Pressure? A safe assumption. But Garcia has been preparing for this role since her days as an international relations major at UD, where she acquired tools you cannot find on a police duty belt. Her time as a Blue Hen prepped her for the demands of leadership in a lightning-rod field: “That period helped shape me,” she says. “The best thing I did was attend the University, and I thank God every day that was my path.”
Garcia grew up in Washington Heights, a northern Manhattan neighborhood then labeled by The New York Times as “crack epidemic central of America.” But Garcia recalls her childhood with nostalgia. At the time, she didn’t know the one-bedroom, 700-square-foot apartment she shared with her immigrant single mother qualified as small. She didn’t know she belonged to an underrepresented group. She didn’t know she was poor.
Then, two years into her high school career, Garcia moved to Delaware (her mother had fallen in love with a man in the area). In this new, middle-class neighborhood in the town of Bear, most other kids were alabaster-skinned. (“What ARE you?” demanded one nosy girl on the first day of school. “Black? White? Everyone is talking about it.”) The district was adequately funded; the houses boasted three, maybe four bedrooms—sometimes even a basement.
“I realized not everyone lives the same,” Garcia says. “I wanted to know why my mother worked three jobs and still had less, why our reality was so far removed. I made myself my own project. I took the time to understand my life.”
Garcia enrolled at UD, where she encountered opportunities to interrogate society’s class and racial divisions. As a member and eventual president of HOLA, the Hispanic student organization, she visited area high schools and community centers to encourage kids from underrepresented demographics to apply to UD, and she helped first-generation students decipher the higher ed ecosystem. Garcia requested meetings with University leadership to discuss issues facing the Hispanic student body and ways to improve school culture. And, as a harbinger of things to come, she organized meetings between local police officers and Wilmington’s urban youth, to build a greater sense of community.
In her academic life, Garcia spent three months in Central America, translating Spanish for Prof. April Vaness and helping to research the migration patterns of Guatemalans to Delaware, as well as the barriers to acculturation upon arrival. She secured an internship with Senator Tom Carper, learning how to effect change on a legislative level, followed by a job with the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition. She regularly set up her office on a Newark city bus, where she educated underprivileged minority women on health-related issues and listened to life stories that touched on recurring themes: hard work, little pay, scant resources. The job stoked a passion inside Garcia—or maybe something more profound.
“I’d say it’s a calling,” she says. “The older I get, the more I realize: I didn’t choose equity work; this work chose me.”
Following graduation, Garcia set out to make her home city a more egalitarian place. She served as an immigrant research analyst for the nonprofit Rockefeller Foundation; deputy director of the Manhattan Borough President’s Northern Manhattan Office; and director of community outreach and partnerships for the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, where she managed contracts with 40,000 nonprofits that benefited millions of young people. Most recently, she served as chief diversity officer for Manhattan’s fiscal watchdog unit, the Comptroller’s office. During her tenure, government agencies significantly increased their contracts with women and minority-owned businesses—from $1 million to $9 million in seven years.
By the time NYPD came knocking, Garcia’s resume was formidable. MUJER magazine, the Spanish version of People, had listed her alongside the Pope and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as one of 10 Hispanics impacting the world. Still, this was February 2022, just over a year since the murder of George Floyd—an event that exacerbated tensions between police and the Black Lives Matter movement. A growing contingent called for dismantling the police system. Could anyone make inroads during such a turbulent time? Garcia’s colleagues attest: She did so immediately.
“She’s a machine,” says one sergeant working in NYPD’s joint operations center, where 7-foot screens stream flight patterns, incident reports, and a live feed of Times Square. (For safety reasons, UD Magazine is not permitted to print officer names.) “The big ideas you think would be impossible to get off the ground, she makes happen. It’s been incredible to watch that change in motion.”
