By Jon Chown
Donna Lind is in her fourth one-year term as mayor, a role she might never have expected, but seems fitting. Lind has served the City of Scotts Valley nearly all her life, starting as a secretary, then dispatcher, to matron, to desk officer, to police officer.
She recently reflected on those years, recalling her service as a young police officer. Lind entered the police academy at Gavilan College in 1977 and in 1978 became the Scotts Valley Police Department’s first female officer.
She went on to work as a detective, a hostage negotiator and would eventually be the department’s first female sergeant.
Donna Lind
She joked about the challenges she faced, but they were serious. She endured sexual harassment from both her fellow officers and the public. By today’s standards, the sexism seems almost unbelievable. For instance, her uniform.
“At first you wore a skirt, your gun was in, early on, in a purse,” she said. Both the skirt and the purse were issued by the department. She still has the purse.
“Back then I was young, I’m small … and I went to a lot of (calls for) violence — in a skirt,” she said.
Her service career started while still a senior in high school. There was a job opening at Scotts Valley City Hall. Her grandfather took her to the interview. Lind said the two had difficulty finding Scotts Valley. It had incorporated only two years earlier and had no traffic lights. She and her grandfather wound up in Felton before turning around.
But when they met City Manager Friend Stone they discovered he was a field artillery officer for the Army in WWII. Lind said Stone spent more time talking to her grandfather, who had retired from a career in the military, than her.
“I think they decided I could start work on Monday,” she said.
At first she worked for the city, answering phone calls and taking notes of City Council meetings. About a year later, the police dispatcher walked off the job in the middle of a shift. Lind was pressed to fill the role.
“I got about 15 minutes of instruction and given some codes and they left,” Lind said. “Thank God nothing serious happened at that time.”
Soon after, she began training to be a police officer. Her first role was to be a police matron, whose role is to strip search women in custody.
“I was really naive. I strip searched this one woman and was hearing all of this stuff I’d never heard said to me,” she said. “I thought, ‘this job’s not so good after all.’ But I kept volunteering until I went to the academy.”
Lind said her career choice did catch some friends and family off guard. She grew up on a dairy farm in Cambria and was driving the family’s Jeep at age 4 while her dad threw bales of hay out of a trailer behind it. Her parents divorced, however, and she moved with her mom to Santa Cruz in 1968. She said she was quite shy while attending Santa Cruz High School and didn’t date. She knew little of the world when she jumped into policing.
As a female officer, she was often sent undercover into dangerous situations. It could be a prostitution sting or a drug bust. She was often alone with dangerous people. And it started before she was even sent to the academy. While in training she was sent into a suspected San Lorenzo Valley drug house to see if there was evidence they would find with a search warrant. “I had a pair of shorts, a tank top and gun tucked into my waistband. I knocked on the door and asked to use the phone and looked around,” she said.
During her career she worked homicides, bank robberies and more. Sometimes, being a female officer wasn’t such a bad thing. “I’d gone to a call for a bar fight at the Rusty Lantern, there was a lot of lumberjacks and truckers at the time. I get there and think “OK, I’m over my head here. I need backup. And I said something and they stopped and they turned and I thought, “Oh, wow, why did I do that?” And then three or four other guys, big guys, came and stood behind me. … Other cops said, “they would never have done that for me.”
Other times, being a female officer subjected to her terrible indignities and even assault. At a training in San Jose an officer was demonstrating how laws had changed regarding searches. Lind, being the only female in the room, was asked to come forward.
“The guy that was teaching it pulled me up in front of the class, I was the only female, and demonstrated how not to search a female. And no one spoke up for me. And I still have issues over that,” she said. “I had men, where they grab you, or whatever, and go, “Oh, sorry about that,” you know, whatever. But that one was humiliating on all the levels.”
Afterward, Lind called Steve Walpole Sr., her trusted colleague who later became police chief. He demanded the instructor’s name and pursued the matter through the department’s chain of command, she said. Lind said leaders in her own department made clear that such conduct was not acceptable.
“And they let people know it wouldn’t be tolerated. And so in our own department, I had less of it. But dealing with other agencies and, you know, and even out in the community, sometimes it did become an issue.”
Lind credits Scotts Valley’s first police chief, Gerald Pittenger, with instilling a community-oriented approach to policing. He prohibited officers from accepting free or discounted meals and expected them to get out of their patrol cars and know local business owners and employees. Steve Walpole Sr. continued that philosophy after becoming chief in 1986, she said.
Lind retired from the Police Department in 2008 and said she would have probably stayed out of local politics.
While retired, she was a reserve officer and was being called in to watch over City Council meetings that were becoming increasingly volatile over the issue of Target being built.
She wrote a letter to the editor calling for mutual respect and a resident, who was running for office, took offense and filed an internal affairs complaint against her. The complaint was withdrawn after the person filing it was warned that Lind could sue if it was found to be frivolous, she said, but it put her in motion.
“Now I’m thinking ‘if these are the are the people that are trying to get elected in my city, then I am running,’” she said. “That’s what pushed me to run.”
That November in 2008, voters elected her to the City Council with 3,336 votes. She has since won four additional terms, most recently in 2024. Lind said she never intended to serve more than one term, but after her first four years there were still some more work she’d liked to see finished and realized that the role wasn’t as political as it appeared to be.
“There is a lot of community support and everybody is collaborative,” she said. “And now I’m in my fifth term.”