Tamica Barnett was promoted to captain of the Syracuse Fire Department on October 25, 2026, and she is the first Black woman the department has put at that rank.
Fifteen of its roughly 360 people are women. Four of those fifteen now supervise anything, and Barnett is one of them. She joined the department in 2011 and was its first Black woman lieutenant in 2021, five years ago, which gives some sense of how recently any of this happened for the first time.
She has not treated the promotion as a finish line. “It’s always good to be in the first, but as Chief Monds always mentioned, I don’t want to be the last,” she said.
Fire Chief Michael Monds, who in 2018 became the department’s first Black chief, named the reason that is hard. “It’s not a historically diverse profession, so there’s not many role models that you can talk to,” he said. He also said the department has promoted a lot of diversity up its ranks, and that over the last nine years it has hired two or three of the most diverse classes in its history.
Barnett now runs Fire Station 18 on Midland Ave in the Valley, which operates two engine trucks and two smaller walk around rescue vehicles. She has been in the job about a week. “When you’re new and it’s your first week doing anything, it’s a heavy lift,” she said. “I’m human, so sometimes things are overwhelming, but we got through it.”
The part that answers the chief’s point about role models is what she already does when she is not at the firehouse. She has been president of the Syracuse City School District Board of Education Commissioners since 2024. She founded Fired Up for Youth Inc., a workforce development nonprofit for central New York teenagers. She owns Who Want Smoke BBQ and Catering. She graduated from Henninger High School in the city and from St. Bonaventure University.
“As I advance and accomplish more things, I think it’s important to always go back to where you started,” she said. “It’s amazing feeling. I like to be a role model for our students.”
A department that has fifteen women in it did not arrive at one, and it will not arrive at a second one by accident either. Barnett is building the pipeline she came through, from a school board seat and a teen workforce program, while running a firehouse.
