By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

After five years, West Seattle and South Park police are about to get a new boss.

As reported here Friday, Capt. Pierre Davis is leaving.

“Big shoes to fill,” says the Southwest Precinct‘s next commander, Capt. Kevin Grossman. We talked with him by phone on Monday.

This won’t be his first time running a precinct. – he was South Precinct commander 2017-2019, and is currently commander of the Special Victims section, which handles cases including sexual assault. His department bio notes that he’s also served as liaison officer to the Seattle Housing Authority, supervisor in the Audit, Policy, and Research section, aide in the Chief’s Office, supervisor in the Office of Police Accountability, watch commander in two precincts, operations lieutenant in the North Precinct, and seven years as a hostage negotiator for.

His SPD career started 24 years ago, but before he started enforcing the law, he practiced law, graduating from law school and working for a while in the state Attorney General’s Office, primarily on mental-health commitments. But a professor inspired interest in policing while he was in law school at the University of Wisconsin – Herman Goldstein, known for work such as “Policing a Free Society” – and it wasn’t long until Grossman’s post-law-school interest turned that way, toward a career for which he professes “a passion.”

Almost 20 years after starting his policing career, Grossman went back to school, for a master’s degree in public administration from the UW‘s vaunted Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. So that gives him extra management chops for running an operation like a precinct – he describes his background as ‘well-rounded.”

But what about West Seattle – any experience here? In the first year or so of his SPD career, Grossman recalls, his early rotations included some time with another officer patroling Delridge – that was back when West Seattle was part of the South Precinct. He also spent a lot of time in West Seattle while visiting friends near Lincoln Park.

He also notes he’s worked before with all three of the precinct’s watch-commander lieutenants, as well as with the new operations lieutenant (second-in-command), Sina Ebinger – they both served on the East Precinct’s Community Police Team. (We’re checking on the next assignment for the current operations commander, Lt. Steve Strand, who – like Lt. Ebinger – is a West Seattle resident.)

He says he’s a “big believer” in both using data – he checks the department’s dashboards daily – and listening to the community; he plans to continue the various channels established for the latter, such as the Precinct Advisory Council.

Capt. Grossman will take over at the Southwest Precinct on July 1st.

(Photo by Karen Orders)