After two years at Cabrillo College and a couple more at Southern Oregon University, Steve Walpole Jr. embarked on a 30-year career in policing that would see him rise through the ranks in Watsonville and Los Gatos, before returning to work in his hometown of Scotts Valley as a lieutenant and making chief in 2017.
But shortly after this year’s State of the City ceremony, where he highlighted the steady performance of a department that is now just one person shy of full-strength, he broke the news to the town that he’d decided it was time to hand in his badge.
Walpole—who plans to retire at the end of October—has served 11 years with the Scotts Valley Police Department, including the last eight as police chief.
“I’ve been kinda mulling it over since this summer, when my youngest child graduated college,” he said, during a sit-down interview in his office at the police station. “I think they’re ready to move on to a future without me. I didn’t want to leave the PD in a bad state of affairs. We have a lot of good, qualified people that are ready to take the next steps in their careers.”
Walpole is the sort of guy who’s always sporting a friendly smile and isn’t afraid to use a moment of glory to advocate for a community concern (like when he was named Scotts Valley Man of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce and used his speech to lobby for a return of Fourth of July fireworks).
He was shaped by his unique upbringing as the son of Steve Walpole Sr., a pivotal SVPD chief, raised in the same South Nevarra Drive house from birth through graduation.
His criminology and political science studies prepared him for some aspects of the police academy, which he attended in 1995.
“I’d just graduated college, so the academics were not that difficult,” recalled Walpole, adding that the taking-people-into-custody part and the learning-to-shoot part was a bit more challenging. “I wasn’t familiar with firearms at all.”
His feet were put to the fire, where he began as a patrol officer, down in Watsonville.
“Watsonville was just a very different community than Scotts Valley in the mid-’90s,” he said. “And, at that point, I had some second thoughts about joining law enforcement.”
Walpole stepped back, becoming a butcher at Zanotto’s, where Scotts Valley Market is now, staying on with Watsonville PD as a reserve officer who would volunteer on the weekend.
“Fun job,” he said, half-joking. “I was like, ‘This is awful. I’m going to try this law enforcement thing again.’”
But he said he wanted to try something different, this time.
“I ended up going to Los Gatos PD, which was much more familiar to me, because it’s a small town,” he said. “It has Highway 17 cutting right through the middle of it. It was basically a bigger Scotts Valley.”
Larry Todd was chief there at the time, and Walpole remembers him as a “cop’s cop.”
“He came from Southern California,” he said. “I think he hired me mostly because I did have a good recommendation from my time in Watsonville.”
Los Gatos was a small enough community at the time that he wasn’t assigned to a particular beat. During his time in the Silicon Valley town, he got experience doing pretty much everything, including investigating homicides.
But policing in 1997 was a totally different animal from how things work today. For one, they’d have to use their batons, since they didn’t have Tasers yet.
“There were no in-car computers, so you had to memorize all the streets,” he said. “And then, when a call would come out, you would have to pull over and write down the information a dispatcher was giving you on a piece of paper…all of those things happened while I was in Los Gatos between ’97 and 2003.”
Walpole was promoted to patrol sergeant and then became an administrative sergeant. After Todd, came Chief Scott Seaman, who Walpole said was “much more political in nature” and made community outreach a major priority.
“Los Gatos was very into community-oriented policing and being out in the public—very much like Scotts Valley was like at the time,” he said, when asked about the lessons he learned over there. “The important thing for me is not to be stuck in your office—is to get out and be seen in the public. People will call their local police department if they know somebody in the police department.”
Those tips always pay-off best, he mused. (“They were nervous about calling the police department, but they weren’t nervous about calling Steve Walpole.”)
One of his first moves as the head of SVPD was to institute body-worn cameras on officers. He also began publicizing demographic data of suspects, so the public could track whether racial biases were creeping into arrest decisions or not.
Walpole said the key to building an effective force is to instill good values in officers arriving from the academy. Crime is not going to come to you. You need to be proactive as a police officer, he’d say.
When you are active in the community, people take notice.
“We will go to all types of calls,” said Walpole, taking a dig at some jurisdictions that wouldn’t send someone out to non-injury accidents or shoplifting reports. “The community sees that, and is more likely to report those kinds of activities to us.”
Walpole said he understands that, thanks to the lightening of consequences for people caught shoplifting, some people were able to avoid a criminal record and got a second chance. But, he added, overall, things didn’t work out as intended. Their data began showing an uptick in retail theft. The policy was reversed too slowly, he added.
“The cost was, a lot of retail establishments went out of business, because they couldn’t afford to keep losing product,” he said.
Walpole recalled the time he got the call from Cal Fire, telling him officers needed to go door-to-door and evacuate the town, during the CZU Lightning Complex Fire of 2020.
“That was insane,” he said. “That was a 24-hour day for everyone.”
And who could forget about last year’s tornado?
“That was absolutely crazy,” Walpole said. “It was shocking.”
Walpole said he sees big challenges ahead for SVPD.
“I think the big concern in the department, in the City, is, ‘Do we have the staffing to continue to keep Scotts Valley safe, as more and more housing is being built in town?’” he said. “We’re going to see a dramatic increase in the population of Scotts Valley, and we’re probably going to need additional officers being hired, if we want to keep the quick response time.”
After all, there were 28 budgeted positions back in 1990 (20 sworn officers, seven dispatchers and a civilian support person), and still 28 today. Walpole said he’s mentioned this to City Manager Mali LaGoe.
“I said, ‘That’s going to be something to keep your eye on,’” he related.
Walpole said he’s probably going to get another job (he jokes he can’t just garden full-time) but that he doesn’t have another role to announce just yet.
“I’m just going to miss serving the community,” he said. “I’ll miss that part of it. … It’s just been an honor and a pleasure serving the Scotts Valley community.”
