Deanna Cantrell never thought she'd be a police officer, let alone a police chief.
"I did not like police growing up," the Fairfield police chief told the Bay Area Reporter. "I grew up underprivileged in New Mexico, in a household with a lot of violence, so police came quite a few times and I didn't care for them. So, if you ask anyone who knew me then, nobody would have thought that'd be my path."
But Cantrell, a 50-year-old lesbian, became the first woman and the first LGBTQ person in her position last October. She said her feelings toward the police began to change after a chance encounter with a stranger at a party decades ago.