When Teresa Chambers, then chief of police in Durham, North Carolina, was hired to be the first woman to head the 216-year-old National Park Police, it was national news. It was national news again when Chief Chambers was fired two years later for speaking out about the understaffing and underfunding of the post-9/11 Park Police.

The US Park Police supervise monuments and federal parks in Washington DC, San Francisco and New York, as well as the Baltimore/Washington Parkway. Because cultural icons such as the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and the Washington Monument are tempting symbolic targets for terrorists, it was natural for Congress to order stepped-up security after the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. But they just didn’t order increased staffing to do the job. Chief Chambers was forced to put her officers on double shifts, cancel leaves, and to take some of them off their normal duties and transfer them to monument detail, leaving their old posts unguarded. Officers started resigning, taking their experience with them.

The Chief asked for the support needed to cover all the venues properly; she was ignored. So when a Washington Post reporter asked her some pointed questions about meeting her responsibilities in protecting national treasures and the lives of people using these public spaces, Chambers answered honestly, hoping that the coverage would help Congress see that the problem was serious. The next day, Chambers was ordered by the Department of the Interior not to speak to reporters. The day after that, she was ordered to turn in her badge and gun and was escorted from the premises by armed special agents. She was put on leave without pay for seven months; within hours of filing for reinstatement to duty, she was fired.