This is southwest Florida InFocus coming up.

Democrats flipped state legislative seats during a special election.

How could this change impact the upcoming special session on redistricting?

A trailblazer in the world of law enforcement.

We speak to a former chief of police, Kristen Zeeman, as part of our celebration of Women's History Month and building a foundation against stereotypes.

We learn how women are carving their own path in the male dominated construction industry.

Hello, I'm Jennifer Crawford.

Thank you for joining us.

Last week, during special elections in Florida, Democratic candidates pulled off a stunning upset, winning two seats held by Republicans.

This comes amid the backdrop of this year's midterm elections and a special state legislative session set to start April 20th.

Lawmakers will address a possible mid-decade redistricting map that they hope will result in Florida adding more Republican seats to the U.S.

House.

For more on what the special election results could mean going forward, we are joined by WGCU host and reporter Jon Davis Jon, can you tell us about last week's Democratic victories in Florida and why they have garnered so much attention, even beyond the state of Florida?

That's right.

So Democrats flipped two legislative seats, one in the state House, one in the Senate, in districts that had been solidly Republican.

One was Emily Gregory, who won the state House district 87 race.

That covers the passing of Palm Beach, Palm Beach County, where, Donald Trump's Mar a Lago estate is.

So that's generally why that, has garnered broader attention even outside of Florida, because it's a Democratic win in what's considered Trump's own backyard.

Conversely, then we saw, Brian Nathan won a state House seat in the Tampa Bay area.

This was a seat that had been held by Republican Jay Collins, who, you know, won that election handily before he left that position to become lieutenant governor.

So again, these were both very tight races, and competitive races and pretty surprising, victories for Democrats and upsets for Republicans.

Can you tell me a little bit more about these two lawmakers and how they ran their campaigns?

Yeah, a lot of similarities between both Emily Gregory and Brian Nathan.

Both of them were first time candidates.

So political newcomers.

Gregory is the owner of a fitness company that works with pregnant and postpartum women.

And, Nathan is an electrical workers union leader and Navy veteran.

He kind of bills himself as, like, a blue collar Democrat and they both campaigned on kind of kitchen table type issues affordability, property insurance, education, funding, pay for teachers, things along those lines.

And importantly, they both tended to avoid any kind of overemphasis on criticism of the president or any kind of national party or Partizan fights in general.

They really kind of kept it to what polls have consistently showed have been top issues for voters in Florida, that the state legislature really hasn't been doing much to move the needle on.

So, John, how have leaders of the Democrats and the Republican parties reacted to these, these upsets and the fact that we now have two seats that were flipped by Democrats?

Democratic party leaders, unsurprisingly, have really been celebrating this.

Nikki Fried, the state Democratic Party chair, has called this a major breakthrough and a sign of growing momentum for Democrats in Florida and also kind of using them to, as I said, criticize Republican leadership.

And just push the idea that the state is becoming more competitive.

And they're calling it evidence that voters are just truly tired of this one party rule that we've had in Florida with Republican Supermajorities in both legislative chambers.

Conversely, Republican leaders have been downplaying this.

They know.

And really, any kind of political science expert will tell you that election results during a Non-presidential year special election voter turnout is going to be very low.

It's not necessarily going to be indicative of major changes, in terms of how voters are feeling or how they're going to vote going into the midterms.

That governor DeSantis has called for a, special session on redistricting, I believe that set for April 20th.

Correct.

Do you think the special election results will will make Republicans rethink this redistricting effort?

I don't think that it's going to make Republican leaders consider abandoning the idea.

They really do want to do whatever they can to adjust district boundaries, to add Republican seats to the U.S.

House of Representatives.

But it might change the question from how many seats can we gain to how many current seats could we accidentally put at risk?

Because now they're looking at districts that maybe they had thought were solidly Republican.

But we're seeing from last Tuesday's results maybe more competitive than they thought.

And that being said, when this redistricting process is over, I still wouldn't be surprised if whatever lawmakers put out with doesn't face legal challenges.

Because you'll remember, back in 2010, Florida voters passed the Fair District Amendments, which enshrine in the state constitution the idea that districts cannot be drawn to favor or display for a particular party or candidate.

And that seems to be overtly what they're doing.

It's very interesting and we will keep up to date and watching what's going to be going on and back in Tallahassee when they reconvene, hopefully on the budget that we've got to get that, set on the calendar as well.

That is still up in the air as well.

Thank you so much, John, for the latest.

Thanks for joining us.

Make sure you stay with us for all of the information coming out of Tallahassee.

For extended political coverage, please head to our website at wgu.org.

Coming up, breaking barriers in the world of law enforcement.

We learn how Kristen Zeeman defied tradition to become a prominent chief of police.

Women make up half of our population.

Yet the National Policing Institute reports only about 12% of women are police officers.

A very small percentage of female police officers actually rise to leadership roles in departments all across the country.

One of those women, Kristen Ziman, became her hometown's first female police chief in Aurora, Illinois, near Chicago Museum and joins us now to talk about how she rose from patrol officer to police chief.

And also, you're going to tell us about a new book that you have authored.

Yeah.

Thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Can you take us back to when you knew you first wanted to become a police officer?

Yes.

My father before me was a police officer, but, it was, this weird detachment I had.

It was this hero guy in his uniform.

But the day that I knew I wanted to be a police officer, I was ten years old, and I was riding in the back of our station wagon with my dad, who was off duty, and, we were driving down, just the roadway, and he said, stop, don't move.

And he jumps out of his car and he's in his jeans and, you know, and, and he goes to this accident scene.

So people just had just had a crash and he shorts pulling people out, and I am glued to the window.

I'm watching this.

And one thing I remember noting, even at ten years old, was all the cars that were whizzing by.

And I was like, that's so crazy that my dad stopped.

That was my first moment.

The second one came maybe a year or two later.

Same drill, I knew it, don't move.

And we were on the tollway this time, and my dad runs out of the car off duty and starts trying to wrestle with a guy who had just smashed into a tollbooth, and he was a drunk driver, and my dad was trying to wrestle the keys away from him.

And I remember in that moment thinking, this is what first responders do.

They run towards things that other people just run away from.

And in that moment, at 11 years old, I was I was like, this is what I'm going.

You were brave and courageous and ten and 11 years old or so.

I was the coolest thing in the world to stop and help people when they needed help.

And it was also really adventurous.

It was dangerous.

And I thought that was cool.

And you became a patrol officer, and you rose all the way to become the first female police chief in Aurora, Illinois.

Yes.

Tell me about some of those roles that you played.

For sure.

So Aurora is the second largest city in the state of Illinois, about 30 miles and due west of Chicago.

My hometown.

And I didn't want to be a cop anywhere else.

It's it's a big city, but it's a mid-sized police agency.

About 320 sworn.

And I, all my friends went away to college, and I became an intern at the police department as a police cadet at the tender age of 17.

Oh my goodness.

So I grew up in my police department, both literally and figuratively.

And if you would have looked at me and said, you will become the chief of police in this organization, I would have laughed at you in that moment because there were no women in rank when I started in my police department, so I had nothing to aspire to.

You don't know what you don't know.

So it just never occurred to me that I could move up in rank.

And then eventually two women were promoted to sergeant and I thought, wow, that's really cool.

I was a patrol officer at the time.

And plus we have, you know, in our lives, all of us great mentors that look at us and see things that we don't see in ourselves.

And one of my lieutenants looked at me and said, you should take the sergeant's test.

And I thought, are you are you talking to me?

And it was the coolest moment because I felt so empowered, and I did that, became a sergeant.

And then no females had ever reached the rank of lieutenant in my police department.

So I had one of those moments of, oh, no, I can't, I can't pursue that.

There's no way.

And then that whole, y me turned into, wait a minute, why not me?

And I pursued that.

I became the first female lieutenant in the history of my department, and then I became the first female commander.

And then went on in 2016 to become the first female chief in the history of my police department, which was a proud moment.

More so for, for me, and my children, because that's, you know, that visibility really matters.

And you were encouraged and mentored by male police officers, and there were no there really were no women in rank to call mentors.

They just weren't available.

Why do you think that is?

Well, just look at the numbers in general.

We have 12% of women in law enforcement, and that's in the United States.

And those who rise to, level executive levels in the police department, obviously, just by the sheer percentages, are smaller and smaller and women in chief's roles, the CEO roles are less than 1%.

So there just weren't any, you know, just they just didn't exist.

So men existed.

And I give so much credit to those gatekeepers that I call them affectionately that that let women in and saw our value.

Now, you were police chief at a very pivotal time.

There was a terrible mass shooting, in your city.

How did that affect you?

And and how did you have the perseverance and the resilience to get through that awful time?

Well, in order to answer that question, let me back up a few years.

I became the police chief in 2016, and one of the first things that I did was my staff down and said, what's the worst thing that could possibly happen?

And we've, you know, we've all experienced or at least, you know, the headlines of mass shootings, whether we've experienced them individually or personally, but we all touch it in some way or affected by it.

And so, of course, we talked about a mass shooting could be the worst thing, you know, mass violence, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster.

We started spitballing all of the things that could happen, and I asked them a second, very pivotal question.

I said, are we prepared for that thing that is coming?

We don't know when.

But, you know, it's not a matter of if.

It's a matter of when.

And so they looked at me and they said, actually, we're not we need better training.

Our equipment was expired.

And so in 2016, I relied on those training officers and our Swat team, commanders, to get us ready.

I said, you tell me my job is to hear you and to sell it to my city council and to the decision makers in my city.

And we got ready.

And so from 2016 to the worst day of my professional career was February 15th, 2019.

And it was 124 in the afternoon on a Friday.

And I'm sitting in my office with another, with another executive, member of the police department and we, we hear this call of an active shooter at, a manufacturing plant.

It was a workplace shooting, and we stumbled over each other, got in the car, and we're only about four minutes away from the scene.

And as we're driving there, I am hearing that they found, five victims that were deceased, that this man who was getting terminated had killed them in the manufacturing plant.

And then I'm hearing over the radio that one officer shot, another officer shot.

So ultimately, five people were murdered on that day, and five of my officers were shot trying to stop that mass shooter.

And that was the worst day of my professional life.

But I will say, because of that preparation, up until that date, those officers continue to pursue that shooter and do exactly what they were supposed to do.

So we are still we've healed from our physical wounds of that event, but we're still dealing with the emotional wounds and the beautiful souls that we lost in.

Your officers took out the gunman that they did.

Yes.

They had a 90.

It took it took 90 minutes to find him in a 300,000 square foot warehouse.

But they found him and he opened fire on our officers again.

And, and they shot him.

Did you learn anything from that experience that you carried forward?

What would that be?

Oh my gosh.

Well, first of all, preparation is everything.

And you know that.

Of course, that's that's my profession is to be prepared for the unthinkable.

But I'd love to think that we could prevent the unthinkable.

But a lot of times we're reactive.

We're going to go where the calls are coming from.

And so, you know, we have to not just prevent, but we have to prepare for it.

So the lesson I learned was preparation is key in any organization.

But the other thing that I learned that I guess I wasn't quite expecting was the level of vulnerability that same father who taught me, you know, to run towards things also taught me, never cry.

There's no crying in policing.

Never let them see you sweat.

Never say that you're afraid.

Don't give them any ammunition.

And it was in that moment that I forgot everything he taught me.

And I learned from our police officers that, you know, this is bigger than us.

And it's okay to fall apart.

And I, I learned that from, you know, our patrol officers who were on the scene that day and from the community who wrapped their loving arms around us and so I learned that day that vulnerability is actually the cornerstone of strength.

And there's nothing weak about, I was going to say, expressing it is okay.

Yeah.

And it can help you heal.

Yeah.

What would you say is the current state of policing in our country today?

So it's interesting because when you say policing, you, we paint it with a broad brush.

And so federal law enforcement and local law enforcement are painted with the broad brush.

So if we lump in what is happening right now in terms of our federal immigration enforcement, I would say that we aren't in a good place.

Here is the interesting part about law enforcement is that we go through ebbs and flows, and we have done so through the history of law enforcement.

In the 50s, in civil unrest, police were were not well revered.

And, you know, and then then fast forward to nine over 11, you know, where we had police and fire running into buildings.

And so I call them the ebbs and flows of policing.

But through that, that is a through line of consistency where there are wonderful human beings with great hearts and first responders who will put their lives on the line every single day to sacrifice themselves for people they don't even know.

And that's a common theme there is.

Then we have, of course, post George Floyd, the other worst day of my career, when the protesters came in and set my city on fire.

And so what this is, to answer your question, is that law enforcement is still at its core, at its at and its good core, is out there truly doing the work of democracy.

And we have to have it.

We saw what happened post George Floyd when people said, let's defund the police, let's abolish the police.

And that was tried and it didn't work because in a democracy we have to have checks and balances.

Now that is not absolving bad police misconduct.

We absolutely have to be certain that we remove those bad police officers and we hold them accountable.

But the majority of police officers come to work every day.

And truly, our our integrity, you know, with the foundation of integrity and mission driven.

Be sure to tune in to our program tomorrow for the rest of our conversation with former Police Chief Kristen Zeeman to learn about her thoughts on the future of women in law enforcement.

Coming up after the break.

Putting up walls and shattering glass ceilings.

Meet the company that is installing more women on construction sites.

Many stressors can impact the mental health of mothers, which can trigger fits of anger.

Excuse Teddy Burn learned more about ways mothers can avoid slipping into episodes of rage.

Between school sports, making dinner and helping with homework, the mental load of being a mom can be stressful and even push some to reach a breaking point.

Doctor Susan Albers with Cleveland Clinic explains more about the psychology of mom rage.

Mom rage is that sudden wave of irritability or anger that seems to come out of nowhere.

It's not about being a bad parent or not loving your child.

Mom, rage happens when there is a heavy emotional, physical, or mental overload that is so heavy that seemingly small things like spilled milk or siblings fighting tends to push you over the edge.

Doctor Albert says when a person is dealing with chronic stress, their brains fight or flight response can become overly sensitive.

That's why small things can trigger big reactions.

She says the key to managing mom rage is calming your nervous system.

You can do that by practicing deep breathing.

Going for a walk or doing something as simple as eating if you haven't in a while.

You'd be surprised how hunger can affect your mood.

Doctor Albert also reminds moms that it's okay to ask for help.

You don't have to shoulder everything on your own.

And finally, try to name what you are feeling.

For example, frustration on the surface.

Mom rage is visible and accessible.

Underneath it is often a secondary emotion, such as feeling shame, guilt overloaded pressure.

Knowing what is driving the mom rage can help you to understand it and repair it.

Doctor Albert says if you feel like you're constantly in a state of stress and it's impacting your relationship with others, it's important to reach out to a mental health professional for help.

For WGCU news, I'm Teddy Burn.

The construction industry has been male dominated for generations.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says women make up just 11% of the construction workforce, but that is changing as WGCU's Kate Cronin reports, new programs are introducing women to the industry.

For some, the construction industry has felt like a man's game, with women only making up 11% of the workforce, they are more likely to experience discrimination, harassment and gender bias, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

But at one construction site in Fort Myers, women are blazing a new trail.

The newly held Fort Myers building will be completed in 2028 thanks to senior project manager Sharice Travis.

With over 20 years of experience, she's seen the industry shift.

I always tell people I've been stubborn enough to stick around because my goal and desire has always been to make sure that my presence allows other women to see that it is an acceptable and a fun career.

So I've watched the trajectory over the last 24 years, and I've seen the growth, and it honestly brings me extreme joy to see the progression of the industry in the past 24 years.

So, will I say I was intimidated initially?

Probably a little bit, but I'm, you know, a short girl from Texas who was very stubborn.

Some of the biggest challenges women face in a male dominated industry are due to isolation and lack of mentorship.

One of the greatest tools, Skanska Construction offers is its women's network.

The program connects newer employees with mentors and resources to help them succeed.

Tori Gabriel is a member and works onsite as assistant Superintendent.

I was kind of surprised when I joined architecture school to see that our year was about 5050 women and men, and it was really inspiring to see that the industry is starting to move forward, and there's more women joining and realizing that this is an option for us, and coming in and doing internships and joining with a company like Skanska.

We have, a core value of a better together with a bunch of support from both male and female counterparts, both higher in seniority and entry level.

So it just continues to expand and I think is really inspirational.

And the number of women in construction continues to grow, jumping by 70% from 2017 to 2022, according to the PR.

Professionals like assistant project manager Annika Rostand attribute the rise to better understanding of the unique skills women offer.

To me, 11% feels like a great improvement compared to how it was historically, and it just goes to show that the standard is really changing and evolving, and the industry has become way more welcoming to women.

And, you know, women are very collaborative and we have a lot to offer.

We have great, interpersonal skills, I would say, and communication is probably the top skill that you need to work in construction management.

So I would say that women have a lot to contribute.

And although we make up a small percentage that's growing every day, women only gain the right to work without discrimination by sex.

50 years ago, thanks to the Civil Rights Act.

But women still make up a fraction of leadership positions and average lower wages.

Skanska construction is setting an example of what woman can achieve, and encouraging more women to consider a career in the industry.

I say, call me, we're hiring.

This is a fun career to be in.

There's so much to learn, so much to do.

Lots of great opportunities.

I say do it.

You know, I think everyone, not just women alone, need to understand there's other options outside of college.

But I would love to have a woman, you know, join our team or just the construction industry as a whole, because we do have a lot to give, right?

And we are valued and we are supported.

So I say, call me for WGC, you news, I'm Kate Cronin with photography by Kevin Smith.

We are one day away from NASA's return to the moon.

The sights and sounds from the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for the launch of Artemis two.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Make sure you head to WGCU .org where you will find all of our stories.

Have a great night and we look forward to seeing you back here next time.

Right here on Southwest Florida.

InFocus.