Capt. Steve Strand on the highs and lows

By Mahlon Meyer
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

As Steve Strand embarked on his campaign for city council, he faced a city in turmoil, torn between conflicting visions of public safety and accountability. With a decorated military career behind him and the weight of leadership on his shoulders, Strand’’s journey promised to be a battleground of its own, fraught with challenges and unforeseen obstacles.

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) had a net loss of 35 officers last year, hiring 61—but losing 96.

So besieged and uncertain does he feel about the state of policing in this city, that Strand, now commander of the West Precinct for the SPD, which includes the Chinatown-International District (CID), and his wife got two dogs when he was promoted to captain and had to work the night shift.

“She didn’t feel comfortable being left alone at night,” he said.

If he had been appointed to the city council, he said, he was preparing his wife and teenage kids to be ready for protesters showing up at his house, “banging on pots and pans to all hours of the night,” as has already happened with other council members, he said.

Running for office

Running for office was, crucially, about preserving his own standards, said Strand.

It was hard to contact people and ask them to support him publicly.

“It was tough in my current role to reach out to people to say, ‘Hey, I’m putting in for this open position and would you mind saying some things on my behalf?’ without having a conflict of interest, and so it was a little difficult for me to navigate that, so I was really trying to reach out to people that I hadn’t talked to in years and didn’t work in my current assignment or nearby,” he said. “I didn’t want anybody to think there was an attachment, that they had to do this for me, or I wouldn’t provide some kind of a service for them.”

It was for this reason, he thought it would be easier to appeal to a group of eight councilmembers rather than face the possible compromising position of trying to appeal to the whole city.

It was heartening, though, he said, to hear stories of how he had changed people’s lives.

“It was nice to hear kind of the 360° view of my background, or who I am as a person, and there have been others along the way when you run into somebody who tells you how they’re clean and sober now because you’ve impacted their life or how they were in a gang and now they’re not, and it’s because you stayed on them and you cared and they sensed it and I turned it around,” he said.

But he stayed away from the CID—he had focused his police work heavily in that neighborhood, seen a difference, and did not want to seem as if he was asking for a return.

“I was specifically trying to stay away from the CID neighborhood because I knew they had some candidates that they really liked, and in my current role I’m working really hard on the CID to do things, and I didn’t want that to conflict with anybody’s loyalties,” he said.

It may have cost him in the appointment process.

“That’s one of the neighborhoods that I think I have a lot of support in and so it was a little tough for me to do that and not ask people for support or even tell them that I was in the running, because I think a lot of them were surprised after this process had played out that I was involved and didn’t know about it,” he said.

Work in the CID

The CID had been special to him, too.

When he was made precinct commander in 2021, morale in the department was at a low.

“Really, a lot of what I felt I had to do was get the officers encouraged to do police work again,” he said. “Because they weren’t engaged like they could or should be, and it was just to let them know that I supported them, that I would be out there with them, leading from the front, and I wouldn’t ask them to do anything I’m not willing to do myself.”

So Strand, in his uniform, and wearing coveralls from his academy days, led the way in personally painting over graffiti on the streets and buildings of the CID.

Simultaneously, he added a mobile precinct to 12th and Jackson—the site of the most prevalent drug and crime activity.

As a member of the CID Public Safety Council, he encouraged the community to come up with a flier that his officers could hand out. 

In Chinese, Vietnamese, and English, it said, “This is hurting all of us out here, what you’re doing, it’s hurting our businesses, it’s hurting our community, and our residents, and people trying to ride buses at the bus stop.”

It asked the recipients not to buy or sell stolen goods and listed support services for those in need.

“I didn’t want it to be threatening coming from the police—but more helpful coming from the community,” he said. “And it really gave our officers something they could point to and say, ‘It’s not us that are saying this.”

The results of all this work, along with the removal of encampments under freeways and getting people indoors, lowered the homicide rate, he said.

In 2022, there were seven in the CID. In 2023, there were none.

Strand did not want to take any credit for his work protecting the activism of CID leaders, though.

War and trauma

Strand was born in Seattle to a father who worked at Boeing and a mother in architecture.

After Roosevelt High School, he joined the U.S. Army. He wanted to be a photographer but partially failed his color blindness test. He was a military policeman.

He was in for three years then back home to Bellevue Community College, while he managed apartments. Transferring to the University of Washington, to complete his four-year degree, he kept managing apartments to pay his way.

He was hired by the SPD.

But he stayed in the reserves and the Washington State National Guard, until he jumped out of a helicopter and injured himself.

After three decades of deployments around the world—including all over Asia and Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and Korea, building schools and serving as a sergeant in the Green Berets (special forces)—it was in training at Fort Lewis that his career ended. 

He jumped with a parachute.

“I just hit bad.” 

He thought it was just a soft tissue injury. So he went back up two more times.

By the evening, he was in the emergency room.

It was crazy his career should end there, because he had been on the front lines in Iraq—going in his Humvee in the first wave.

“I’d been telling people, ‘You can join the reserves and National Guard and you’ll never go to war, trust me.’ I’d been in 20 years and never gone to war—and then that all changed,” he said.

But it was through his mission in Iraq he met his wife.

Stationed in Kuwait, before the war, he met her in a Starbucks, and they began to date. Eventually, they got engaged.

Strand thought it ironic that they had met in the Middle East, far from both of their homes, since she was from the Philippines, although he had been there, too.

Today, she is more pragmatic than even he is.

“I may come home and say I was involved in a shooting, and she’d say, ’Are you okay?’ and I’d say, ’Yeah, I wasn’t hit,’ and she’d say, ’Okay.’ Well, she’s much more practical than I am,” he said.

It’s not that they’re not aware of trauma.

Strand, in dealing with his own trauma, had a brief period when he drank more than was good for him. 

“But I could tell and was able to regulate it. It’s a depressant and it doesn’t really put you in a better mood even though it seems like it’s going to help,” he said.

Now, he said, among his greatest moments are when people tell him he made a difference in their lives helping them stop drinking or using.

High hopes

I told him I used to watch reruns of the TV show Adam-12 as a kid and wondered aloud how public attitudes had shifted so much.

He said in the city council race the priority initially was public safety, but that seemed to shift.

“Many of these finalists had a background in public safety, and it was difficult for me to try to overcome that without stating the obvious that nobody, none of the finalists, had my background in public safety. They couldn’t talk about it from the micro to the macro level, to working within city governments, and across departments, and anything from violence to the homeless to the fentanyl crisis, while trying to give answers within 45 seconds,” he said.

He also had high hopes for what his appointment might mean—it could have revitalized the police department and perhaps even have made it a national model.

“I thought that this would be the number one thing that the council could do,” he said. “There could be a national story to say we respect our police officers—that it’s not the old Seattle, this is something new,” he said. “And we would get candidates from around the country that would say, ’I want to go be a part of that, I want to join Seattle because they are moving in the right direction, and I want to be a part of it.’”

Mahlon can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.