She thought to start the class in 2001 while she was recovering from a burst appendix. Because of the appendectomy, she was unable to wear her gun belt, and so spent her shifts helping rewrite some lesson plans for the academy. A commander lightly suggested she teach a class specifically for women. After some brainstorming, she landed on Women Against Crime. “It was a really huge turning point in my career and my life,” she says.

Though it seems like an obvious decision to start such a program, it wasn’t easy to get it off the ground. “I did advertising. I went on TV. I went on the radio,” she says of promoting the program. But just four women showed up for the first session. “I’ll be honest, that was very discouraging,” she says. “I kept thinking, Why would women not want to hear this information? Because to me it was vital and important." She recalls how her chief at the time told her not to feel discouraged. “Jesus only started with 12 disciples,” he told her. She took solace in that idea, but decided to regroup, do more advertising, and eventually she got 15 women to show up. Through word of mouth, that group eventually grew to 30 people. Now, there’s almost always a wait list to get into Hoffman’s sessions. She doesn’t need to advertise anymore.

“I was getting people coming to my class that had been victims of domestic violence; they had been sexually assaulted, robbed at gunpoint,” she explains. “The dynamics were so obvious to me that these were women that were scared.”

The WAC classes run twice a year. The latest session, which started just two weeks ago, has 72 women. Though she’s been given the Albuquerque Police Academy as a venue for the class, Hoffman has funded WAC entirely out of her own pocket for the past 15 years. She estimates she spends $2,000 per class on supplies and materials. That means she’s invested $60,000 of her own money since the program began.