IN FOCUS: The future of Longview Police Department

Yahoo

18-05-2025

TYLER, Texas (KETK) – In this edition of East Texas In Focus, KETK's Nolan Hoffman spoke with the Chief of the Longview Police Department, Anthony Boone about his plans for the future of policing in the city.
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Boone earned his bachelor's degree in criminal justice from UT Tyler in 2000 and started working with Longview PD in 2001. He's worked on three patrol shifts, the tactical team, the bicycle team and as a field training officer.
He was promoted to assistant chief in 2015 before earning his master's degree from Tarleton State University in 2019. Boone worked with his predecessor for several years and was then named chief of police in 2022.
'You get hired in your early 20's to be a police officer, and it's about going out and doing patrol work and answering the calls for service and making traffic contacts and so forth. And then as you develop in your career, you realize there's a business side to anything, even in the municipal world. So there's staffing, there's HR stuff to be had, there's training that needs to occur, there's budgets that you have to operate within, cars you have to buy, gas that needs to be in the cars. So, definitely my role has expanded over the almost quarter century at the city of Longview.'
One major challenge the department recently faced was moving into their new headquarters 17 months ago without interrupting their service.
'I definitely think that the move from across the street to here was one of our largest challenges. It was everything that goes into construction and then getting all the finishing touches on to a building beyond just the brick and mortar, making sure everything technologically works and does what it's supposed to,' Boone said. 'Then you have to worry about evidence operations, how you get everything over there, you keep integrity and everything in the process of the move. and so that was, quite a bit of logistics went into to making that move. I think for the most part, it's gone over very well.'
For Boone, their new office helps Longview PD fulfill his mantra of 'Providing Professional Policing' which is how he wants his staff to work with the community.
'I like providing professional policing because it's very simple and we apply it to everything that we do. To me, it is our brand. and it doesn't matter what happens in the rest of the world, but I want our citizens to know that when they call Longview Police Department, they're expecting their professional officer to show up, that's going to help them with their with their situation,' Boone said. 'I tell every new officer that comes on board, really, new officer, new professional employee, new dispatcher that it's really about the brand and this patch is our brand, this badge is our brand. And I want them to to protect that and not let it get tarnished. To me, when you're taking care of the brand and doing the right thing for the right reasons, in the process of that, you're taking care of your community and you're providing them the services that they deserve.'
Part of this approach is what Boone called a sort of customer survey that some community members will get to give feedback to the department on how their officers did on calls. The SPIDR Tech system will display the officer's name and how well they responded to surveyed calls.
'It means so much to us. Not only do we track it as administrators, but we actually even put free space where people can add some additional comments besides just the scoring. We actually publicize those scores internally. So we have a couple monitors throughout the building that are constantly showing that feedback that our public has given us and it even has the officer's name,' Boone said. 'The overwhelming majority of that is very positive and it's great for an officer to see his or her name up there and saying, 'hey this is what this is and after I left, this is what they thought about the service I provided.''
Looking ahead toward the future, Boone said the city is fortunate to have crime rates that are trending down.
'We are very fortunate right now to be on a trend where our homicides are reduced. In fact, really, our crime overall is reduced. I would like to think It's a lot of the efforts that we're, we're trying to do right now. but again, I'm not going to sit here and take take credit for everything that's occurring,' Boone said. 'Going back to our intel division, going back to our push for traffic enforcement, I think when you put all of this together, that's when I think you start to see some advantages to crime situations going on in the community.'
To hear the first half of Nolan's interview with Boone, watch the video above. In a future episode of East Texas In Focus, East Texans will get to hear the rest of Nolan and Boone's conversation which covered issues like homelessness.
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