The woman chosen to lead Boston's police

"She made some sort of record number of arrests," says Mary. "She loved being on the streets and doing the gritty work."

O'Toole's skill at the basics of policing - hard work, attention to detail, and good communications skills - helped her gain the attention of superiors and rise through the department's ranks. It also makes her well-suited to lead the department's community-policing initiative, which emphasizes close contact among police officers, local leaders, and residents in preventing neighborhood crime.

"She has the common touch," says Jack Dunne, spokesman for Boston College, O'Toole's alma mater. "She has the ability to empathize with people on a human level, and that's a great gift for a police commissioner."

Community policing is being implemented across the country, and officers like O'Toole, many of them women, are now in high demand.

But it was O'Toole's willingness to leave the BPD behind that ultimately made her an ideal candidate to return and lead it. After obtaining a law degree, O'Toole left the force in 1986 and later started her own security consulting firm. In the early '90s, she was appointed state secretary of public safety. She also helped construct a new policing plan in Northern Ireland.

It's a CV that reveals a rare sort of public-relations savvy for an incoming commissioner.

"She has a lot of important political and social instincts that have really brought her so far," says Judge James Lawton, chairman of the board of trustees at Boston's New England School of Law, where O'Toole earned her law degree.

According to her daughter, Meghan, her ambitious mother's primary form of entertainment is watching and reading news. "She doesn't relax that much," says Meghan. Though she does, on occasion, take in TV shows like "JAG" and "CSI" - "official kind of stuff," according to Meghan.

O'Toole doesn't miss her daughter's sporting events. During Meghan's high school years, she was in the rafters at basketball games cheering with the other parents. But she has less time for what one might think of as soft entertainment. She admits that she has taken her daughter to no more than two movies.

And while the new commissioner loves to cook, she and Meghan recently began a South Beach Diet.

But O'Toole's first few weeks on the job have, it seems, made a much greater impression on Boston officials than her biography. She has gone out of her way to speak with the families of those who have died from violence, and has visited officers injured on the job. Emphasizing transparency, she's also launched a formal review of the Police Department's conduct on Super Bowl night.

"It's not new for her that compassion is a priority," says Linda McCaul, a captain in the Police Department at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

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