Last Gotham episode introduced yet another character. In Strike Force, when Gus Freeman is introducing to Nathaniel Barnes and Jim Gordon the recruits for the new team they’re assembling, he first brings them to the ring, telling them to keep an eye on a little girl who’s apparently getting her butt kicked… but who eventually wins in a matter of seconds. She’s Josie Mac, portrayed by Paulina Singer, and she’s in Gordon’s new strike force team. She even takes a bullet from Mr. Zsasz on her first mission, but she luckily had a bulletproof jacket. We’ll see more of Josie and of her teammates, but, in the meanwhile, let’s see who this young cop is in the comics.
Josephine MacDonald was born in Gotham City, and she grew up with her beloved big brother, Raymond. When Josephine (nicknamed “Josie Mac”) was still a child, however, Raymond went missing, and the police proved to be unable to find him. This was understandably quite a major emotional trauma for the girl, enough to trigger her latent metahuman abilities: the child was now able to hear “the voice of the objects”, a psychic link that allowed her to perceive inanimate things. At first, Josie used this talent for helping the people in her neighborhood, finding without effort anything they 
had lost. Josie became some sort of heroine for her neighbors, and everyone came to her whenever they lost something: for the girl it was just like a game, until the day a woman came to her for finding her missing daughter. Josie’s ability only worked with inanimate objects, not with living creatures, so she had to turn the woman’s hopes down… and the grieving mother didn’t take it well at all, and she started an all-out war against the girl and her family, depicting them as horrible people spoiling others’ pain and grief for their own amusement. Following this unpleasant event, Josie’s parents decided to move, and to keep their daughter’s power a secret from anybody. Josie, however, knew deep inside her that she had that particular gift so that she could help people: when she came of age, she decided to join GCPD, and started training. While she was in the academy, however, her mother became severely ill, and she died in a matter of months: this obviously saddened both Josie and her father, and the latter became even more protective over his daughter, since she was now the only family he had left. Josie, however, managed to become a cop as she had always wanted, and she started her path to become a detective, her true objective… even if the road wasn’t an easy one at all, especially in Gotham.
Being a young and idealist agent in a crooked and corrupted police department wasn’t easy… and some “rookie mistake” was inevitable. Josie Mac did one that nearly costed her her entire career: during an investigation, she exposed the extra-marital affair of the mayor’s wife with a male stripper. As a result, Josie was dumped into the Missing Persons Unit, with a few hopes of ever being able to become a homicide detective. She was partnered with Oscar Castro, an old and tired cop near retirement… and she arrived just in time to be assigned to quite a difficult 
case, involving the child of a renowned crime boss who had gone missing. Everybody, including the city’s hero Batman, tried to warn her off the case, but after what happened to Raymond, Josie just didn’t want to give up on a missing child, not even a criminal’s one. She worked together with Castro and Batman, and the three of them were repeatedly targeted by the kidnappers: even Josie was attacked twice, and during the second attempt to her life Castro was injured. Eventually, the kidnapper killed the woman’s father to scare her off the case… with the only result of making her even more determined. At the end, Josie and Batman managed to corner Two-Face, who admitted the abduction and revealed the child’s location, but denied any involvement in the attempted murders. Josie kept investigating by herself, and found out that the lawyer of the child’s father was the responsible, since he wanted to inherit his client’s fortune. Josie Mac tried to arrest him, but the man resisted, and at the end she shot him and killed him: Castro intervened soon after, arranging the crime scene so that it seemed the lawyer had shot first. Castro saved his partner and allowed her to be promoted to detective just in time for his retirement. Josie was moved to the Major Crimes Unit, where she was at first partnered with Crispus Allen (she filled in for Renee Montoya, at the time framed by Two-Face for crimes she didn’t commit), and then with Marcus Driver. Finally, Josie Mac had the job she had always wished for, one in which she could truly help people the way she wanted.
Josephine “Josie Mac” MacDonald is a smart and resourceful young woman, an idealist cop who, for a change, truly believes in justice in a city in which everybody, police especially, only cares for personal gain. Josie possesses the unique ability of “reading objects”, that allows her to “speak” with inanimate things and to learn from them nearly anything she wants to know, thus making her able to find virtually anything… except people. Bent on her mission as a law enforcer, Josie Mac is one of the most promising young detective in the GCPD, a strong and determined woman willing and capable to prove her worth.
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