After 26 years on the Morgan Hill Police force, Cmdr. Terrie
Booten will retire this summer
Morgan Hill – One of Morgan Hill’s finest will soon be a civilian after 26 years of service on the local police force. And after all those years, she still remembers the incident that reinforced her belief that she could make a difference in the community.
“My first night out, I was working a call on a gal who wanted to commit suicide, and when I was talking with her, trying to negotiate her out, it turned out that I had known her in college,” Morgan Hill Police Cmdr. Terrie Booten said. “I was able to establish a rapport with her. When she walked out to the ambulance on her own, to seek help, I knew that this was the right choice for me.”
And 26 years later, Booten has no regrets. Booten will turn in her badge and retire from the force in August.
Though she was not the first female on the force, Booten was the only woman for many years. There are now three, including Booten, Officer Mindy Zen and newly hired Sarah Alanis, who is going through her field training.
“I don’t know about other agencies, but I have never felt, in Morgan Hill, that gender plays a role,” she said. “I have always been supported by my fellow officers, as well as administrators, and as I climbed the ranks over the years, that didn’t change. They know I would go to the mat for them, but that I also have very high expectations.”
Regardless of gender, Booten said, an officer has to be able to “hold their own.”
“It’s how you handle yourself,” she said. “That goes across the board. If you have the ability to talk to people, to respect them, you can accomplish a lot. You always aim for diffusing a situation, not using force.”
Fortunately, Booten said, she has never had to fire her weapon in the line of duty, though she has come close.
When she hangs up her gun in August, Booten said she plans to have some “good quality downtime.”
“I haven’t really made plans for anything but that,” she said. “I’m looking forward to spending some good time with family, helping my folks build their retirement home in the Sierra Nevadas. I may get back into coaching at some point. I coached Live Oak softball for a couple of years. I really enjoyed that.”
One of the things she won’t miss, she said, is being on call.
“It’s truly a 24/7 job,” she said. “You’re on call all the time. If there’s something like that homicide, you have all hands on deck. If there’s a major incident, even if I don’t have to go on duty, I’ll be made aware of it.”
Though she won’t miss the late night phone calls, she will miss the role she played in the community where she was raised, Booten said.
“The interaction with the community in that way, that’s going to be hard to give up,” she said. “The people who have put their heart and soul into the community have made this community what it is, not just the City Council, not just the mayors over the years, but people like the business owners, people who volunteer in the community.”
MHPD Cmdr. Joe Sampson said Booten’s wealth of knowledge about the department and about the community will be missed.
“She has made a point of getting out in the community,” he said. “She’s been able to develop lasting relationships over the years. We’re fortunate that she has been with us for so long.”
Booten said her family and friends sometimes tease her about seeing someone she knows everywhere she goes, but that’s one of the things she loves about her job. And, she always wanted to work for a small police department.
“I really wanted to be a part of the community, to be a part of its growth and development,” she said.
But one of the biggest drawbacks to working in a small department as opposed to a larger one, she said, is working with fewer resources.
“It only takes two complex situations to tie us up and bog us down,” she said. “But we’ve been developing more in-house expertise, developing relationships with agencies around us.”
She has seen changes in Morgan Hill and in the crimes MHPD deals with over the years, but she said types of crimes tend to come in waves.
“When I started, Morgan Hill was more rural, and there wasn’t a lot to do, but there were probably nine bars in the Monterey corridor, so DUI enforcement and dealing with fights were a big part of our job,” she said. “We have seen some increases over the years in drugs and drug-related crimes, like property crime, but these things come in waves. If we arrest someone who’s responsible for a lot of the property crime, for example, another type of crime might surge more.”
Booten started out taking classes in animal health technology because she thought she might want to be a veterinarian, but she’d always had an interest in law enforcement, she said.
“I was encouraged by an officer in another agency to see if my community had a reserve officer program, and Morgan Hill did,” she said. “That was in 1979. I took the two classes that I needed, and was sworn in as a reserve officer. I put myself through the academy, and after nine months as a reserve officer, an opening became available in August of 1980.”
