Stepping out on the street and into the Albuquerque patrol car for the first time, Officer Ramona Bivians didn’t know what obstacles awaited her.
It was 1972, and a shift in Albuquerque Police Department policy swept a few women like Bivians from clerical positions into fieldwork. Some were asked to go on patrol and others refused, but Bivians embraced the new job assignment.
One of the first female patrol officers in New Mexico, Bivians soon discovered acceptance as a patrolwoman would not come easy.
She would have to earn the respect of criminals, citizens and male police officers during her 14 years on patrol.
“We were not only treated different by men, we were just not wanted out on the street by men and women,” Bivians said. “We knew we could do it, but we had to prove it twice before we were accepted.”
Now long retired from police work, Bivians, 68, still enjoys reminiscing about the good and bad times as one of the first policewoman on patrol.
She is proud of her career and still wears her Albuquerque Police Department jacket — with some official patches removed as not to give the wrong impression.
Memories of her trailblazing work comfort Bivians in now darker times.
Although she faced difficult battles as an early female cop, Bivians now fights the toughest challenge of her life — pancreatic cancer.
Currently receiving care in a hospice in Centennial, her cancer was diagnosed as terminal.
She first fell ill in Albuquerque in September. Doctors soon discovered she had pancreatic cancer and transported her to Rose Hospital in Denver for treatment near her only daughter, Lory Bivians, 45, of Thornton.
Bivians had always planned on moving back to Colorado, but not under these circumstances.
Raised in Denver, Bivians moved with her former husband and Lory to Albuquerque in 1964.
After retiring from police work and a following career in private security in the mid 1990s, Bivians started to plan her move. She bought a house in north Arvada and gradually started moving items from her home in New Mexico.
After falling ill, Bivians finally moved to her new home after her release from the hospital. Only now it had become a makeshift hospital instead of a retirement spot.
Doctors determined they couldn’t remove the cancer, and Lory Bivians moved from Thornton to Arvada to take care of her ailing mother fulltime.
Then in the week of Jan. 16, Ramona Bivians fell so ill she had to be taken to Porter Hospice in Centennial.
She is often kept company by phone calls from old friends from her time in the Albuquerque Police Department.
A former police officer and member of the New Mexico Association of Women in Law Enforcement, Gunhild Vetter is a close friend who started in the Albuquerque Police Department’s records division two years before Bivians joined in 1968.
“When we first came through the police academy they told us to not even bother thinking about going on patrol, that we would go into records,” Vetter said.
The women worked in records until 1972 when police administration determined they should move out of clerical work and into the field. Bivians accepted her patrol assignment with little protest.
Although it is difficult to name the first woman on patrol in the country, International Association of Women Police historian Bonnie Devore said female officers started to make the move toward patrol and other field work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, placing Bivians as an early female pioneer in a male-dominated profession.
Retired Sgt. Royce Keller, one of her early supervisors at the Albuquerque Police Department, said Bivians’ move from records to patrol was hard.
She was pushed onto the field without the usual training and expected to perform flawlessly from the start, Keller said.
“At that time there was a feeling that women weren’t emotionally or physically suited for the work and that they didn’t belong in the field,” he said. “She didn’t get a lot of help in the beginning. Any shortcoming was just further proof that they didn’t belong.”
As a child growing up, Lory Bivians said she routinely heard her mom talk about the inequalities during her first few years on the job.
“For years she said the administration’s slogan was ‘Equal treatment, equal pay, but not equal,’” Lory Bivians said.
But Keller said Bivians over the years slowly began to gain the respect of her fellow officers before retiring in 1987.
“This is her life, her identity, her role,” Lory Bivians said.