WASHOUGAL — New Washougal Police Chief Wendi Steinbronn comes to the city after running a precinct in Portland where 135 employees cover 58 square miles.
On Nov. 30, she took over the Washougal department, where 21 sworn officers and four nonsworn employees police 6.8 square miles. But Steinbronn, 55, isn’t looking to wind down her career. She’s looking to get back to some of the happiest times of her law enforcement career.
“For me, this is a return to the small-team concept,” she said. “Some of the best times of my career have been leading teams of eight people up to 35 people. In a large precinct, I was getting to a point where I didn’t know everybody’s names, or I couldn’t name something about them as people.”
In her first few weeks, Steinbronn has tried to attend as many community events as possible, from a Meals on Wheels luncheon to bell ringing outside Safeway for the Salvation Army. She’s also been meeting one-on-one with every member of the department.
“She’s been so engaged,” Mayor Molly Coston said. “She’s been attending almost everything. She’s been out there in the community.”
Steinbronn said that’s one bonus of working in a smaller city. While she was able to forge relationships with community members in Portland, she anticipates that being a bit easier to do in a small city like Washougal. That’s something Ridgefield Police Chief John Brooks — who once worked with Steinbronn in Portland and sent her the Washougal job posting — told her he noticed after taking over the Ridgefield department in 2016.
“It’s really refreshing to feel like you’re such an integral part of the community and have people recognize who you are and feel comfortable coming up to talk to you,” Brooks said. “That is really gratifying. It’s quite enjoyable to come from a large agency, where it’s hard to make relationships at such a high level.”
Steinbronn said she feels it’s important for the community to know who she is.
“I’m approachable,” she said. “I want people to talk to me.”
She succeeds Ron Mitchell, who retired in November.
During the search for Mitchell’s successor, Camas Police Chief Mitch Lackey sat in on a panel interview, and said one thing Steinbronn told the panel really stuck with him. She was talking about how she worked with Portland business owners by giving them her cellphone number, and said they could reach out to her if they were having problems.
“It’s very much like something we’d do in small city for our local business community,” Lackey said.
He’s excited to have Steinbronn aboard, especially since their two agencies regularly work together.
“The (Camas-Washougal) border is this imaginary jagged line,” Lackey said. “Our officers float back and forth almost daily.”
Setting an example
Steinbronn didn’t set out to become a small-town police chief. She had spent 25 years and 11 months working in Portland as a patrol officer, sergeant and lieutenant and had reached retirement age. She thought about serving an even 30 years on the force. When Brooks sent her the Washougal job listing, she thought it was a perfect fit.
Not only was it more in line with the more close-knit law enforcement style she liked, it was right next door. Steinbronn and her husband, Rich Steinbronn, have lived in Camas for the last 15 years, and their son, Chris Steinbronn, is a Camas High School freshman.
“(Steinbronn) has long had a fantastic reputation,” Brooks said. “I’m really pleased she is over there in Washougal. That’s going to be a great fit for her. What a great opportunity for the community to have someone who is almost like a hometown person, but has a whole other kind of experience to bring to the table that might be something different than what the community had before.”
She said she and her family enjoy checking out the trails around Camas, and she’s started exploring more parts of Washougal recently, too. Steinbronn is an active runner, and said she runs partly to keep in shape and partly as a way to wind down when not working. She said she’s seen the stress of the job get to plenty of co-workers, and as she received promotions her last few years in Portland, she noticed she was working more hours off the clock and thinking about work even more frequently.
“I would always tell my departments to take care of themselves,” she said. “The city and department are entities. They can’t care about you. I, myself, wasn’t setting a good example, though. I wasn’t doing that.”
Steinbronn has spent the last few years with a renewed energy toward her own health outside of work. She downloaded a meditation app that has helped. At a recent job fair at Hathaway Elementary School, she saw a booth for a local yoga studio. She talked to people at the booth about teaching yoga to the department.
Just a soccer mom
Another way to reduce stress outside of work is to not allow “shop talk” at home, Steinbronn said. That was hard at first, as she met her husband while both worked for the Portland Police Bureau. He’s a sergeant over in Portland.
But they’ve since agreed to try and leave work at work. One way they do that is with computer gaming. Steinbronn said it started a few years back when she worked a 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift. She and the other officers on her shift would go home, hop on their computers and play “World of Warcraft,” “Counter-Strike” and other games. She still plays computer games with her husband and their son.
She also likes to watch her son’s soccer and baseball games. Steinbronn will be in an awkward position when her son plays for Camas and takes on Washougal, although Steinbronn expects to root for the Papermakers in those scenarios. Regardless of what color shirt Steinbronn is wearing in the stands at those games, one big reason she’s spent a lot of her first few weeks as police chief getting out in the community is so that people know who she is — in her law enforcement role and as their neighbor.
“We need the community support, and it helps when they see us out there,” she said. “That’s where we get our legitimacy from. But I also want people to know that when I take off ‘my costume,’ as I call it, I’m just a middle-aged soccer mom.”
