DANGER, EXCITEMENT, FULFILLMENT
Officer Yvonne Mauricio finds all three in her job with the San Antonio Police Department

By PAULA ALLEN
Photography JANET ROGERS

Yvonne Mauricia
Age: 32

Occupation: Officer, San Antonio Police Department

Why she’s a Role Model: Besides a challenging career in law enforcement, she finds balance in time spent with family while pursuing fitness and further education.

Personal: Widowed; two sons, Gabriel, 12, and Devin, 10.

Her own role model: “My mother, because she supports us 100 percent.”

Favorite relaxation strategy: Reading on break.

People would be surprised that I … “became a police officer. In high school, I was such a preppy little female.”

Believes: “That everything happens for a reason.”

Watching a car ahead of them, two police officers on patrol nodded at each other before one of them switched on the light on top of their car. Something about the driver of the other vehicle seemed off to them, and they had probable cause to pull him over — failure to signal before turning, a mudcovered license plate.

When the other car stopped, the young man driving opened the door and took off running. There was something in his hand — maybe a pack of cigarettes, maybe a weapon. The officers gave chase anyway, bringing the suspect to the ground just across the street from where he’d abandoned his car. “You win,” the man said, as the officers handcuffed him. The object in his hand was a small bag of crack cocaine. But it could have been a gun or a knife, and he might not have been so quick to surrender.

“You get an instinct, a gut feeling for knowing when something is not right,” says officer Yvonne Mauricio, who was on patrol that night in the Austin Highway area. “What happens next depends on your being able to trust your instincts.” Mauricio, who has served with the San Antonio Police Department for five years, is a member of the Tactical Response Unit, whose officers are charged with looking for trouble. She and her partner may answer calls from an area where the substation is short-handed, or respond to 911 requests, but the rest of the time, she says, “We are supposed to self-initiate — drive around looking for stuff, make contact with the people on the street, get to know what’s going on. We develop a rapport with the people in the community so they will tell us where there are houses selling dope, who’s causing problems in the neighborhood.”

Mauricio, 32, is trim and fit but not tall or bulky. When she graduated from the Police Academy in 2002, she was first assigned to the East Side. On patrol alone, she says, “I got in so many fights. (Criminals) think that if you’re a female, ‘You can’t catch me,’ and then they got mad when I did.” She quickly learned that a street-savvy attitude — strong, aggressive, but not challenging — afforded some protection, eliminating a lot of the fistfights.

Nothing in her previous life prepared her for this aspect of her job. As an executive secretary, she says, “I dealt mostly with upper management.” Her days were desk-bound, and she dressed up to come to work. Though she had been interested in law enforcement since high school, she might never have applied to the academy, if not for a sequence of life-changing events.

First, Mauricio’s husband died unexpectedly, at age 29. Her mother, who was close to retiring from her job at H-E-B, quit to help take care of the couple’s two young sons. With an eye on wider opportunities, Mauricio decided to act on her longtime ambition, enlisting the aid of her sister, a personal trainer, to help get her into shape for the Academy’s physical-fitness tests. Female police cadets must meet most of the same physical requirements as their male counterparts, with age range determining the rest for both genders. To prepare, Mauricio trained for two years, with a routine based on running and lifting weights.

She already had filed her application to the Police Academy when the company she worked for started laying off employees because of financial difficulties. “I was one of the last to go,” she says, helping the company’s management wind up its affairs before the business closed. Luckily, her academy application was accepted, and she stepped into a new life that has turned out to be a perfect fit.

“With two young children at home, any job is hard,” she says. Gabriel, now 12, and Devin, 10, grew up adjusting to life with a mother who sometimes worked the late shift. “They’d stay with my mom and dad, but I wanted them to sleep at our own house, so they’d know that’s their home,” Mauricio says. “At first, we thought, ‘This is never going to work,’ when I’d come and have to wake them up to take them home.” Soon, the boys adjusted so well, they barely woke up for the transfer, and they learned to be proud of their police-officer mother. “They still think it’s cool for me to come to school in my uniform when there’s a career day at their school,” she says, smiling. “My younger son even says he wants to be just like me.”

Asked whether she would she want one of her sons to pursue a career in law enforcement, she considers the question carefully. “I love my job,” she says, “There’s something different every day, and I love helping people. But I also know the realities of the job.” Before joining the police force, she says, “I didn’t know people could be so mean to each other.” For this story, she has requested that the area she lives in not be identified. “Out on the streets, in uniform, you contact a lot of people,” she says. “I know I’ve ticked a lot of people off.”

Occasionally, when Mauricio gets ready to go out on patrol, she says, “I’ll get this bad feeling, like this is the time something (bad) is going to happen.” Veteran officers have told her this goes with the job, and she has learned that it signals tiredness or preoccupation that might interfere with her reactions. On those days, she says, “I know I need to watch out and be especially careful to take care of myself. My sergeant says, ‘Remember, your goal is to go home tonight. You’re going home, and they’re going to jail.’”

Mauricio has some long-term goals as well. She is only a few credit hours away from earning her bachelor’s degree from Wayland Baptist University, and she may want to go on for a master’s degree. She recently also completed training for certification as a personal trainer and does some part-time work at a local gym.

“My sons tell me, ‘You’re always leaving,’” she says. “I tell them, ‘I have to go, because my work is part of how I take care of you.’” Over the summer, she gets to spend the days with her sons before going off to work, while during the school year, her parents, brother and two sisters help get the boys to after-school activities and take care of them in the evenings.

“I tell them, ‘You don’t have a dad, but you have a lot of people who love you,’” Mauricio says. She also shares with them “little stories of the juveniles I see on the job — nothing too bad, but I want them to know where you can end up if you make the wrong choices.” She and her sons also share their home with a family of pets: Brownie, a German shepherd who’s a retired police dog; Sophia the cat, and a ferret that’s the newest addition. “I guess I have my hands full,” she says, smiling, “but we have a lot of fun.”

For years after her young husband’s sudden death, Mauricio stayed focused on her sons and her career. “I wasn’t into dating,” she says. Her current relationship seems promising, though: “I can see it going a long way.”

Work also is going well. The assignment to the Tactical Response Unit was a vote of confidence in her skills, and Mauricio is committed to developing them further. “I love what I do, and I hope to stay out there (on patrol) until I’m ready to move on,” she says. “I’d like to stay in (the SAPD) until retirement, but for now, I’m taking it one step at a time.”