After nearly 4 decades, veteran lawman retires, says he’ll miss his ‘DPS family’
In career that took him across Texas, longtime law enforcement official ‘never made any excuses’ on the job
Over nearly four decades with the state Department of Public Safety, Philip “Duane” Steen arrested scores of drunken drivers, had his car riddled with bullets by a fleeing suspect and helped dismantle a meth operation in Central Texas.
After starting as a rookie trooper in Denton, he worked in nearly every corner of Texas, with stops in Austin (three times), Waco, Garland and San Antonio. Along the way, he helped oversee takedowns of marijuana grow-house operations that produced up to $250 million a year and pill-mill busts aimed at curbing the rise of opioids.
Steen in 2011 came to Houston, where he spent the next seven years working as the director for Region 2, which covers Houston and 35 surrounding counties.
Steen officially retired Friday, ending a distinguished career that began when Ronald Reagan was in his first year as president. Law enforcement colleagues praised him for his steady leadership and ability to work effectively with other agencies.
Former Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland said he occasionally sought Steen’s help tracking down suspects who had fled outside of Houston or when his officers were working bigger cases.
“Anytime I had a task force that we needed to deal with stolen property, gangs or narcotics, Duane always was willing to contribute resources,” he recalled. “He never made any excuses, never said, ‘I can’t do it.’ I never heard a word like that from Duane.”
For his part, Steen, 60, said he is looking forward to retirement but will miss his “DPS family.”
“It feels bittersweet,” Steen said. He will be succeeded by Texas Ranger Maj. Jason Taylor of Houston.
Steen, among the agency’s highest-ranking black officials, made the decision to join the DPS after his car broke down near Waller County. A trooper drove past him, then turned around and circled back.
A Texas A&M student at the time, Steen didn’t know many police officers, and he was worried.
“We’re going to be in bad trouble,” he thought, as the trooper pulled up behind him.
Instead, the trooper — John Tucker — gave him and a friend a lift back to Navasota, showing Steen how the speed radar worked along tbe way.
“He was very professional, friendly, cordial,” Steen recalled.
Steen worked briefly at the College Station police department before joining DPS. His
path would cross with Tucker’s years later, when Tucker applied for a promotion. Steen was on the promotion board.
“I told the board I was starting out with a very favorable impression of him,” Steen said, chuckling.
‘Doing the right thing’
As a trooper in the early 1980s, he responded to similar incidents — broken-down vehicles and crashes on the roads around Denton. On the highways, drivers traveled faster — and he saw firsthand the human toll of speeding. Many of those days have blurred together, but he will never forget some deaths. He responded to one crash on Interstate 35, north of Dallas, and found a young woman dead. She was driving back to Texas from Oklahoma when she crashed and died.
The woman’s father gave Steen a photo of her; he wanted Steen to remember her as a vibrant young woman, not a mangled body on the freeway.
Steen held onto that memory during frustrating traffic stops, when motorists complained that he should chase “real criminals.”
“You know you’re doing the right thing because you’re trying to make that highway safer for all people,” he said.
Three years after becoming trooper, Steen was promoted to the department’s narcotics division. He got married, had two kids and spent nearly 20 years handling drug investigations and other major criminal probes — many of which were undercover. Those assignments could get tricky: One attempted undercover arrest ended with a fleeing suspect riddling Steen’s car with bullets as he gave chase.
Even as he retires, he remains tight-lipped about many of those cases. He’s proud of one case, though, that snagged a Central Texas meth manufacturer responsible for supplying drugs to a number of counties across the region.
Those cases taught him to call his wife, Kathy, to let her know he was alright.
Working on that case and others taught him the value of relationships with others in law enforcement, something he drew upon when coordinating large, sprawling multiagency investigations.
“It was the most effective means of rendering some criminal organization ineffective,” he said. “If you’re working a local investigation, you may arrest two or three guys working together, but their area of impact is relatively small, mainly within a town or county. We were impacting drug trafficking all across the nation, working these conspiracy investigations.”
Fred Milanowski, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Houston office, said Steen helped coordinate operations in Houston’s Texas AntiGang center and on other local task forces. The two also worked closely during the Santa Fe High School mass shooting that left 10 dead and 13 wounded.
“Duane and DPS have been great partners with ATF, from robbery and gang investigations to the Santa Fe school shooting,” Milanowski said. “We thank him for his service.”
Steen has also witnessed DPS become more focused on building trust with the communities it serves. Relations between law enforcement and the black community have been stressed by officer-related shootings of unarmed African-Americans, as well as incidents like the 2015 arrest of Sandra Bland in Waller County. She was jailed after becoming involved in a tense exchange with a state trooper who pulled her over for an improper lane change. Days later, she was found dead in her jail cell, a death that was ruled a suicide.
Time for Bermuda shorts
Speaking generally, Steen said, “When you have a concern about what law enforcement did, but you don’t have anybody you can reach out to that you know and trust … you’re always a little suspicious about whether they’re going to be completely transparent and tell you the truth. We started working to build relationships with people who may have sometimes felt like they weren’t completely certain about law enforcement.”
Now, he’s going to spend time with his wife and his grown children and grandchildren, many of whom live in and around Houston.
He plans to ditch his uniform for Bermuda shorts, the gun for his fishing pole.
As for what else is ahead, he says, “I’m going to wait and see what happens.”