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“I found her to be absolutely remarkable,” said Valerie Tanguay-Masner, who attended the academy while a member of the San Bernardino County sheriff’s office, a post from which she has since retired.

“Keechant was very athletic, very energetic, very focused and driven on what it was that she wanted to do,” she added. “I believe that her integrity is absolutely above reproach. She was a shining star.”

Art Howell, a classmate who retired earlier this year as the chief of police in Racine, Wis., said that as a Black woman and a sergeant at the time, Chief Sewell was a rare figure in the academy. Most of the other officers held higher ranks, and only 26 of the 256 attendees were women, he said.

But he said symbolism should not overshadow her qualifications. “She’s got a lot of substance,” he said.

Enormous challenges await her in New York, where relations between police and communities of color have been strained for years and calls to shrink the Police Department predate the pandemic.

Perhaps her biggest challenge will be overcoming doubts about her ability to lead a department that is vastly larger and bureaucratically more complex than Nassau County’s force of about 2,400 officers. As chief of detectives there, she has as many people under her command as the typical precinct commander in the city.

She inherits a strained relationship with the City Council and State Legislature, which her predecessors criticized for enacting laws that were aimed at making the criminal justice system fairer, but that past commissioners say scapegoated cops, emboldened criminals and made the city less safe. Gun violence, which reached a high for the decade in 2020, remains higher than before the pandemic.