When David Kassick, an unarmed 59-year-old, was fatally shot by a Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, police officer during a routine traffic stop in early February, his case barely registered a blip on the national radar. By then, nearly 100 other Americans had already lost their lives at the hands of police since the beginning of the year.

But Kassick’s case departs from what has become a tragically common narrative. For starters, the cop who shot him was charged with criminal homicide — a rarity in such scenarios.

Even rarer is that the officer accused of firing two bullets into his back while he was lying facedown on the ground is a woman. She is one of only two female cops ever to face a murder charge in the U.S. for killing a suspect while on duty, according to available data and independent research.

The chances of getting shot by a female cop are slim, and it’s not just because there are so few women in police departments. Data show that female cops discharge their firearms at rates far below their male counterparts, face significantly fewer civilian complaints and are less likely than men to resort to unnecessary physical force when arresting someone.

The evidence is not just statistical. As a veteran female officer explained recently, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships with her colleagues, “I’ve never been in a fight on my own, because I never had to. I’ve only been in fights instigated by my male counterparts.”

Studies also show that female police officers are more inclined to view their job as a public service than men do and are better at communication, de-escalation and trust building — all hallmarks of community policing.

“All the things people are saying they want in their police forces, women are already naturally good at,” said Penny Harrington, a former police chief of Portland, Oregon, and a co-founder of the National Center for Women and Policing (NCWP), in a phone interview this week.

Law enforcement is one of the least gender diverse of any public-sector profession, with male officers accounting for more than 88 percent of the nation’s municipal police forces. Discussions of diversity in policing have focused almost exclusively on hiring more minority officers — which, for all its potential benefits, has been shown to have a negligible impact on levels of excessive force.

If we’re serious about curbing police violence, a good place to start would be to increase the recruitment and promotion of female cops. Unfortunately, the last concerted effort to reduce gender disparities in policing fizzled out in the absence of sustained political pressure.

For most of America’s history, the policing profession was almost exclusively white and male. In 1970 women accounted for less than 2 percent of sworn officers, with most relegated to gender-specific units or clerical positions. That began to change in 1972, when the Supreme Court expanded Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to the public sector, holding police departments accountable for hiring discrimination for the first time.