Urbana's new police chief draws on his past to inform his present and future

Sep. 18—URBANA — The concrete walls of the Norfolk, Va., housing project were sweating on a hot summer day in the early 1990s when Larry Boone and his partner entered a small apartment.

The young police officers both quickly noticed the mattresses on the floor, the roaches crawling around and the empty refrigerator.

"My partner, who happened to be Caucasian, it made him very uncomfortable," said Boone, who is Black. "When he left, he made a comment, 'How do people live like this? These are freaking animals.'

"That was a strange world to him, being a young, White male, having been afforded all of the luxuries of life," he continued. "I say that because he was my partner and I knew about him. He made that comment assuming I had lived the same life that he had. Otherwise, he wouldn't have felt comfortable saying that."

Boone recognized those damp walls, the mess and the beds on the floor, which were likely the sign of a family trying to squeeze several kids into a small apartment.

Decades later, on the wall in his new office at the Urbana police station, where he took over as chief on July 31, hangs a photo of similar concrete buildings. Boone points to a window on the second floor.

"I lived right there," he said. "I've seen and experienced everything that goes on in public housing."

That day in the early '90s, Boone decided to tell his partner about his childhood in that two-bedroom apartment in a New Brunswick, N.J., housing project, where he lived with his mother and three siblings in a building that consisted of mostly Black and Hispanic families. The only time he interacted with White people those days, he said, was when he went to school and when police officers came to his neighborhood.

In the few years he'd spent as a member of the Norfolk Police Department, he hadn't told anyone about a childhood that would shape his perspective on policing. After all, he'd shown the ability to adapt to new surroundings — first as a high schooler, when he moved to North Carolina to live with his grandparents, and then as a college football player, where he won two Football Championship Subdivision national titles at Georgia Southern.

During his 33 years with Norfolk police, Boone rose through the ranks, becoming chief in 2016. His perspective, he thinks, is relatively rare among police chiefs around the country.

"Whether you're Black, White, Asian, LGBTQ+, I am very comfortable around everyone," he said. "Because my life has captured that."

Boone left the only department he ever knew in 2022 after becoming embroiled in what he deemed "politics." Now, he's embarking on a new stage of his career in Urbana, leading the type of organization he once feared.

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As a child, Boone said he always looked older than he was, particularly when he shot up to 6 feet tall as an eighth-grader. That's part of the reason, he thinks, that as he walked near his home one day, a police officer stopped him, put his hands on him and told him a specific spot on which to stand.

Today, he realizes that the officer was making him part of a "show-up," in which police line up possible suspects in a crime as a victim tries to identify the perpetrator.

Confused as to why he was stopped, Boone looked toward the police car.

"There was a young man in the back of the car, and his face was bloody and bruised," he said.

Eventually, the officers let him go, but not without an unsettling message.

"One of them kicked me in the butt and said, 'If it wasn't you this time, N-word, it'll be you the next one,'" he said. "I'll never forget that morning, because I urinated all over myself."

A few weeks later, he was stopped again.

"I don't know if it was the same two officers, but I do know this — when they grabbed me, I thought of the last time I was stopped by police, and I pulled away," he said. "They quickly let me know they were in charge."

The officers brought him to the station and arrested him. Charges were eventually dropped, but his football coaches caught wind of his struggles with law enforcement. They arranged a meeting with his mother and encouraged her to send him away to live with his grandparents in North Carolina. She agreed, and the summer before he was set to begin high school, he left home.

"I always say to young people, 'Whatever your gift is, show it,'" he said. "Because whatever it is, somebody will see it, and they will take an interest in you, and they will help you get where you need to go. In my case, I was really good at sports."

The environment in his grandparents' home was far different from his mother's, who "did the best she could under the circumstances" but suffered from her own "ills and challenges," Boone said.

"In that environment, there was a different expectation," Boone said. "You made curfew. You did your homework. You went to church."

Boone went on to play football at the junior-college level before earning a scholarship to Georgia Southern.

In the middle of a game, his life's trajectory became clear.

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Boone picked himself up off the ground after celebrating a tackle during a game against James Madison University, looked over to the sideline and saw something that shocked him — a Black police officer. Throughout the game, he constantly repositioned himself to get a better look at the officer.

"He looked like a bodybuilder, he had his full uniform on, and he just carried himself in a way that impressed me, and it's hard to impress me," he said. "I made up my mind and said, 'I'd like to try that one day.'"

Before he embarked on his eventual career, though, he had one dream to pursue — playing in the NFL. That was stopped short during a physical with an NFL team, when a doctor looked at his left leg.

"The doctor said, 'Young man, have you ever injured this knee?' I said, 'Yes,'" he said.

Boone's mind went back to high school, when he injured his knee and had surgery to clean up cartilage damage. Before the injury, he was a running back. After the injury, he noticed he'd fall if he cut certain ways. After sitting out his first year of junior college to rehab his knee, he switched positions and learned to run with limited use of his left leg.

"There were certain things my left leg would not do, so I gave up the idea of running the football and just decided to focus on defense," Boone said. "My mindset was such that I didn't want to go back to poverty, so I had to find a way to do something different."

The NFL doctor, though, was taken aback when he looked closely at the knee.

"I'll never forget, he looked up at me, and he had on those eyeglasses that make your eyes look big," Boone remembered. "He said, 'Son, how in the hell did you play collegiate football without an ACL?' I said, 'What is that?' He said, 'At some point in your life, you tore your ACL.'"

The discovery of the injury ended his NFL career before it started.

"In my mind, that was my way out," Boone said. "But I had a backup plan.

"I've always known that I've wanted to be in a position to influence people, and me coming from where I came, I couldn't have done it without folks helping me. In a sense, that becomes contagious, and you feel obligated. I know I do. You feel obligated to give back.

"(Becoming a police officer) was a natural progression of my personality. I had to become accustomed to discipline and structure and teamwork and winning. Helping people, things of that nature. It was a natural fit for my personality. I'm kind of an alpha guy. "

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Boone joined the Norfolk Police Department in 1989. Fourteen years later, he got his first promotion. After that, his ascension was quick. He rose from sergeant to lieutenant to captain to assistant chief to deputy chief, and finally, in 2016, chief of police.

During his six years as chief, Boone prided himself on creating policies and programs that he views as progressive. Under his leadership, Norfolk police began tracking guns recovered in crimes back to their original point of sale and confronting the sellers.

He placed an emphasis on engaging youth in positive situations. After a man was charged with dealing drugs out of an ice cream truck, police began using the impounded truck to give out free ice cream to kids, calling it a "COPsicle" truck. Under his leadership, the department also put on youth-engagement programs that taught kids how to play chess and read, along with bi-weekly meetings at barber shops with male patrons and a yearly father-daughter-style dance that includes officers and girls aged 6 to 13.

Boone promoted the department's first African American female captain, first African American female assistant chief, first Hispanic captain and first LGBTQ captain.

Boone prided himself on making inroads with the LGBTQ community and said he's learned about "real bravery" and "what a manly man is" from his transgender son.

All the while, Boone points out, crimes reported in Norfolk dropped from 12,039 in 2016, when he became chief in December, to 10,523 the following year. In 2021, his final full year on the job, the number was 9,110.

Boone said he believes the beginning of the end of his 33-year career in Norfolk came in June 2020, when he became the focus of national attention.

On that summer day, Boone was preparing for a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of George Floyd's murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The previous day, rioters had burned down a police precinct in Minneapolis, and Boone heard rumors that protesters in Norfolk planned to do the same.

With his crowd-management team tucked inside the building so as not to create an environment that pitted a row of police against protesters, Boone stepped out in front of the precinct amid hundreds of protesters.

"At first, they were really angry," he said. "Some of them were as close as 6 or 7 inches away. They were yelling until I could feel their spittle hitting my face. I happened to see a guy that, as an organization, we had a relationship with. I started speaking with protesters and commending them on their behavior, and I started to bring them down.

"Then, out of nowhere, they started chanting, 'Will you march with us?'" Boone said. "I had a concern about the optics of that, because I knew that it might not look favorable to some of my officers, but at the same time, conversely, it may not look favorable to some of the protesters and some of the community if I didn't."

Instead of marching, Boone decided to wade into the crowd and began answering questions. Then, he took a question from a man who had heard Boone speak previously about what to do when stopped by police.

"At those events, I stated, 'When you're stopped by police, stay with them, don't run, don't resist,' et cetera," Boone said. "He said, 'Chief Boone, I've seen you speak about what to do when you're stopped by police, and George Floyd did all of that, and he still died.' He said, 'What do you have to say about that?'

"I said, 'I have nothing to say about it except that it was a slow, casual murder.' He said, 'Will you hold this sign?'"

The sign read, "Stop killing my Black brothers and sisters." Boone declined. The man handed him another sign that read "Black Lives Matter" in large writing, with the names of Black people who had died at the hands of police and rogue vigilantes written in small letters.

"I knew that there would be backlash, but my chief concern was that I had gotten that crowd settled down," he said. "They became peaceful. And my concern was in losing them. And if I lost them, they would have returned to the precinct, they would have stormed that building, and we were easily outmatched. ... So we're talking about potential injury, potential damage to the building. So I held the sign, and I knew it would be problematic, and I just took a chance."

"Everything kind of settled down, but my phone started ringing off the hook with positive comments and negative comments from all walks of life. But I knew that it would cost me professionally."

Boone began receiving national attention for his handling of the protests, both positively and negatively. On Fox News, conservative host Laura Ingraham railed against him. Conversely, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex and wife of Prince Harry, complimented him in remarks to students at her high school alma mater.

More controversy followed. The next April, the officer in charge of the internal-affairs department was found to have donated $25 to the legal defense fund of Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who was charged with and eventually acquitted of homicide in the shootings of three people, two fatally, at a protest of a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis. Along with his donation, the officer made a comment that included the statement "Every rank-and-file police officer supports you."

After an investigation, Boone fired the officer.

"What a lot of people don't know is, my issue was not his donation, although that looks bad," Boone said. "My issue was the comment he made associated with the contribution, that the entire police department supported him, and that put the entire organization in a compromising position."

Politics, though, made his position as chief untenable, Boone said. In May 2022, he decided to retire from the Norfolk Police Department.

"I knew my time was getting limited because folks in the union were making things difficult," he said, "and they were in the ear of city leadership."

In the ensuing year, Boone was a finalist to lead several departments, including Cincinnati, St. Louis and Fort Myers, Fla., among others.

Throughout that process, he began to believe that his reputation preceded him. While he prides himself on being a progressive police chief, Boone would rather be known for policies and programs than a photo that may have been partially misunderstood.

"What you start to understand is, a lot of cities and these search firms, they look good when they bring top, stellar police candidates to their city," he said. "They've done their job, but they also bring people they know they're not going to pick.

"For me, it's never been about ability; it's been, 'Can the rank and file accept him?' And the challenge was out there. I've never been in trouble, I've done 33 years of policing, and I've never gotten a letter of reprimand, a suspension. Nothing. I've never done anything to get in trouble. I've never been in a situation where I was told, 'Don't do that again.'

"I'm a law-and-order kind of guy. The challenge was just being a leader in a very dramatic time in policing. And that's just the reality of it."

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That's how Boone found himself in Urbana, a city of 38,681, according to U.S. Census data, less than a fifth of the size of Norfolk. In a smaller city, Boone hopes to advance the department into modern ways of policing.

With one college football championship ring on each hand, he sat behind his desk in the Urbana City Building recently and showed off the new ways in which the department is capturing crime data for public consumption.

"One of the things that we want to implement is data capture that paints a picture," he said. "When I was sworn in, I made a statement that we'll be a different department, because I'm coming in with a brand-new set of eyes in trying to build a police department that is couched in the 21st century, that is data driven, community relations driven."

"Me coming here, there was an expectation of growth resource-wise, whether it's human capital, software, et cetera," he added. "I made trips from Virginia to here five times, and all of those times, those were my concerns should I accept the job. When I said 'We're going to look different,' that's what I meant."

On his walls are photos of himself playing football in addition to various policing awards and pictures he took with both Michelle and Barack Obama. Those photos and awards remind him of the places he's gone and the things he's accomplished.

The large photo of his childhood home positioned in the center, though, reminds him of something different. It reminds him of that kid with the bloodied face in the back of the police car. It reminds him of his cousins and friends who were shot and killed, and of his brother, who is unable to care for himself after years of drug addiction.

His life, he knows, could have gone down a different path.

"I keep it there because it keeps me grounded to remember where I started," he said. "Eight times out of 10, I probably would have been a statistic. I've been very blessed."