SPOKANE, Wash. – After 27 years with the Spokane Police Department (SPD), Interim Chief Justin Lundgren’s last day will be on Monday.
The second-generation Spokane Police officer announced (SCSO), right as Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown .
Lundgren has been serving as Spokane’s interim police chief since January, after former longtime chief Craig Meidl .
When he last sat down with NonStop Local for an interview in February, he made it clear this was a temporary position, in the wake of Meidl’s departure and ahead of a new voice taking the lead amidst a mayoral administration transition.
“I would say our team brought stability, it certainly wasn’t me or any one person,” Lundgren said Wednesday, when asked if he was successful in that goal. “I think it was all of us as a leadership team saying, ‘we’re going to get through the transition. We’ve gone through chief selections before, and it’s going to be alright. We’re going to bring somebody in and they’re going to make their mark on the department.”
It’s been quite the tumultuous seven-month interim tenure at the helm for an interim chief, which included a rash of officer-involved shootings over the span of a couple weeks to start out the year.
“In looking at them all individually, they’re an incident that you can’t generalize and trendset,” Lundgren said. “We just continue to reinforce the message and the training to our officers, which is that we control the things we can control. We make the community safe, we want them to be safe and [our officers] do everything they can to de-escalate that situation.”
That’s been followed by the challenges of navigating one of Spokane’s most expensive departments through the city’s current budget crisis.
“The worst thing that can happen is to not provide any information at all [to our employees],” Lundgren said. “We have been making a concerted effort to have frank conversations, to talk about the very worst possible situation that could happen with the police department and what that could look like, with the hope that officers, all of our employees and our volunteers know this is the worst case scenario–it’s not going to be that bad.”
Lundgren said he never planned on stepping into the chief role, but called it “a huge honor.”
“It’s a different feel, it’s a different role than even the assistant chief position,” Lundgren continued. “There’s a certain weight to it that I don’t think you can fully appreciate until you try it.”
Lundgren won’t be going far–his new job will be across the hall at Spokane County’s Public Safety Building–as an Inspector with SCSO, overseeing all patrol aspects for the department outside of Spokane Valley city limits.
“It’s going to provide me an opportunity to continue to have an impact,” Lundgren said. “I can try to be a positive force in the community for public safety, and maybe have a better work life balance.”
In the meantime, Lundgren calls incoming chief Kevin Hall extremely qualified, and said he’s ready to help him however he can.
“I’m just going to approach it with an open mind, learn more about him and his philosophy and opinions and give him as much information as possible about the community, how things work in Spokane,” Lundgren said. “I think it’s going to be exciting days, months and years ahead.”
Once Lundgren leaves SPD, current Assistant SPD Chief Mike McNab will take over the interim role until Hall takes over. Hall’s start date has yet to be finalized, but SPD says they expect it to be before September.
