San Francisco Police Chief Derrick Lew elevated Deputy Chief Nicole Jones yesterday to assistant chief, moving a seasoned insider into a high-profile role that had lingered open during a broader shake-up of the department’s command staff. In the job, she will act as Lew’s chief of staff and oversee administration, risk management, strategic communications, community engagement, government affairs, and policy development, effectively serving as his second-in-command for day-to-day operations.
According to her department biography, Jones joined the San Francisco Police Department in 2007 and worked her way through patrol and investigative roles at the Ingleside and Tenderloin stations, as well as assignments in the Special Victims Unit and Internal Affairs. The biography also notes that she holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, according to the San Francisco Police Department…