Profiles of Success: Olga Maldonado

HARLINGEN – “That boy had bruises all over his body.”

Mercedes Police Chief Olga Maldonado had just returned from another fatality on Expressway 83. It was one of many that had broken her heart over the years.

There would be many more since, but Maldonado has never flinched.

She enforces the law.

She helps improve people’s lives.

She’s also at present the only female police chief in the Valley and recently took on a new position as the mayor of La Feria next door. Incidentally, that’s her hometown.

Earlier this week she had several projects in place for the community. Paperwork awaited her attention on her desk, reports needed to be filled out, and there was a smile on her face.

“We’re getting them moved in,” she said. She was referring to something which obviously had weighed on her mind for quite awhile.

“This family had been living in the park, homeless,” she said, at once tired and charged with energy.

“We’re helping the family out,” she said. “The lights should be turned on. We’re getting them some furniture.”

To Maldonado, being an officer of the law is about helping the community any way she can as well as making the hard choices and having to arrest people.

“If I have to arrest somebody I’m keep the community safe and I’m keeping them safe,” she said, referring to earlier years when she was a patrol officer.

She’s had her share of “difficult” suspects.

“I remember them struggline, I remember them fighting back,” she said.

She never wavered in her duty to restrained a suspect and would not allow fear to dictate her movements. To do so could be fatal, and she could allow that.

“I had to go home,” she said. “My father always told me, ‘Don’t ever back down.”

She hasn’t.

In 1987, after a conversation with her father, she approached Mercedes Police Chief John Pape about her desire to become a police officer.

“Of course!” he told her. At the time, he didn’t have any female police officers, Maldonado said. “He want to open new door of opportunity, and he avidly supported her decision.”

The calling turned out to suit her just fine.

She was one of only three women in the police academy in San Benito, and she wasn’t daunted by any of the challenges presented to her. She had a job waiting for her in Mercedes when she finished. She quickly proved her mettle.

It’s been almost 30 years since Maldonado first began patrolling the streets of Mercedes.

“I was dispatch, records and patrol officers in the first year,” she recalled with satisfaction.

Over the proceeding years she eventually made detective and finally, in 2004, she was chief. A plaque on the wall has the glistening number, “2004.”

It’s an accomplishment she shares proudly.

So, why did she want to become chief?

“Why not chief?” she said sharply, but not unkindly.

“I wanted to break new ground,” she said with some resignation.

To date, she’s still the only female police chief in the Valley. She hopes more will come. She does some community outreach to encourage young people to follow their dreams, including girls and young women who’d like to pursue law enforcement.

So far, no chiefs, but quite an increase in female police officers.

She never counsels them to do things different as female police officers, that they have to work harder than their male counterparts, or that they have to behave in a certain way. A police officer is a police officer, she said, and they all have the same rules and expectations.

Surprisingly, she found little resistence to her being first a police officer, then a detective and finally a police chief. Nor did she feel she had to work harder than anyone else to achieve different positions. She simply did what she had to do to make rank. That in itself requires someone to go the extra mile, the same mile her male counterpart would have to walk.

However, recent events may alter that to a certain degree. She’s now the mayor of La Feria, again the first woman to hold that position. She ran for the office in May when it became apparent no one was running.

“Somebody had to step up to the plate,” she said. “It’s been hard. I don’t have days off and it’s very tiring, but it’s very important.”