Benita Renee Jenkins is an agent with the DTCU.
That acronym stands for the Domestic Terrorism Crime Unit. It is "a joint venture created by the CIA and the FBI to handle high-profile assignments that needed to stay under the public radar. DTCU was a vehicle to protect officials who had a bad habit of participating in unorthodox tactics that would be political suicide if the media got wind of them. Avoiding bureaucratic red tape and the observant eyes of government watchdogs was a major part of DTCU's mission."
Jenkins is not an agent with that organization when we meet her in the first recorded adventure. If you mentioned that organization, or its acronym, she would have responded with a "what?". That is no aspersion on her, of course, because if you asked, well, most people, you would get the same. To say the intelligence group is covert is to be understating a lot. They are very hush-hush.
Another reason Jenkins is blissfully ignorant of that department is that she has absolutely no interest in such a vocation. She has just "completed a rigorous semester at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan while also working full-time as a hairstylist". She would be the first to admit that trying to earn a bachelor's degree in order to then get a job in law enforcement is a challenge but doing so while also maintaining a regular job to pay the bills is tricky. Still, she would not likely complain because she is quite happy with her life. She has "a great job, loving family, loads of friends, and the hope of one day becoming a crime scene investigator".
What she does not have is a desire for some guy to push his way into her life, handsome or not, and really extort his way into making her get involved in cloak-and-dagger work. Unfortunately that is what will happen to her.
Jenkins is a black woman happily hailing from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, nicknamed in her mind as the "Do-or-Die-Bed-Stuy", living with her maternal grandmother and her younger brother. She is said to be very attractive and is fond of making sure that she looks her best in the strangest of time - case in point, when she stands for hours fixing hair in her cousin's popular salon, she does in high heels because it accentuates some of her better features. Luckily that cruelty to her feet aside, she is in excellent shape.
"Thanks to her martial arts training, she had abs and legs of steel, which was great, since she loved wearing clothes that accentuated her curves. She worked out hard to stay fit so she could enjoy her grandmother's food. .. Whenever she went overboard and overate, Benita would push herself to the max to burn the fat. She didn't want to see her butt expand beyond recognition. She had a small frame, and the last thing she needed to be was a chubby fashionista who studied jiu-jitsu."
Her skills and her attitude, coupled with her keen intellect and her ever-improving survival instincts, are the reason she stays alive when the DTCU comes along.