ALTAMONT — Patricia M. Groeber, recently appointed to the highest post ever held by a woman in the New York State Police — First Deputy Superintendent — is a resident of Altamont. She has lived in the village for over a decade. 

She is second in command of the nearly 4,800-member force. The appointment was made by Superintendent Joseph D’Amico, and takes effect on Dec. 17. 

Groeber, 53, joined the State Troopers in 1986, a dozen years after the first women graduated from the police academy. She has seen a lot of changes over her almost 30 years on the job, reflecting changes in the wider society.

When she attended the academy, she said, people were still surprised to learn some of the new recruits were female. Whereas now, she said, “If one of the male members of the academy class went home and said, ‘Mom, I can’t believe I have to work with women,’ the mother — who is a doctor or a lawyer or a police officer — would take issue with that.” 

There aren’t any official channels for women to mentor other women who are coming up through the ranks of the 98-year-old State Police, she said. Since it’s a statewide agency, the number of women in any one location is not large, she said.

Mentoring and friendships with other women tend to happen organically over time. Her own “best girlfriends” are Troopers from various parts of the state with whom she crossed paths over the years. “We try to make a point of getting together for girlfriends’ weekends,” she said, and of “heralding one another’s successes.” 

She noted that she had just spent a weekend with her friends and that they had given her a present of a large photograph for the wall of her new office.

Asked about diversity within the agency, Groeber said, “I think there is a desire that the agency statewide reflect the people we serve, and there are parts of the state that are not very diverse. Our recruitment efforts have always been focused on a diverse, strong agency.”

The New York State Police has 4,789 sworn members, 426, or 8.8 percent, of whom are female. Of the sworn members, 597, or 12.5 percent, are members of a minority (and 62 of the minority officers are women). 

Groeber is a founding member of New York Women in Law Enforcement, and a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police; one function of organizations like those is exchanging information on how to make an agency more diverse. 

She added that a lot of the agency’s minority officers are members of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), and that this group also is a source for recruitment ideas and tips on how to “help us become more diverse.” 

Groeber was raised on Long Island, where her father was a parts supervisor at Grumman Aerospace, which made, she said, Navy planes and lunar landing modules and “things like that.” His job, she said jokingly, was to “make sure the right parts were attached to the right planes.” 

Her mother, who died just two months ago, worked at the New York State Police as a secretary, starting a number of years after daughter Patricia became a Trooper.

Altamont is home

Groeber’s is a close-knit family. She is the second of five children. She said that her father, who is now retired, lives with her in Altamont, in an apartment in the house, as did her mother. Groeber’s sister and her sister’s daughter now live “next door, in the same house,” she said. She refers to the home as “the family clubhouse.”  

She was initially drawn to Altamont at least partly for its beauty. “In the wintertime, it looked like a tunnel of snow.” She soon came to love it for its welcoming qualities. 

“It actually goes past ‘tolerance’ of differences,” she said. “The fact that we have various group homes in the village, I think it teaches kids a lot about compassion and differences. And that’s always struck me. You see the folks from the different three group homes walking around town, and it becomes very normal and very welcoming. I was actually glad to see that they built some of the senior housing as well. Because there’s a lot of long-term residents there.” 

Altamont has been a wonderful place, she said, to help in her niece’s development. “I think having our own elementary school was huge,” she added.

Asked what advice she would give to young women who are thinking about a career in law enforcement, Groeber said that opportunities in the agency are the same for men and women and “you can have a great deal of control and a great deal of say in your future and a great deal of responsibility.” There are no areas within the work of the State Police, she said, that are barred to women.

“A lot of it just comes down,” she said, “to being a person of character and being a person of competence, regardless of their gender.” 

When she first started out, women were viewed as more of a novelty, she said, making it a little harder to fly under the radar. “What you did stood out a little bit more, for the good and bad.” She started out at Troop G, and back then, “you were not the new Trooper at Guilderland, it was, ‘Oh, did you know we have a female Trooper at Guilderland?’” 

Early on, she said, female Troopers used to worry that, if more than two of them gathered in any one place, “someone would take your picture and put it somewhere, because it was so unique.” 

Helping others

Groeber graduated from the University at Albany in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry and spent a couple of years working in that field before deciding to take the test to become a Trooper. She calls her interest in science a “detour,” noting that she really wanted to be a police officer, even as a child. 

“I went to Catholic schools, and I was Safety Patrol,” she noted. “You know, the white sash, the silver badge, making sure that kids behave on the bus. It was prestige if you liked being a” — she paused to think — “a goody-two shoes, I suppose.

“I routinely turned in my brothers.” 

She started out working in forensics but soon began to find that she enjoyed working as a uniform supervisor, initially as a sergeant in Duanesburg. 

Groeber says that the area of police work that she most enjoys is “helping somebody else’s dream or opportunity to come true,” basically by helping Troopers gain an accurate and honest sense of their own strengths and weaknesses that can help them head toward responsibilities where they can succeed or learn new skills that they might need. 

She likes helping other officers maintain their focus on the idea of service — for instance, helping them learn how to best interact with vulnerable populations including people with disabilities, defenseless adults, and the elderly. “I realized that I was good at helping people tweak their skills to really help, and to go home every night thinking that you really helped somebody,” she said.

Duties

Her responsibilities will include overseeing day-to-day operations, “making sure that we’re staffing things properly, and that we’re addressing problems not just in the immediate short-term but also in the long-term.” 

She also looks forward, as second in command, to helping shape policy at a time when police work has changed dramatically from what it involved a quarter-century ago. 

“We live in a global world, and problems that took way longer to get to small communities in the past don’t take very long any more,” she said, listing the heroin crisis, the methamphetamine crisis, and the world of Internet crimes against children as issues that police did not face 25 years ago. “The amount of things a young law enforcement professional has to understand and learn and be flexible toward is phenomenal.” 

The New York State Police has reason to be proud of its use of technology, which she hopes to keep improving, Groeber said. She mentioned that the agency’s Public Information Offices have been greatly expanded in the last few years, under Superintendent D’Amico, and that the agency is now using social media to aid in recruitment and also generate tips from the public on colder cases.

She mentioned an initiative on the State Police’s Facebook page called Warrant Wednesday, in which the agency seeks the public’s help in solving one case per week. She said that there have been leads and even arrests stemming from Warrant Wednesday. 

Groeber wants to see Troopers equipped with the best possible technology when they go into situations. Knowing where you’re going and what has happened there is the “biggest safeguard,” she said, noting that she hopes to increase interagency communication between Troopers and other law enforcement agencies that may be responding to a scene.

The technology in Troopers’ vehicles now is “pretty high-tech stuff,” she said, “but it could be better. We ask people to do dangerous things, and I think one of my roles is to make sure we’re properly equipping them as best we can.”

Returning to the idea of what she would tell young recruits, she offered, “Be exactly who you are.” At morning briefings, she said, she doesn’t make believe that she loves watching football on the weekend. “Be exactly what you are, because running a dual life to satisfy somebody else is just not going to work for you in the long run,” she said.