Longboat welcomes its new chief

As a kid growing up in Pompano Beach, Russ Mager had exactly zero interest in being a cop. After graduating from Florida State University with a major in psychology and minor in criminology, he had zero interest in joining a police force. In fact, Mager didn’t start his law enforcement career until age 30, after having spent several years in hotel management.

And yet here he is, the new police chief of Longboat Key, fresh from a three-year stint as top cop of the Delray Beach Police Department, where he spent 29 years, beginning as a patrol officer. “Most chiefs of police have always wanted to be a cop, always had aspirations, always wanted to move up the food chain,” Mager, 59, says. “I’m kind of funny in that I got a late start.”

In his late 20s, Mager had grown weary of being transferred from hotel to hotel, worrying about his job status as major chains gobbled up each other. He accepted an offer from a friend to share an apartment in Boca Raton. That friend was a cop, who pressed his housemate into doing a ride-along. Afterward, Mager was intrigued. 

He applied on a lark, passed all the stringent screening, and got hired by Delray Beach. Mager underwent a year of arduous training, some of which raised further doubts. “The police academy was very paramilitary,” he recalls. “I’m 30 years old and these guys are screaming and yelling at me. I was like, ‘What did I sign up for?’” After another five months of by-the-book field training, Mager was handed the keys to a patrol car. “I was able to start making [the job] my own and enjoying it,” he says. “I felt like I could have a positive influence, treat people well, arrest people if I had to, but do it with dignity and respect. It was a powerful position to have, and I felt I was able to use it for the greater good.”

He rose steadily through the ranks — sergeant to lieutenant to captain to assistant chief to chief. Alas, the Delray Beach PD does not have the rank of major, depriving him of serving as Major Mager. At every rung on the ladder, he “never accepted the status quo,” he says. “I worked to make things at least a little bit better.”

Observe and protect 

Longboat’s new chief left an agency with 175 sworn officers and 60 non-police personnel and joined one with 19 sworn officers and three supplemental staffers — in a town with a median age of 71.5, a median property value of about a million bucks, an extremely low crime rate, and effectively no violent crime.

During a late-August interview, Mager had been at his job for all of four weeks. He was still getting adjusted, gathering a feel for his department before considering changes. “It’s easy to come in, start flexing and saying, ‘I’m chief and I come from his big organization and we’re gonna flip this place upside down,’” he says. “But that’s not my style, and candidly, I’m in the observation phase.”

Major believes in community policing, which means getting to know residents, developing relationships, working to be a positive force in the community and striving to be viewed positively by residents. That’s in contrast to traditional policing, where officers essentially respond to calls.

Photo by Lori Sax

From that first stint as a patrol cop in Delray Beach’s tougher neighborhoods — where all rookies started — he worked to establish connections with residents, many of whom were minorities and wary of the police. “It was hard at first, but I just got out of my car a lot and walked, threw a football or shot some baskets with kids,” he says.

Probably his best gambit involved donuts. “After briefing, I’d go to Dunkin Donuts, buy two dozen, park where I’d see kids and throw the box on the trunk of my patrol car,” he says (and yes, he gets the irony). “What kid doesn’t like donuts? Soon enough they’d start coming over and eating them. When you could get to the young kids, you could get to the families.”

Value add

While crime may not be much of an issue on Longboat Key, policing involves a lot more than that. Mager’s team deals with parking issues, traffic management in a community with a robust tourist season, quality-of-life issues such as loud music, boating problems, dogs on the beach, kids congregating on sandbars and poppin’ beers. And then there’s the threat of hurricanes. If one hits, it can tax a small police department past its limits. 

As far as true crime, Mager says the biggest issue is fraud, mostly against the elderly, often perpetrated from well outside city limits. “There’s an education component,” he says, “getting out to the HOAs and communities and really trying to help people be aware of what these scams look like.” 

Mager lives near downtown Sarasota, about seven miles from his office. His wife, Beth, recently retired as a sergeant with the Coral Gables police department. She has family here, so the move from Delray to Longboat was planned before the job opening came to Mager’s attention. The Magers have two kids living with them and one back on the east coast. 

The new chief appreciates the family-oriented culture of his force, made possible by its relative smallness. “I’d sort of been-there-done-that with the bigger organization,” he says. “It’s like being a CEO of a business — a business that just so happens to be called police. Here, I was handed something with a good playbook, good people, a good system. I just want to make it better and have the agency be of real value to the community.”