DC police chief continues to make history
WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — Pamela Smith has been a consummate history maker.
In 2021, Smith was chosen as the first-ever African American female of the United States Park Police. Then she resigned a year later to take a job with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) as its chief equity officer.
Last year, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser made Smith the first Black female police chief in the history of the department.
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For the law enforcement veteran who grew up in a troubled home in Pine Bluff, Ark., with a mother that struggled with alcohol and ended up in foster care, Smith has been making Black history for years.
“I certainly didn’t see the path of becoming the first African American chief in the agency’s 230-year history,” Smith told DC News Now.
Smith said she has had mentors – several big-city police chiefs – who have been encouraging her to chase her dreams. And they were instrumental in her applying to be police chief.
“They were like, ‘you can do it,'” she said. “You have what it takes.”
Smith said that when she applied for the chief’s job in D.C., she stayed silent.
“I didn’t call anyone. I prayed and I said to the Lord, ‘Lord if this is what you want me to do when I wake up tomorrow, allow this to be on my mind,'” Smith said.
The historic nature of her rise in law enforcement never dawned on her until after she had achieved a certain milestone, she said. For example, she was the first woman to serve as the explosive detection handler for the park police, she said.
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“I think it had everything to do that I was prepared for the job,” Smith said. “And again, not thinking about history until somebody told me that, ‘hey, you know you’re the first.’ Like I didn’t know it until somebody said it.”
Going into police work seemed like an unlikely career for Smith, who said she had some family members who had brushes with the law. She went into the foster care system at 13.
“Growing up was really tough for us,” Smith said of herself and her brother. “We were kind of raising ourselves.”
But a pastor’s family adopted her and Smith said she began to flourish. She ran track in high school and college and graduated from the University of Arkansas with an education degree.
But police work kept calling her, she said.
A park police official riding on a horse in New York approached her decades ago to consider joining the park police. She spent 24 years in a variety of posts from San Francisco to Atlanta.
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Now she has a tall order in D.C., in charge of a department that is under pressure to bring down rising crime.
“I still have the same passion, a desire to help people … as the chief of police in the nation’s capital,” Smith said. “I believe the best is yet to come for me.”
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