Longtime Kalispell Police records official heads into retirement

Teresa Parker went to work when she was just a junior in high school and after nearly half a century, she’s ready for the joys of retirement.

Parker retired from the Kalispell Police Department Dec. 1 after 32 years. While she performed many duties for the department, she retired as its records management specialist.

First on the retirement agenda for Parker and her husband, Rick, is a trip to North Pole, Alaska, for a Christmas gathering with their children and grandkids.

Judging from her plans following the trip, Parker will not get bored.

“First I have to clean my office at home so I can get to my sewing machine and do some quilting projects,” Parker said. “I want to clean my office at church and I’ll be busy with my little kids in Sunday school class.”

The Eureka native began working in the city clerk’s office in the 1970s. The job also included dispatching emergency calls and that ultimately led to her career in law enforcement.

“Back then, there were no pagers, so when a fire call came in, we’d go outside and push the buttons to set off the alarms,” Parker said. “I moved to Whitefish after high school and worked at North Valley Hospital,” Parker said. “We did the dispatch work for the police and fire departments at the hospital.”

Parker worked the day shift as a dispatcher for the Whitefish Police Department in 1980 and in 1985, she took on another job as a part-time dispatcher for Kalispell’s police force. In 1989, she became a full-time employee in Kalispell.

“We got a computerized records system and we went from card files to everything being computerized. The advances in technology are the biggest changes I’ve seen in this line of work,” Parker said.

BEFORE COMPUTERS, crimes would be marked on what amounted to a big map, she recalled.

“You’d make a little hash mark to denote the type of offense and where it happened,” she said. “Every month, I’d send it to the FBI for their records. Back then, you could have probably sent it out just once a year.”

But before the records work, Parker worked as a dispatcher until 2000. Some of her most vivid memories occurred while taking emergency calls.

“There was one call from a woman who was giving her children a bath when a former partner shot his way into her apartment,” Parker said. “I told her to hold the door shut and not let him in. He got into the bathroom just as our guys got there and got everything under control.

“It came out OK, but I was sure I was going to hear her die,” Parker said. “I can only imagine how traumatic it was for her, but it was the most traumatic one I ever dealt with.”

Parker and the responding officers were honored for their work in the case. She also received the Meritorious Service medal and the local Elks Lodge honored her.

Parker began splitting time between dispatching calls and records management. Part of the work in records included compiling statistics for use by law enforcement agencies.

Local departments submit their data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. According to the agency, the program includes data from more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies. Agencies participate voluntarily and the information is also for students of criminal justice, researchers, the media and the public. The program has been providing crime statistics since 1930.

Parker ultimately became the gatekeeper for people who needed records for various court or insurance matters.

“Attorneys needed reports for various cases, including divorce proceedings, and people may need a police report for an insurance claim,” she said.

PARKER SAID training her replacement was a challenge when she tried to recall everything she knew.

“I loved my job because the technology was always changing, but recalling everything has been tough. You do so many things automatically. I spent the last few years making notes of steps and procedures so I could teach the new person,” Parker said.

Parker has been recognized by the Montana Law Enforcement Information and Records Association with its “Above and Beyond” award for her work in incident-based reports.

Those reports capture details on each single crime incident — as well as on separate offenses within the same incident — including information on victims, known offenders, relationships between victims and offenders, arrestees, and property involved in crimes.

The data goes much deeper because of its ability to provide circumstances and context for crimes like location, time of day, and whether the incident was cleared.

“I answered a lot of calls from other agencies on how to do work with the incident based reports,” Parker said.

She was also there when the department transitioned to Windows from its DOS system. That led her to working in Libby when its police force needed help installing a new system. Ultimately, she trained others in departments across Montana when they put in new computer systems.

Parker said she worked under five different chiefs of police in Kalispell.

“I outlasted a lot of them, but I think that was mostly because I was younger,” Parker said with a laugh.

She started thinking about retirement when she started running into new officers who were children of officers she had worked with in Whitefish and Kalispell.

Her other retirement plans include diving into a Lithuanian cookbook.

“My son and his wife live in Lithuania and my daughter-in-law gave me a cookbook of their food so I plan on cooking my way through it,” Parker said.