Boise Police Department’s new Chief of Police, Chris Dennison swore in at a packed city hall on Aug. 28. As outgoing Chief Ron Winegar prepares to cap off a three-decade career and enters retirement, we spoke to him and the heads of two other emergency response agencies in Ada County about what duties a chief must fulfill, and what they find desirable in a leader.
“First and foremost, the Chief of Police is an advisor to the mayor,” said Sheriff Matt Clifford. “I think you need to have someone who can go to the mayor and say ‘Hey, this is how this should work or this is how this works.’”
Clifford currently serves as Sheriff of Ada County. Before his election, Sheriff Clifford served as Chief of Police in Eagle, ID, which contracts its police department from the Ada County Sheriff’s Office.
“[You need] to have somebody that’s going to be a good leader for the Boise police,” Clifford said. “I think they want someone to lead them — someone that’s going to say ‘here’s what we are going to do, come with me.’”
Chief Shawn Rayne of Ada County Paramedics believes that leaders must also be teachers. Rayne was appointed to his position in 2020 after a brief stint as the EMS Division Chief at the Boise Fire Department. Chief Rayne has served in Emergency Medical Services for 28 years.
“If you look at my department, our current leadership, I believe all of them have been a field training officer — that’s the person who is literally teaching the new paramedics and EMTs as they come into the agency,” Rayne said. “That’s why I strongly believe that you have to be a teacher at heart.”
Law enforcement officers also must undergo the field training (FTO) process, where senior officers serve as FTOs who train and evaluate newly recruited junior officers.
So, while the new chief steps into his role, what challenges await him?
The leaders we spoke with noted increasing gang activity, a geographically and numerically expanding community and a technical increase in crime.
One of the biggest challenges facing first responders is the rapid growth of the Treasure Valley.
The growth of Boise and its surrounding area has catalyzed efforts of all emergency response agencies in the Treasure Valley to work together. The Sheriff and Chief Paramedic both stressed the importance of cooperation.
“It becomes important, when those big calls happen, that we’ve already sat down and we know each other on a first-name basis,” said Rayne. “Even though we’re doing very different things, we’re trying to accomplish that task together. And we really can’t do that if [we’re not] able to communicate so that one hand knows what the other is doing.”
“We’ve had to really, in the last couple of years, stand up and go ‘we need a lot more cooperation across the whole valley,’” said Clifford. “We have to, as agency heads, communicate much more- because there’s no farm fields that distance us between cities anymore.”
Both Clifford and Rayne said that in their times serving Ada County, the cooperation between agencies has improved dramatically.
“Fifteen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t uncommon on Boise Guardian or even the newspaper to see EMS and Fire fighting like cats and dogs,” said Rayne. “And so we started working toward the development of a system, as opposed to [all agencies] doing something different.”
Rayne said this new system has been a “game changer,” ensuring that any changes made to emergency service operations are unanimously approved by a board of elected officials and that the agencies train jointly, not independently.
“Now, I’m on a first-name basis with every Fire Chief in Ada County and their Deputy Chiefs, we routinely go out to lunch together and that was unheard of twenty years ago, you would never have seen that happen,” said Rayne.
“If you look at Star [ID], in the last year Star has seen a 250% increase in their population,” said Rayne.
For Ada County Paramedics, it poses an especially big challenge: as they only receive 30% of their funding from taxes; the remaining 70% must come from the fees they charge for using their ambulance service, resulting in a struggle to fund their agency.
While funding for paramedics does not inherently affect BPD, the problem that faces paramedics could also affect policing, as they often work together.
This rapid growth presents policing challenges, too.
“We enjoy a very low crime rate here. But just mathematically, there is more crime. The crime rate’s the same, but there’s just more of it,” Clifford said.
While the crime rate has not risen, the population of the city and county has increased – meaning that the crime rate, a percent value, now represents a greater number of crimes.
Outgoing Chief Winegar noted that increasing gang activity poses an additional challenge for the new Chief of Police.
“We have lots of challenges in our community- but gang activity is on the increase,” Winegar said. “We have issues with gangs evolving and presenting themselves in the community.”
In terms of what qualities he finds desirable, Winegar stressed that the chief should have passion.
“Charisma — that’s not really that important,” Winegar said. “It’s more important that they care. That they have a deep love for the community and the department, that they’re committed to doing the right things and making sure we have accountability, making sure we have resources and tools we need to do the job, and simply leading.”
