Need to find a place that sells cheap doughnuts and strong coffee? Ask a police officer.
Want to locate a good Jewish deli on the Peninsula?
Ask Susan Manheimer — the new chief of police in San Mateo.
No, blintzes and badges usually don’t mix, but when it comes to being a cop, Manheimer is creating a new mold.
For example, when she was an officer in San Francisco, she walked beats in some of the seediest sections of the city. But she didn’t win people over by stating her rank and waggling her weapon; rather, she did it by being friendly, affable and innovative.
And now, as the top cop in the city of San Mateo, she is one of only four female police chiefs out of 337 municipal police departments in the state.
“This woman has personality and drive, and she has a knack for making everyone feel good about themselves and about the work that the police department does,” said Rabbi Herbert Morris, the retired spiritual leader at Congregation Beth Israel-Judea, where Manheimer used to serve on the board.
“She’s a fantastic representative for both the police department and the Jewish community.”
Morris, Manheimer’s longtime rabbi, said a brachah over her when she was sworn in as San Mateo’s chief in May.
In a ceremony attended by her family, city officials and dozens of San Francisco’s finest, the popular Manheimer was drenched in applause from her former SFPD cohorts, whose respect and admiration for her bubbled over in a rousing standing ovation.
“I would venture to guess that her becoming chief of police is probably just a stepping stone,” said Andrew Cohen, a San Francisco police officer who added that he learned a lot about himself and Judaism from Manheimer.
“I could see her running a major city one day in her life, if not following in the footsteps of other great women of San Francisco.”
Manheimer, 44, lives in Pacifica with her husband, Michael, and son Jesse, who is about to hit the one-year anniversary of his bar mitzvah. Her 20-year-old daughter, Sarah, goes to U.C. San Diego. They are longtime members at Beth Israel-Judea, a Conservative-Reform congregation in San Francisco.
Manheimer spent her early childhood in the north Bronx in what she called “an old Jewish, Italian neighborhood,” where beat cops walked the street, responded quickly to crises and were friendly with all the residents.
“I really came to admire what they did and what they stood for in society,” she said.
However, she didn’t decide on a career in law enforcement until age 27. The impetus was getting robbed in the company of her daughter, then 2 years old, in the Panhandle area near Golden Gate Park.
It was a somewhat curious career move at the time. Although she had taken some criminology classes at the University of Maryland in the ’70s, she had finished college with a degree in business management from St. Mary’s College in Moraga and had worked as a KCBS radio reporter.
Plus, how many nice Jewish girls grow up to be a cop?
“I think my dad was thrilled and my mom was shocked,” Manheimer recalled. “But they didn’t try to talk me out of it at all. I’ve done a lot of non-traditional things in my life, and they had a real confidence in me. They always instilled in me that I could do anything I wanted to.”
She graduated the police academy in 1984 and spent the next 15 years in San Francisco, rising to the rank of sergeant, then lieutenant, then captain.
Some of her most impressive work occurred when she was commanding officer of the Tenderloin Task Force, a handpicked team of 100 officers.
To improve life in perhaps the city’s toughest neighborhood, she helped halt new massage parlors and liquor stores, established a graffiti paint-out program and school drug-free zones, and helped reclaim the streets on Halloween for the children.
Cohen said Manheimer’s people skills — simply going up to Tenderloin’s assortment of drug dealers, prostitutes and other residents and talking to the them — are amazing.
Cohen was also touched by her on a personal level.
“She introduced me to my first seder,” he said. “I’m Jewish, but I came from a non-religious background. She opened my eyes a little bit to some Jewish values, like the strong sense of family.”
At the seder Cohen talked about, Morris was presented with an honorary police star for his work as an SFPD chaplain, a program to which Manheimer helped add a Jewish flavor. Rabbis H. David Teitelbaum, Stephen Pearce and Pam Baugh have also served as chaplains.
Manheimer also helped start a Jewish law-enforcement group in the San Francisco.
“It was very loose-knit, more of a kind of networking opportunity,” she said. “But it was a nice opportunity to get together, speak with a rabbi and recognize there was a Jewish presence on the force.”
As police chief in San Mateo, Manheimer supervises and guides the department, and also has a role as a civic leader. “Meetings, meetings and more meetings,” was how she described her civic duties.
Claiming “it’s an important symbol of the profession,” she also prefers to always wear her uniform on the job, even though many police chiefs don’t — like those on “Cagney and Lacey,” “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue.”
Then again, Manheimer wouldn’t know. Ironically, she has never watched any of those police television shows. She spends most of her free time working out or going to the movies with her family.
“I’ve only seen ‘Jeopardy,'” she said.