KELSEYVILLE — That she is a woman puts Mary Bosserman in a minority among the officers in the California Highway Patrol. Nationwide, only about 15 percent of all law enforcement officers are women.
That Bosserman was a woman officer with a quarter-century of service as of Sept. 23 from which she is now retiring puts her in a minority among the women who patrol the state”s highways and freeways.
“The average length for women in the CHP is six years. I don”t know if it”s injuries or family issues,” says Bosserman, who has worked with two other women officers in the Clear Lake office. “One quit and moved to Hawaii. The other transferred to another unit.”
Now, as she prepares to spend some grandmotherly time with her granddaughters, 5-year-old Haley and 1-year-old Lily, and help out with Special Olympics, she can derive satis-
faction from the fact that she was one of the rare women who stuck it out long enough to qualify for retirement.
She can leave with pride.
“I”m proud that I worked the road for 25 years,” she says. “I”m proud that the men I worked with felt that I was competent and that they could count on me.”
It”s a career that”s definitely had its rough spots. “I have been hit, kicked, spit on, puked on, just about everything you can name, which happens to officers over time.”
Bosserman also has been hit by a drunk driver and a driver who ran a red light at an intersection, slugged in the chest by a man attempting to avoid arrest and threatened by a man with a very large knife. She knows what it feels like to chase a car going 140 mph at 3 a.m. She has suffered a concussion, a fractured sternum, an injury to her back and a knee injury that required surgery.
Other than that, she says that the good in the career she is retiring from “certainly outweighs the hardship.” Ninety percent of the people she has dealt with, she says, were great.
For the past five years, Bosserman has been a community relations officer for the CHP”s Clear Lake unit. It has been a mild stage of her career following the 20 years she spent patrolling highways and freeways in her hometown area of Barstow, San Diego and El Cajon, and later Clear Lake.
Bosserman never applied for a CHP job and her original plans didn”t include law enforcement.
She had been married to a high school sweetheart for seven years, had an infant daughter, was living in San Diego and was enrolled at San Diego City College while studying for a nursing career.
“Then, one day my husband came in and said, I don”t love you anymore; I hope you will find a way to take care of yourself.”” she said.
Anxious about how she was going to support herself and her daughter, Mary took a test to join the San Diego Police Department. And she failed it. But the CHP pulled her file off a stack of SDPD applicants and invited her to take a test and to interview.
“I cried the whole time I took the test,” she recalled, “because I wanted my marriage to work and I wanted to be a nurse. But I knew I had to do something.”
She was a downcast young woman walking out of the CHP testing site when the officer who administered it said, “Hey Red, come back here. You passed the test.”
With a crash course into the conditioning that has been a hallmark of her career, Bosserman passed the test for physical agility as well. The next test was convincing the CHP interviewer, who, noting that she had no law enforcement experience, asked her what on earth made her think she could do this job.
“I said, I can do anything you train me to do, and I”ll never quit or give up and I”ll do what I”m told to do,”” Mary said.
She was convincing. She passed.
The real tests, though, lie ahead, beginning on the network of highways in the Barstow area, where her nearest backup, she said, might be 40 miles away.
Once she made a significant drug arrest, but she hadn”t planned on it. It was an incident that began with three men urinating on the side of a freeway. Bosserman was about to arrest the men for indecent exposure when she noted they had been drinking and there were open containers of alcohol in their vehicle.
“I ended up arresting the driver and searching the car and I found two kilos of coke, nine pounds of marijuana and a handgun,” she said.
But they all went quietly.
In a 3 a.m. incident near Barstow, she and her graveyard-shift pursued a DeLorean clocked at more than 140 mph at 3 a.m.
“He was way ahead of us,” said Bosserman. “But when he got across the Nevada state line, he stopped and said, You can”t do anything.””
Wrong, said Mary. “The CHP does have some reciprocity in Nevada and we held him at the state line until the Nevada Highway Patrol came and arrested him.”
In another high-speed chase in the pitch black night near Barstow, Mary found herself responding to a call to stop a man she described as being “twice as big as I am,” who was driving at 90 mph with no shoes, no shirt and no lights.
“He was driving a mail truck, of all things,” Bosserman laughed, “and when I stopped him, he got out of the vehicle, put his hands on his hips and said, Female warrior outstanding!””
Then the driver explained that he was doing a “night vision test.”
Although backup officers she had called suggested a plan to subdue the man with physical force, Mary said hold off, she wanted to try something. Then, she asked the man if he was hungry and when she said he would be taken where he could get something to eat he gladly consented to letting her put handcuffs on him.
Turned out the driver was a man with mental problems who had gotten off his medication.
She had other unusual stops.
“I have arrested male drunk drivers who have been naked and I have arrested female drunk drivers who have been naked,” she says.
How about males and females who were both naked, and …
“Absolutely,” says Mary. “That”s one of the good things about this job. Everyday is different.”
Bosserman says that she didn”t face any more or fewer physical threats than a male patrolman might experience. Occasionally it was an advantage when guys who didn”t believe in attacking females were involved.
“But mostly the public doesn”t see you as a male or female. They just see that badge,” she says.
The scariest thing that ever happened to her, Mary said, was in Clearlake when she was among CHP officers assisting the Clearlake Police Department in the “Safe Street” program, a project to reduce the town”s crime rate, a few years ago.
“As a Highway Patrol person, I”m trained to be around traffic and around cars,” said Mary. “So, for this program it was on-the-job-training. If they (CPD) officers ducked down behind a door, that”s what I did.
“Then I saw a man running down the road with clothes draped over his arm. I thought, Hey, that looks different,” so I pulled up, got out of my car and said, Hey, come here.” I could tell he had been drinking, because he was staggering a little, his eyes were glassy and he smelled like alcohol.
“I said, Where”d you get the clothes?” Then, it occurred to me that I could only see one of his hands. The other was under the clothes, so I said, Show me your hand.” As he pulled it from beneath the clothing, I could see he held the longest knife I”ve ever seen. Then I don”t know how I jumped back so fast and took my gun out, but I did. I drew my weapon down, pointed it right at his head and said, Drop the knife.” I think he was intoxicated enough that he couldn”t figure out whether he should stab me or not. So, I said something to him that was very plain and that everyone could understand and he dropped the knife.
I”d been in accidents before, I”d been in high-speed chases, I”d been in struggles with people, but that was the closest I ever came to somebody taking my life.”
Bosserman thought how the stress, strain and physical challenges of the CHP has changed her. Law enforcement is tough work that exacts its toll on marriages and there had been a second busted marriage to a fellow patrolman before her current happy one with Kelseyville fireman Dave Bosserman.
The good-natured ribbing with male officers, whom she says, are like brothers to her, also became a part of her life.
“It”s been a privilege to work with men,” says Mary. “A lot of women don”t get that experience.”
One suspects that, to a man, the male officers would return that sentiment. As George M. Cohen said, “Mary, it”s a grand old name.”
Contact John Lindblom at jlwordsmith@mchsi.com.
