In a city where old-boy networks and pub politics still pervade public life, the appointment of Kathleen O'Toole to head Boston's Police Department might come to some observers as a shock.

Boston has never had a female police commissioner, and as of a little more than a month ago, this most fraternal of organizations had never seemed in any hurry to change that.

But then the city was struck with tragedy, and with it, scandal in the police department.

After the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl Feb. 1, rioting swept over the city, leading to dozens of arrests and the death of one college student. When the city's interim police chief came under fire for not coming into work that night, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino quickly sought a replacement to stanch the fallout.

The department needed a leader with a light touch to shepherd it through the crisis, but it would be unfair to suggest that Commissioner O'Toole was chosen because she is a woman, say friends and colleagues. O'Toole, they say, is tough, competitive, and brainy, and can make everyone from the homeless to the well-heeled feel at ease. After 30 years in which women have risen through the ranks among America's finest, she is the sort of talent that will increasingly be taking the reins of the nation's police departments.

"Communities are looking for some change, and these women are usually quite open minded, creative, and willing to think outside the box," says Vicki Peltzer, president of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives in Seattle.

There are now a handful of major US police departments led by women. Among them: Detroit, Milwaukee, and San Francisco. These women were among the first to serve equally beside male colleagues.

Women in law enforcement traditionally focused on specific tasks that at the time seemed more appropriate to their gender, such as juvenile and sex crimes. But as women gained a greater foothold in the workforce, and the feminist movement strengthened calls for equal employment, police forces across the country began partnering women with male colleagues in traditional policing rolls, like foot patrol.

"The women chiefs we see now result from the the big push we saw for equality in the mid-1970s," says Ms. Peltzer, who is also chief of the Police Department at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Growing up in Marblehead, Mass., a tiny maritime town north of Boston, O'Toole gave little indication through her college years that she would someday go into police work. It was during a summer when she was looking for part-time work, and a friend persuaded her to take the police exam, that she first had an inkling to carry a badge. "My mother nearly fell off her chair when I told her what I was going to do," says O'Toole. She spent some of her first years working on the city's subway as a decoy for would-be purse snatchers. It was a duty, according to her sister, Mary, that she found exhilarating.

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