Charlotte’s trailblazing cop breaks the gender barrier

HERBERT L. WHITE | THE CHARLOTTE POST

Estella Patterson, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s new police chief, is the first woman to lead the department.

Estella Patterson’s law enforcement career is breaking barriers.

Patterson, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s new police chief, is the first woman to lead the agency, but she’s no stranger to the department. She joined CMPD in 1996 as president of her recruiting class and spent 25 years in several roles, starting as a patrol officer before moving to the academy as an instructor and recruiter. She moved to Internal Affairs and advanced to deputy chief for administrative services and patrol services deputy chief.  

Patterson spent three years as Raleigh’s chief, where she oversaw a reduction in violent crime, including a 100% clearance of homicides in 2024 and the launch of a recruitment and hiring plan that cut the department’s vacancy rate from 150 openings to 40. Other accomplishments include creation of the Raleigh Police Foundation, which raised $4 million in two years to fund initiatives to lift employee morale. 

In an interview with The Post, Patterson discuss her goals, including building relationships within CMPD as well as the larger community, breaking the gender barrier and what it’ll take to reduce crime. Responses are edited for brevity and clarity.

On returning to CMPD:

That’s a question I’ve gotten a lot, and I say it just feels great. It feels good. It feels normal for me to be back in this uniform, back in this city, a city that I know, that I love, a police department that has been good to me, that has taught me everything, really, that I know about policing. It’s just an all-around good feeling to be back.

Lessons learned from leading Raleigh police and what can be applied with CMPD:

I was in Raleigh as chief for three and a half years. It was a wonderful ride. I loved it. I went into Raleigh not knowing anyone. I did not know a single person in that police department, and over the course of that time, I got to learn everybody to work with them. Being in Raleigh really taught me the importance of looking inwardly in a department, because I didn’t know anybody. So, I had to learn them, I had to spend time with them and to really understand the issues that employees feel, the workload that they have to experience. I constantly was talking to them about that. 

I had to learn the community as well, so I was out, and I had one occasion where one of my officers in Raleigh said to me ‘Chief, we see you in the community all the time. We know you’re engaged in the community, but also too, we want to spend time with you.’ That really, [was] like a light bulb went off in my head for that officer to tell me that, and I then began to really see the importance of spending time making sure that we’re listening to our employees. 

Coming in, back to Charlotte, that’s a top priority. In fact, that is my number one priority – that we build morale, that we are concentrating on the wellness of our employees, that I’m spending time listening to them, that I see the work that they’re doing.

What the delegation of authority will look like to make CMPD better:

As a CEO, you can’t be in all places at all times. You can’t do the work you want to do on the ground, right? You have to run the organization, so delegation is a priority. You have to trust the people who work for you, and I have a great team around me. I’m really happy about that, so I do have to delegate, and they take care of the day-to-day functions, if you will, so that I can concentrate on getting us the resources we need to be successful. 

Also … reaching out to the community and making those connections. That is really important to me, gaining that support from the community, but for me, I’m going to make sure that I focus on three areas, the top one being internally with the police department, looking at the needs, looking at the morale, but also too that we work as a community to mitigate the crime that is around us.
What it means to be in a position previously exclusive to men:

I am honored to be able to be a female in this position. It is a male dominated field. We understand that, and I know for many little girls who think that you can’t be a police officer, or you can’t be a police chief, or other women who are struggling to figure out in their workspace that’s male dominated. Can they advance? Can they do it? I’m here to tell you yes, you can, and that it is commendable and it’s an honor to be able to do it. 

But really, at the end of the day, gender, race, nationality, none of that matters when it comes to doing this kind of work. It is about making sure that our communities are safe. And whatever we have to do to have that happen is what we have to do. So, I come into this position proud to be the first but that is not the most important thing to me at all.

Whether law enforcement was always a career goal:

I never thought I’d be a police officer. It was the farthest thing from my mind. When I was in my senior year at UNC [Charlotte], I needed some credits to graduate. Just needed to take some classes. People suggested [criminal justice], those are easy. I was like, ‘Oh, OK. And so that’s what I did. And to my surprise, I just loved it. I was like, ‘Wow, this is like, you really get to serve, help people, be outdoors, do all these various things when you’re a police officer. I said, ‘I love that. That really aligns with who I am.’ 

So I took one class, and then I took another class, and I’m like, ‘This is pretty cool.’ And then I met a I went to a job fair. There was a CMPD recruiter there. She recruited me. I took the job. I really loved it. Came to CMPD, and then some years later, I went back and got my master’s degree, and I got it in criminal justice. It is really an honorable profession. I’m so glad that I did it, but it didn’t start out this way for me. I thought I was going to maybe a teacher, a professor, something like that, maybe even a lawyer, is what I thought about. But once I got in the profession, 29 years later of doing this work, I’m still loving it.

On how CMPD will approach Charlotte’s growth  given the political climate for dealing with crime versus the relationship between law enforcement  and communities of color:

Growing cities, metropolitan areas, you have good growth coming, but you’re always going to have a criminal element that comes with it. We cannot avoid that with a city this size and the pace in which we are growing. We know we’re going to have a criminal element. Our job is to try to mitigate as much as possible, to reduce it as much as possible. 

And for Charlotte, when I’ve come back to this city and just seen the growth, all the housing going up, every time I look, I say, ‘Oh, that’s more cars to be broken into. That’s more apartments to be broken into and burglarized.’ That's a reality. We just have to face it, but we tackle it, not in a silo, not by ourselves, but we rely on our community to be eyes and ears and report information to us, but also to our other law enforcement and community partners.”

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