First in - and Out

Only last year Penny Harrington of Portland, Ore., earned a mention in history, when she capped 22 years in law enforcement by being named the first female chief of a major police force in the U.S. Last week she resigned as head of the Portland police bureau, after an investigating commission called for her ouster, charging that "defects of leadership" had irretrievably cost her the confidence of her 760-member command.

Harrington, 44, had been buffeted by crises almost from the day Mayor Bud Clark appointed her. The three-man commission, initiated by Clark, criticized her management style, as well as her insensitivity to the atmosphere of nepotism created by the fact that her brother-in-law and sister held bureau jobs, as did her husband, Officer Bruce Gary Harrington. The commission questioned the friendliness the chief and her husband had shown to a Portland businessman being investigated in a cocaine probe; it recommended a 25-day suspension of Gary Harrington. Penny Harrington, who declared herself "shocked" by the findings, was almost certainly made more vulnerable by the mayor's own troubles: Clark is the target of a recall effort.