the community and on the streets.”

Then she chuckles. She slaps a high-five with Morera and says, “But we can handle it because we’re bad to the bone.”

Despite the bravado, Wooten isn’t blind to the realities of police work. Most of the bad guys are men.

“I am afraid now,” she says, “don’t get me wrong.”

Morera is 28. She grew up in neighboring Twiggs County and has been on patrol in Macon about seven months now, since last October.

“Sometimes in situations you get scared, but you’ve got to know there’s a higher power,” Morera says. “Your tactics, what you learn and your skill sets that you learn on the job, you take that with your common sense ... and you make wise decisions based on your knowledge and your training.”

Bibb deputies on patrol for the most part work solo, but Morera says everyone tries to back up one another. She and Wooten look out for each other as well.

Morera, who is white, says, “We’re always together.”

“Ebony and ivory,” adds Wooten, who is black.

‘It just worked out’

While women are a growing minority in law enforcement, there are few high-ranking female deputies in Macon.

Many ranking female deputies in the sheriff’s office took early retirements last year.

“It is my intention, when we do make promotions ... certainly there are females who are in consideration,” Bibb County Sheriff David Davis says.

The sheriff’s office currently has about 60 openings for deputies.

In Monroe County, 10 of the sheriff’s office’s 68 deputies are women. But only one of them patrols.

In Houston County, eight of 335 deputies are women, none on patrol.

Jones County has 26 patrol deputies, none of them female. The department’s chief deputy, however, is a woman.

When Morera began working as a sheriff’s office clerk in 2008, she had no plans to tote a gun or fight crime.

“I never grew up thinking I would be a police officer. I have no family that’s in law enforcement,” Morera says.

But in 2012 she took the oath and was sworn in as a deputy.

Her first job was working in the county jail.

“It made me want to do something with my life and help others,” Morera says. “I felt like I could do that.”

Though she has been on patrol for less than a year, Morera says she gets more satisfaction from being on the streets.

“In the jail, you’re just dealing with the criminals that come into the jail on charges,” she says, “versus being out in the community (where) you’re able to help more people.”

Deputy Dominique Johnson answers calls in a district that includes Riverside Drive, the north end of Bibb County.

“Everybody wants to patrol,” Johnson says.

September will mark her fourth year as a patrol officer.

“You get the most interaction with people,” she says. “It’s not one set thing all the time. You get to adjust, and you just learn a lot more, in my opinion.”

Ever since she was a little girl in her native Chicago, Johnson knew she wanted to be a cop.

Her parents wanted her to go to school, do something else.

She joined the Air Force and ended up at Robins Air Force Base.

When she left the military, her mother told her to become a police officer here in Georgia, not back home in Chicago.

“Every time I talk to her,” Johnson says, “she tells me how proud she is.”

‘The sweetness of this job’

Later that same April night, Morera cruises Unionville’s east side.

Outside a gas station at the corner of Mercer University Drive and Pio Nono Avenue, something catches her eye.

A pair of teenage boys are standing in the parking lot. The two are brothers.

Morera stops beside them and rolls down a window.

Light rain falls as midnight approaches.

“What’s going on?” Morera says.

“Time just flew by us,” says one of the brothers, who is 19.

He says they missed their ride home.

“We really need cab fare,” he says.

“So,” Morera replies, “y’all need a ride?”

The boys nod.

Morera looks at the younger brother.

He’s wearing a blue Miller Middle School shirt.

“How old are you?” she asks.

“Fourteen,” he says, his voice low and soft.

“Fourteen?” Morera says. “What are you doing out here this late?”

Hands in his pockets, he bites his lip and looks at the ground.

“Does your mama know where you’re at?” Morera asks.

“She knows I’m with my brother,” he says. “She ain’t stressin’. She knows I’m gonna be straight.”

Morera lets them into the back seat of her patrol car and offers to take them to their house on Montpelier Avenue.

Soon the boys change their story.

They tell Morera their mother is away being treated for drug addiction.

“Do y’all need something to eat?” Morera asks. “Are you hungry?”

The boys say yes, and she drives them to a Checkers.

She buys them chicken sandwiches and Cokes.

Then she drops the boys off at home.

They thank her and head into an empty house.

After driving away, Morera says, “Yes, there is a lot of crime. ... But the sweetness of this job is to be able to touch the life of somebody else who needs you in that moment.”

This story was originally published June 3, 2016 at 7:07 PM with the headline "On the night beat with female deputies, a rare breed among local police."