Retiring Boise police chief reflects on department’s growth and a ‘troubling trend’

On Thursday, Boise Police Chief Ron Winegar celebrated his retirement – again.

Winegar served the department from 1993 to 2021. He came out of retirement in 2022 at the request of Mayor Lauren McLean after a turbulent two years at the department, when nine officers brought forward allegations against then-Chief Ryan Lee.

“I was frankly surprised and certainly honored to receive a call and ask if I’d be willing to consider coming back and serving as the acting chief for a time,” Winegar told the Idaho Statesman at the time.

During his tenure, Winegar tried to help the department keep pace with the city’s rapid growth. In 2022, he told the Statesman he aimed to hire more field trainers to bring the department’s many new hires up to speed.

Now, “we are just at the point where we can see the fruition coming,” he said Thursday in an interview during a celebratory barbecue at City Hall West. With 24 new officers in the police academy, he anticipated the department would soon see a “precipitous drop” in overtime as they wrapped up their training and went to work.

Winegar expressed pride that crime in Boise had been dropping in recent years, but he said he was concerned by one “troubling trend”: a rise in assaults against officers.

Since COVID-19, he’s observed a “‘keyboard warrior’ mentality,” he said. “You’re hiding behind anonymity, and there’s just this vitriol and divisiveness and hatred that seems to be more prevalent online. But obviously, that spills over into personal encounters as well.”

Over his career, Winegar said he’s seen the department start to share more information with the community, particularly about officer-involved shootings.

In the 1990s, “our media relations policy – well, there wasn’t a policy, but our practice was to say ‘no comment,’” he said. Now, “we’re releasing information quicker, more information. It might not seem like that … but trust me, so much more information is being relayed today than it was 30 years ago.”

Friday is slated to be Winegar’s last day. It falls on the anniversary of the night he and another officer, Mark Stall, were shot while on duty. Stall died of his injuries that night. On Thursday, Winegar said he wished he had spent more time working on an idea for a proposed tribute to fallen officers: light posts at the scenes where Stall and Ada County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Tobin Bolter were killed.

“That’s personal to me,” he said.

As for what’s in store in retirement, Winegar and his wife are planning a trip to Nova Scotia – and tackling all the home improvement projects that have piled up.

“The garage finally has to be cleaned,” he said.