During her first month on the job, new San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus – the first woman to hold the post – had to deal with a year's worth of crises, everything from floods to a mass shooting.
As part of Women's History Month, NBC Bay Area sat down with Corpus to discuss her challenges, her vision and the glass ceiling she's breaking.
Corpus stood tall as she was being sworn in as the county's top cop.
"I was so proud to be standing in front of everybody as the first female Latina sheriff of this county," she said.
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With those firsts, Corpus knows there will be doubters. She's faced them her entire career.
"Because I am a woman and I’m feminine and I'm not very big in stature, those challenges, the noes that I was given throughout my career always were the fire for me to fight harder," she said.
It didn't take long for Corpus to earn her stars. It seems everything happened during her first month in office, including major flooding that forced evacuations.
"People say you were baptized by fire," she said. "We had an international child abduction the first month. We had a gang related shooting that happened in Half Moon Bay. We had the other horrific incident in Half Moon Bay."
That other horrific incident was the mass shooting that left seven farmworkers dead. The case is under gag order, which is why the sheriff can't talk about it.
“I’m so proud of her," San Mateo County Supervisor Noelia Corzo, the county's first Latina supervisor, said of Corpus. "I’m so proud of her and what she represents for our community."
Corzo said Corpus has handled her job with grace, even before she became top cop.
"When I first met Christina, she talked about things that I had never heard a law enforcement officer talk about in a way that showed that she could be vulnerable but also make really tough decisions," Corzo said.
Corpus has her own vision for police reform, and she's ironing out her plan for the department. It starts, she said, with community trust and community policing, something she did as a deputy in the Fair Oaks neighborhood.
Her other goal is to inspire.
"I wanted to inspire other women and girls that look like me that they can do whatever they want to and their dreams can come true as long as they are determined," she said.
