Bellevue taps first woman chief of police

Bellevue's interim police chief Linda Pillo was named chief Friday, besting five other candidates from around the nation.

Pillo, 51, the first woman chief in Bellevue, has held the job since May when Chief Jim Montgomery retired after 10 years in the top post.

Running a police department is something Pillo never expected to do when she started police work on Mercer Island after graduating from Washington State University in 1978, she said, although she did aspire to be a supervisor.

Pillo joined the Bellevue department in 1986 and rose from lieutenant to captain, major, deputy chief and, now, chief.

Bellevue faces substantial challenges in maintaining its position as one of the safest cities in the United States, she says.

"We definitely have some challenges ahead in terms of growth and density and our diverse community."

It will be a job, she noted, just to maintain the city's enviably low crime rates.

"We enjoy a very low rate of person crimes," she said, attributing that achievement to a variety of factors, including the socioeconomic level of the community, the department's rapid response to situations and its prevention measures such as a "premier domestic-violence program."

FBI statistics issued this month show that in the first half of 2007, Bellevue had no homicides and that the rates for rape, robbery and assault all fell.

Still, Pillo said, there are opportunities for improvement — building stronger partnerships with Bellevue's diverse ethnic population, finding a way to police dense high-rise housing and using technology to improve services.

"It's about us finding ways to work smarter," she said.

Changes Pillo envisions include using bicycle officers in high-density areas, exploring whether citizens would rather file some types of police reports online instead of face-to-face and enhancing efforts to communicate with the community.

Such improved communications might involve living-room meetings with residents, ads or articles in community newspapers in various languages, changing the department's Internet site or even using blogs to encourage a sense of partnership and trust between officers and the community.

It's not always easy to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between police efforts and quality of life, Pillo says: "Some things you just can't measure."

But you can identify broad areas of improvement. For example, Pillo said, city gang activity of the 1980s and 1990s has virtually disappeared, partly because the police have school-resource officers working closely with the schools.

"We really have a network," she said, and the results, so far, have been gratifying.

"Truly, we have done very well in catching those people who commit violent crime," she said.

Peyton Whitely: 206-464-2259 or pwhitely@seattletimes.com.