The alarm hadn’t yet rung.

Officer Amber Bolton didn’t need it.

She woke on her own, around 1:30 in the morning.

In two hours, she was due at El Cajon police headquarters. Soon after, she needed to persuade a young man in a nearby home to walk outside before a SWAT team broke down the door.

Policing in the United States has undergone major changes in recent years.

High-profile killings by cops in Missouri, Minnesota and other states increased pressure to decrease physical force. A series of officer suicides in New York pushed departments to expand mental health support.

The number of homeless people is up. So are school shootings. And fires.

Many of those changes can be seen in the career of one officer in East County’s largest city.

On July 14, Bolton pulled out of her home in Ramona for another 12-hour shift.

It was technically Thursday, yet felt like Friday: Her shift was the last of a three-day cycle.

The 41-year-old is one of the El Cajon Police Department’s only women. Out of more than 120 officers, 108 are men.

Bolton arrived at headquarters before sunrise and entered a briefing room.

The plan was simple: Serve a warrant. Search the home. Maybe arrest an 18-year-old man suspected of robbery.

The operation had been organized by the San Diego Police Department, but they wanted Bolton’s help.

For years, Bolton has been a crisis negotiator, a title that required 40 hours of FBI classes and follow-up training every quarter.

Assignments were often sprung last minute. She’d only heard about this one the day before.

Around 5 a.m., more than a dozen officers gathered outside a line of homes on Vermont Court.

Bolton was parked nearby, in an armored vehicle known as a Bearcat.

It’s not a given that you can get people on the phone. Landlines are often nonexistent, and Bolton’s had to negotiate with people by text and on social media.

This time she at least had a number. Bolton dialed. A woman picked up, groggy from sleep.

“This is Amber from El Cajon PD,” Bolton recalled saying. (She’s found using her first name triggers less panic.) “We have a search warrant for your residence and we’d like it if you guys could come out.”

Bolton outlined what needed to happen: Move slowly, don’t have anything in your hands, follow commands from the officers outside.

The family complied. The 18-year-old was arrested without force.

“About as textbook as you can get,” Bolton said later.

Bolton was raised in El Cajon, and she can trace her origins as a cop to the job that got her through school.

More than 20 years ago, Bolton was studying for her associate’s degree at Grossmont College. During the day, she was an unarmed security guard at Granite Hills High School.

On March 22, 2001, the main item on her calendar was a staff party.

She and several colleagues had gathered inside a break room to celebrate the birthday of her supervisor, Jeremiah Larson.

Larson had just handed a piece of cake to Rich Agundez, an El Cajon cop seated nearby, when everybody heard a “pop” outside the room.

Probably just seniors with balloons, Bolton thought.

Earlier that month, a 15-year-old had opened fire at Santee’s Santana High School, killing two. But what were the odds of another shooting in the same district?

Another “pop.” Somebody yelled “gun.”

Agundez stood and ran out of the room.

Outside, an armed 18-year-old had already wounded two teachers and three students. Agundez shot the young man, ending the spree before anyone died.

In the aftermath, both Bolton and Larson joined El Cajon’s police department.

While Larson had already been moving in that direction, the shooting was a “catalyst” for him.

“I thought the same thing as Amber,” he said recently. “I’d rather be on the side of this that can respond with a weapon instead of just having a radio.”

For Bolton, it took a series of conversations with a friend on the force to convince her.

But since signing up nearly 16 years ago, “nothing has happened to make me rethink what I do,” she said.

The constant threat of violence was one of the first things Bolton brought up when a reporter climbed into her SUV during her shift in July.

From the driver’s seat, Bolton lifted a handheld radio and demonstrated how to call for help.

If something happens where I go down, we’re Unit 244, she told the reporter.

She leaned to her left, exposing her utility belt.

If things really go south, she said, this is how you un-holster my gun.

Then she pulled out of the parking lot and onto city streets.

There was no set route. She drove past churches, signs in Arabic, vacant lots cooking in the sun.

Bolton’s been driving these roads long enough that she can tell when she’s veered into a neighboring city by the gradient of the concrete. (El Cajon’s is gray, Santee’s more yellow, she said.)

Her blonde hair stayed in a bun, even as wind blew in from an open window.

The temperature ticked up in the 70’s. If things really got hot, she knew which stores would let her stand in their refrigerators.

Nearly a fifth of El Cajon lives below the poverty line, and recent surveys in the region show a rise in the number of people on the streets or in shelters. Overdoses are also up, and Bolton now sees three to four a week.

She’s also noted an increase in mental health calls, although she’s not sure how much is due to residents just being more comfortable asking for support.

Cops have wrestled with mental health too.

Around 2013, Bolton was called to the scene of an accident.

By that point in her career she’d sat near plenty of bodies, and there wasn’t even a corpse at this site. While a Ford F-150 had slammed into a golf cart, the woman inside was still clinging to life and had been taken to a hospital.

But after Bolton arrived, someone showed her a picture of what the woman’s injuries looked like.

Maybe the photo was one traumatic image too many. Perhaps the very absence of a body let her imagination run wild with what the moment of impact must have looked like.

All she knew for sure was the nightmares started soon after.

Bolton signed up to see a therapist.

“I’ve had a lot of rookies in my car over the last couple months,” she said. Her main advice: “Don’t be afraid to ask for help.”

While Bolton spoke, she listed to radio chatter through an earpiece.

A little after 11 a.m., a call came in: An empty lot had caught fire on the corner of Franklin and Johnson.

“Two forty-four on Main and Mollison,” Bolton responded, giving her location.

She drove toward the intersection, her eyes moving between the road and her laptop, mounted over the center console.

A column of smoke stretched far into the sky. Flames several feet high moved toward nearby homes. Neighbors stood outside with garden hoses, trying to beat back the fire.

Bolton stopped in the middle of the road, angling her SUV to cut off traffic. She told a dispatcher what other streets needed to be blocked off, then stepped outside.

The fire was only feet from a neighboring fence.

An engine from the local Heartland Fire-Rescue Department pulled up, then another.

“It’s moving toward that house,” Bolton told arriving firefighters.

Josh Stewart jumped out of a truck. The firefighter dragged a hose to a hydrant, plugged it in and twisted a valve.

The hose jerked, then froze, the water stopped by a twist in the fabric.

Stewart kicked it. The hose bulged again, and water flowed around the back of the truck — where it hit another kink.

Bolton appeared. She swung back her foot and drove a boot into the hose, straightening it out.

Water rushed out of the nozzle and onto the lot.

The fire was out before noon. Nothing was damaged.

Firefighters continued spraying the ground for a while after, while Bolton and another officer watched from across the street.

Neighbors approached with questions. At 5 feet, 5 inches, Bolton sometimes had to look up at whoever was talking. But her eyes, hidden behind black Maui Jim’s, kept tabs on everyone’s hands. She always wanted to know what the hands were doing.

He thanked Bolton for showing up, then launched into a complaint about local crime.

“Even at night we hear shooting,” he said in accented English. “Gun shooting!”

Bolton told him to call 911 whenever he sees something suspicious. The man said he did, but cops didn’t always come.

The dispatchers “still relay that information to the officers,” Bolton responded.

Talking to people may be what she likes most about the job.

Bolton plans to retire from the force in about eight years, when she turns 50, and she’s thought about what other jobs will let her keep up the conversation.

Maybe she could work for Amazon. Who doesn’t love the Amazon driver?

Around 12:30 p.m., Bolton got another call.

A homeless woman was at a nearby am/pm convenience store, and staff weren’t happy.

Reports like that were common. Bolton had found people sometimes took off before police arrived, so she first turned down a nearby alley, in case the woman fled there on foot.

Bolton parked at the am/pm. Another El Cajon cop, Kyle Webb, was already outside with a store employee. Bolton quietly joined them.

The homeless woman had gone, and the employee was furious. “She steal Snickers!” the staffer said, arms waving. She described the havoc she’d like to wreak on the accused.

“I can’t advocate violence,” Webb said, “but you’re allowed to protect yourself.”

After some more back and forth, the employee went inside.

The two cops stepped away from the entrance and traded stories about their least favorite arrests.

“We tackled a lady that — she was super high, running on the roadway, and she had urinated on herself,” Bolton said. “And then the guy with bugs.”

“I think, like, body lice,” Bolton said. “So then I felt like I had stuff crawling on me.”

“I love it when you get to jail, after you’ve already patted them down and spent some time with them and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I got MRSA,’” Webb said.

Bolton’s interactions with colleagues feel more relaxed than when she started. In the 2000s, it was more paramilitary, Bolton said. Lots of “sirs,” “ma’ams,” keep your hands crossed in the briefing room.

At 1 p.m., another call.

Bolton drove to a two-story apartment building, where a woman had said her son stole her car.

An El Cajon officer stood outside. He and Bolton briefly conferred. The other cop said he was talking to the mother, so Bolton pulled out to look for the son.

These calls were tricky to resolve, she said. It could be hard to charge someone for taking a vehicle if they once had permission to use it. Plus, this guy could be anywhere.

The lack of action sometimes left residents frustrated.

Bolton got it. Some cases left her frustrated, too.

She didn’t like that voters changed the law a few years back to limit when cops could arrest people with drugs.

Drug arrests made sense to her. She felt they could serve as a wake-up call.

Tough moments became tougher when children were involved. The previous week, she said, she and a clinician from a Psychiatric Emergency Response Team encountered a woman having some sort of breakdown.

The cops had to take her kids, both still in diapers.

Then there were the protests.

In 2016, El Cajon police shot and killed a Ugandan refugee whose vaping device was mistaken for a gun.

“It was probably the scariest time of my career,” Bolton said. “You didn’t know who were friendlies.”

George Floyd’s murder launched similar protests in seemingly every community.

During that stretch, El Cajon cops worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off for two weeks straight. You couldn’t expect help from neighboring departments because everyone was facing the same thing, Bolton said.

She was horrified by Floyd’s death — the video “made me sick to my stomach” — but disliked when protestors lumped her into the same category as Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis officer convicted of murdering Floyd.

Bolton wondered if she’d be sent home soon, since her shift started so early.

As she drove to the station for the last time, she passed a man pacing the sidewalk.

He was swinging his arms, elbows in the air. His mouth was open, although the roar of the SUV’s air conditioning made it hard to tell if he was making any noise.

The man reminded Bolton of a text she’d recently received.

A former co-worker wrote to say their nephew had been living on the streets, but might be ready for help. Could Bolton keep an eye out?

Bolton said she would look.

So far, she hadn’t seen him.

Editor’s note: The San Diego Union-Tribune accompanied Bolton for four hours during a 12-hour shift in July, and interviewed other officers and reviewed police records to illustrate additional parts of her day.

Get Essential San Diego, weekday mornings

Get top headlines from the Union-Tribune in your inbox weekday mornings, including top news, local, sports, business, entertainment and opinion.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Because the incumbents had no challengers, the city will save up to $36,000 in election costs

Coach actually doesn’t care much about the poll, but things look good for his team

As part of the Kumeyaay Community College curriculum, students and volunteers learned to weave boats Monday and Wednesday

Two-alarm fire caused extensive damage to Office Depot on Fletcher Parkway on Wednesday afternoon

Fire prompted the evacuation of adjacent businesses on Fletcher Parkway

Rain fell so hard Wednesday on Interstate 8 motorists had to pull to the side of the road

Privacy Policy Terms of Service Sign Up For Our Newsletters