Sacramento’s first woman police chief is making history. Here’s how she can make us safer

The city of Sacramento will have its first woman police chief in 27-year veteran Kathy Lester, a historic appointment worth celebrating. Lester succeeds the first Black chief in city history, Daniel Hahn, who ran Sacramento’s more-than-century-old Police Department for four turbulent years marked by civil unrest.

It wasn’t until 1974 that Flossie Crump and Felicia Allen became the first two women sworn into the department as officers to work alongside men, some of whom were not happy about it. The women, both of whom were Black, endured sexism and racism. Ranking officers spoke disparagingly about them in front of their colleagues and loudly enough for Crump and Allen to hear.

Theirs was a hard road now honored by portraits of the officers hanging at the department’s headquarters on Freeport Boulevard. That honor didn’t come until 2018.

Lester’s ascent to the top of the department of 1,100 comes nearly 50 years after Crump and Allen broke that first glass ceiling.

The city’s 46th police chief, like Hahn a Sacramento State graduate, started as a dispatcher before becoming a community service officer. She worked in patrol, internal affairs and criminal intelligence and earned her way up through the ranks to deputy chief of operations.

Lester said she “joined the Sacramento Police Department because of its reputation for community-based policing, and that spirit of community and collaboration has long been instilled in me. I look forward to continuing the ongoing work by the Sacramento Police Department to make our city a place where everyone feels safe, secure and protected.”

We welcome the spirit of Lester’s words and hope they guide her. She takes over a department that has endured difficult years since two of its officers killed unarmed Stephon Clark. More turmoil came after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.

These events and others inspired a wide array of community members to demand more of their Police Department — more accountability, transparency and emphasis on the work still needed to ease the mistrust of minority communities.

Lester’s department still has a long way to go on racial diversity in its ranks. Many city cops don’t live in the city, and some wonder if that causes some to forget that the neighborhoods they patrol are filled with good people, not just suspects.

These and other issues are difficult. So is the job of a Sacramento cop. It’s a dangerous job that deserves respect but also comes with awesome responsibility.

Police officers in the line of duty can legally take the lives of people they view as a threat. What other entity has that power? This is why, when people like Clark are killed, communities wonder why. And they wonder whether Clark’s blackness and circumstances made it easier for Sacramento to corner him in his grandmother’s backyard and fire 20 shots at him even though all he was packing was a cell phone.

Too often, our police leaders, including Hahn, grow defensive about these matters. We hope Lester will be different. We hope she will be true to her word that she wants Sacramento to be a place where everyone feels safe.

That is not the reality today, and no one should suggest that achieving this laudable goal will be easy. But it can’t be achieved if Sacramentans feel that their police leaders are circling the wagons and not being straight with them.

We hope Lester will be a leader who is mature and strong enough to do what’s needed for our communities to feel safe. We wish her the best and want her to succeed, and not only because she is a historic figure in her department and a role model for women and girls. We also want her to succeed because if she does, Sacramento will be a safer place for everyone.

This story was originally published December 10, 2021 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Sacramento’s first woman police chief is making history. Here’s how she can make us safer."