Strawberry resident retires as S.F. police’s highest-ranking woman
Updated: 1 day ago
Ann Mannix was skeptical when her brother, Richard Corriea, first encouraged her to take the police-officer entrance exam.
Corriea had joined the San Francisco Police Department a few years earlier, but Mannix, who was then in her 20s, had never considered becoming an officer. With a degree in political science from Loyola Marymount University, Mannix briefly considered law school before getting into retail management, and she was eyeing a career in banking management.
“My brother was a cop at the time, but I didn’t even like police officers, to be honest,” says the Strawberry resident, now 60. “He told me, ‘Take the test, you never know, you might like it.’” Her brother turned out to be right. Mannix joined the San Francisco Police Department as an officer in 1986 and retired last month after a 35-year career that saw her advance to the rank of deputy chief, making her the highest-ranking woman in the department.
Drawn to the variety and excitement of the job, Mannix says she found more than a career when she joined the force.
“It wasn’t your typical 9 to 5 desk job that maybe I had thought I wanted to do,” she says. “I found this calling. It really spoke to me, and I truly, truly enjoyed every aspect of it.”
Mannix joined the department about 11 years after it swore in its first class of female officers, but women were relatively scarce throughout the department’s ranks — and they still are. Of its 2,176 sworn members, about 15 percent are women, according to the department’s most recent demographic data.
“It was unusual then, and it’s not much better today,” Mannix says.
Still, she says, she wasn’t intimidated by the prospect of joining a male-dominated profession, and she didn’t have too much trouble fitting in, something she partially attributes to her height — she’s 5-foot-11 — and to her natural athleticism; she went to college on a basketball scholarship. “If I was told to do something, I didn’t question it. If I received a call for service, I always wanted to be busy and handle it,” she says. “I think I gained respect that way.”
Mannix spent the first 10 years of her career patrolling the streets, spending time in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and Bayview neighborhoods. Along the way, she says, she developed unbreakable bonds with her fellow officers, cementing her loyalty to the job.
“We were backing each other up, we were going from call to call and we did the best we could,” she says.
Corriea, who retired from his own 34-year career with the San Francisco department in 2014 after achieving the rank of commander, says Mannix took to the work naturally.
“What makes a good police officer is someone who likes people, someone who likes helping people and someone who has good judgment,” he says. “Ann had all of those.”
Mannix’s time as an officer also included a stint on the SWAT team; to this day, she says, she’s the only woman to have served on that team. She says her time with that unit is the most pressure she faced on the force.
“If I could survive that, then I could survive anything,” she says.
She began to advance through the department’s ranks, to sergeant, lieutenant and then to captain, where she was the first and only woman to oversee the department’s Northern Station, which covers a wide swath of the city that includes the Civic Center, Western Addition, Hayes Valley, Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, Cow Hollow and Marina neighborhoods. She later oversaw the tactical unit, including the SWAT team.
She was eventually promoted to commander and placed in charge of traffic and transportation before moving over to field operations, overseeing police operations for about half the city. After being promoted to deputy chief — the third highest rank in the department, after chief and assistant chief — she oversaw special operations, which is the position she retired from.
Mannix says her advancement through the department was a natural progression driven by her desire to have a greater say in how decisions were made.
“I care so much about the organization,” she says. “If I wanted to make change, if I wanted to have a positive impact at a greater level, I had to move up.”
Corriea says Mannix opened doors for herself with her confidence and her work ethic, as she never shied away from a challenge, including undercover work.
“I kid her about things that she’d do that I would have thought twice about, like chasing a suspect through someone’s apartment and out a window,” he says.
He notes that even though she began her time as an officer in a comfortable position at the department’s Park Station, which includes the Haight-Ashbury and Castro neighborhoods, she volunteered to move over to the Bayview Station to cover an area experiencing more serious violent crime.
“She was kind of mission-driven, and people respect that,” he says.
As a woman who had advanced through the department, Mannix says one of the things she focused on as a deputy chief was doing her best to help other women through the ranks, including appointing a woman to run police operations for Chase Center, which opened in 2019 as the home of the Golden State Warriors and about 200 other events each year.
“The important thing as you move up is to bring people up,” Mannix says. “That was so important to me throughout my whole career.”
Dan Perea, a commanding officer within the department who worked both alongside and under Mannix for several years, says one of her strengths as a boss was ensuring every member of the department had an opportunity to try new things or advance to a new field of expertise.
“As far as her success took her, she never stopped looking behind her to reach back and bring other people along and help other people follow the path that she laid,” he says.
Mannix says as she took on new leadership positions, it was also important for her to maintain her connection to those who continued to patrol the city. “To me, the most important person in the organization is the police officer on the street,” Mannix says. “They have to be supported, they have to be well-trained and they have to feel you have their back.”
Mannix did all those things for her officers, Perea says, describing her as a service-oriented leader.
“Her whole purpose when she sits at the desk every day, she’s there to help other people, inside the police department, outside the police department, at other city agencies,” he says.
That genuine desire to help was apparent in the way Mannix interacted with those below her within the department, Perea says.
“She’s confident, but she’s not arrogant,” he says. “She’s accomplished and she’s highly skilled, but you never feel like she thinks she’s above it or above you.”
Mannix says her retirement came about naturally.
“It was time,” she says. “You know when it’s time.”
A Strawberry resident since 1989, Mannix says she plans to spend time with her husband, Kevin, who is also a retired San Francisco police officer; their three kids, who range in age from 19 to 26; and the family’s three dogs and a cat. She plans to place a renewed focus on working out, will continue to play tennis and is looking forward to traveling. For now, she’ll continue serving on the board of the San Francisco Police Activities League, which organizes youth sports; she also serves on the board of the University of San Francisco’s International Institute for Criminal Justice Leadership.
Though he’ll no longer be working with Mannix directly, Perea says he’ll continue to draw on the lessons he learned from her and attempt to emulate her service-first mentality, as will others.
“Younger cops and younger bosses in this job have seen her success, and they’re going to continue to look at her as inspiration for what can be accomplished and what the right way to accomplish all of that is,” he says.
He says Mannix’s impact on the department will be a lasting one.
“She is not going to be forgotten any time soon,” Perea says. “She left her mark on this police department, and we are the better for it.”
This story was published in the July 14, 2021, print edition of The Ark.