In Norfolk, police often live elsewhere
‘You have a different attitude about policing when you are part of the community.’
NORFOLK — The vast majority of Norfolk officers live outside the city they police, something both the mayor and a U.S. congressman representing much of Norfolk say is a problem.
One out of every five officers lives in Norfolk, according to a Virginian-Pilot analysis of city data. Far more — nearly two-thirds of the city’s roughly 700 sworn officers — live in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.
And the proportion of officers who live in the city is smaller than Norfolk city employees on the whole. More nonsworn city employees live in Norfolk than anywhere else — about 42% of the city’s 3,920-person workforce compared to 25% in Virginia Beach and 17% in Chesapeake.
“To the extent that you have people from the outside policing our community, you’re gonna have problems,” U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Newport News, said last month at a town hall on police reform hosted by the city’s chapter of the NAACP. “You need people that grew up in Norfolk, went to high school in Norfolk, know people in Norfolk.
“You have a different attitude about policing when you are part of the community.”
At the town hall, Mayor Kenny Alexander said Scott was “absolutely right”: Officers “would think twice about drawing their weapon on a person that they worship with or attend civic league with or attend community events with — because they understand the culture, they understand the social connection. But more importantly, they are actually tied to that community.”
For decades, people pushing for police reform have urged city leaders and police chiefs to hire officers who live in the same communities in which they patrol, write tickets, use force, and investigate crime. If police live where they work, they have a stake in that community and are less likely to beat someone if they have to face that person or their family members a couple days later in the grocery store or in church.
But there’s been little research about whether residency requirements — when city leaders force officers to live within city limits as a condition of employment — are effective at rooting police in their communities, reducing how often officers use force or boosting the number of nonwhite officers in the department.
Where officers live was a focus in 2014 after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And it’s come back into focus since former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by jamming his knee into Floyd’s neck for eight or nine minutes as Floyd was pinned to the ground. (Both of those officers lived about 20 miles from the places they patrolled in communities far whiter than the places they patrolled.)
The 20.3% of Norfolk officers who live in the city they serve is below the national average. Two news organizations analyzing U.S. Census data from 2006 to 2010 found officers tended to live where they worked at significantly higher rates than Norfolk: 31% when USA Today looked at 745 cities and towns across the country for an article published in June and 40% in an analysis FiveThirtyEight did in 2014.
The USA Today examination found white officers were more likely to live outside the city for which they worked than black officers. That is not true of Norfolk. The Pilot analysis of city data showed the racial breakdown of sworn Norfolk officers — 70% white, 19% Black and 7% Hispanic — remained close whether they lived in the city or beyond.
For its analysis, The Pilot pulled data from the city’s website on its 4,625 employees, including 848 who work in the Norfolk Police Department. The Pilot chose to limit its analysis to the 694 sworn officers in the department — which includes law enforcement officers of any rank, up to and including the police chief. The 155 nonsworn police employees, such as administrative assistants and school crossing guards, were excluded because they are not armed and do not routinely engage in high-stakes encounters with people, like arresting and using force against them.
‘What moves the needle’
Whether cities should do more to get officers to live where they work has been an issue for decades and periodically flares up in discussion about police reform. In 1993, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California conducted a study and found that 83% of all Los Angeles police officers lived outside the city, arguing that police need to be “a true part of the community they patrol” and not appear to be “an outside hired force.”
In 2015 — after Brown’s death ignited civil unrest in Ferguson — President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing backed the idea that officers should live where they work. But the task force did not recommend a residency requirement. Instead of a stick, officials on the task force recommended a carrot: push local leaders to reinstitute residency programs, in which they would lure officers into cities by paying for them to live in public housing.
With the death of Floyd, the issue is back at the forefront.
Police Chief Larry Boone said it makes sense that living in the city they serve would make officers more rooted in the community. But he said he hasn’t seen any research suggesting it actually makes a difference. Plus, Boone added, he knows of officers who don’t live in Norfolk but people love them, and others who do but don’t have a strong connection to the city.
“What matters the most — whether you live in the city or not — (is) whether or not you have an authentic relationship with the folks you serve. I think that’s what moves the needle,” Boone said. “There’s nothing hard and fast on this.”
That’s one of the reasons Boone said he’s reluctant to implement or back a residency requirement. Such a mandate could also stymie the department from recruiting the best candidates because officers may not want to live in the communities they patrol or may have already settled in other cities. If current officers weren’t grandfathered in, a requirement would uproot them from communities where they’ve bought a house, go to church and have kids in school.
Plus, many officers are scared of living with their families where they police and arrest people. Boone said he lived in Norfolk the first few years he was on the force and experienced the pros and cons. Sometimes he’d be working and people who’d interacted with him when he wasn’t “Officer Boone” would wave and say hi. Other times, he’d be in a store or parking lot, minding his own business, only to spot someone he had arrested “mean mugging” him.
“That kind of gives you pause,” said Boone, who has since moved out and back to Norfolk.
Mike McKenna, a retired Norfolk officer who was heavily involved in the department’s police union for decades, echoed Boone. Even though he’s been retired for a decade, McKenna said he makes sure to face the door when he goes to a restaurant. On more than one occasion, someone he arrested decades before has approached him and “thanked” him for sending him to prison or jail, something he took as a veiled threat.
“You could’ve put them in jail 20 years ago; they are not going to forget you,” he said.
It’s one of the reasons he moved out to rural Chesapeake near the Dismal Swamp more than 35 years ago after living in Norfolk during his early years on the force. Another — people used to frequently come to his house on Bankhead Avenue for help with police work when he was off duty.
But McKenna said he agrees there’s a benefit to having officers living in Norfolk. So did Clay Messick, a 13-year veteran and president of the police union that represents more than 100 Norfolk officers, adding that he thinks officers should live in the city they patrol, if that works for them. But they shouldn’t be required to. Messick said he moved to Virginia Beach about 13 years ago when he moved to the area and joined the department because that’s where he found a house. Another officer might want to live on the Peninsula because their spouse works in Williamsburg. A third might live down in Moyock because they have parents there who can take care of their kids.
Some officers need that break from the community they work in, to get out of it so they can unwind before diving back in, Messick said. (In a 2015 interview with the New Yorker, Wilson said living 20 miles away from Ferguson gave him and his wife, who was also a Ferguson police officer, a buffer, “a chance to get out of that element.”)
“Every officer’s situation is different. Every officer’s outlook on things is different,” Messick said.
And like Boone and McKenna, Messick said just because you don’t live in Norfolk, it doesn’t mean you don’t have ties to the city, that you don’t care about what happens in the city.
“Just because you don’t lay your head where you’re protecting doesn’t mean you don’t have a vested interest in it.”
Stick versus carrot
Residency requirements for police were once much more common in American cities, but have become increasingly rare, according to a 2014 FiveThirtyEight article. Such requirements date to the turn of the 20th century, when all city workers had to live within city limits as aldermen stacked their municipal workforces with buddies and political allies.
But reformers in the 1920s argued the requirements prevented the best candidates from getting jobs and fostered corruption. Residency requirements fell out of favor.
In the 1970s, the requirements enjoyed a renaissance, especially when it came to police officers. Proponents pushed residency requirements as a way to keep taxpayer money in their cities and stop white flight to the suburbs. When it came to a police officer, it was believed to increase his “interest in the results of his work,” according to two economists cited in the FiveThirtyEight article.
Residency requirements have fizzled again in recent decades, though.
Some research suggests they may have backfired. In the 2014 FiveThirtyEight article, reporters Batya Ungar-Sargon and Andrew Flowers found police departments with residency requirements were consistently less representative of their cities’ overall racial makeup when compared to departments without a mandate.
A residency requirement isn’t the only way to get officers to live in Norfolk.
In the past, officials have tried to coax officers into the city. Boone and McKenna remember a push in the early 1990s to do so by using federal funds to pay half of their mortgages, so long as they lived in the city.
The Housing and Urban Development initiative — which still exists as the Good Neighbor Next Door program — aims to “make American communities strong … by encouraging officers, pre-K through 12th grade teachers and firefighters/emergency medical technicians to become homeowners in revitalization areas.”
Federal officials pay for half of an eligible home’s list price as long as an officer promises to live there for three years.
But the program failed in Norfolk, Boone and McKenna said. Few officers took advantage, and those who did gamed the system by finding homes that were in eligible zip codes but actually on the outskirts or even outside the city.
McKenna said one eligible zip code included a new development in Suffolk, but officials didn’t find out about it until about 10 Norfolk officers bought “really nice homes” for half price.
Boone, who had recently joined the department in 1989, said he remembers far fewer officers participating in the program — maybe two or three, but no more than five.
“It wasn’t embraced,” he said.
More recently, Norfolk’s top brass and then-City Manager Marcus Jones talked about luring officers living outside the city into Norfolk by offering Norfolk residents take-home police cruisers.
That idea never got off the ground, either. Boone said it probably cost too much.
Now, Boone has a different idea to get officers into Norfolk: recruit in Norfolk.
‘Be the difference’
Before the pandemic hit, Boone was planning to recruit more heavily in the city’s high schools by starting a cadet program. The program would essentially serve as a stepping stone for high school students interested in becoming police officers, but who aren’t old enough.
Cadets would work part time, earn $26,000 or $27,000 a year, and work alongside officers while wearing a uniform without the gun. The program would give cadets a taste of police work and a feel for the culture of the department. And those would-be officers, by definition, would have gone to high school in Norfolk.
“It could help us recruit individuals that have a better vibe of the city because they live here, they go to church here, they go to school here,” Boone said, adding that the idea for the cadet program came from an officer during one of the 30-minute, one-on-one talks Boone has had with more than 600 officers.
Even if those officers eventually moved out of Norfolk but continued to work as officers, they would still have those childhood ties to the city they were policing.
That’s something Scott pushed for during the NAACP town hall. In fact, the congressman specifically brushed aside the idea of residency requirements to focus not on forcing officers who live outside the city to move here but on recruiting would-be officers who already live here.
Or even better: those who grew up here. “So that when you take out your weapon and either beat somebody upside the head or shoot at them, the first thing that comes to your mind is … he could go to Reverend So-and-So’s church,” Scott said.
Boone and Scott said it’s not just up to the city and the department to craft top-down policies that induce Norfolk residents to become officers or lure current ones to move into the city. Norfolk residents need to step up and “be the difference” by becoming police officers, Boone said. Teachers and parents also need to encourage residents, students and their children to see becoming a police officer as a way of becoming a part of their community and being able to change it for the better.
“So that … it’s not ‘us against them,’ it’s ‘us against us,’ ” Scott said. “You’re not going to improve policing until you establish that.”
Jonathan Edwards, 757-739-7180, jonathan.edwards@pilotonline.com