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Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish speaks at a press conference at the Long Beach Police Department on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023. Photo by Maison Tran.<\/p>\nAfter 32 years in uniform and a career punctuated by declining murders, spiking traffic deaths\u00a0 and challenges retaining officers, Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish announced Wednesday that he will retire in December.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hebeish, who began his career in 1994 with the Orange County Sheriff\u2019s Department and joined the Long Beach Police Department a year later, stepped into the limelight in 2021 when he replaced then-Chief Robert Luna, who went on to become the LA County Sheriff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hebeish declined a request to comment on Wednesday. In a characteristically terse and formal statement, he thanked the department that he described leading through \u201csome of the most challenging times we have faced in modern law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a separate statement sent by department spokesperson Allison Gallagher, Hebeish said he had been \u201ccontemplating and planning my retirement for some time,\u201d and wanted to see through the department\u2019s newest round of academy cadets and a tough budget year before leaving. \u201cIt\u2019s been a rewarding [five] years as Chief and I\u2019m proud of everything the Department has accomplished,\u201d the statement said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Mayor Rex Richardson did not respond to a request for comment. In a social media post Wednesday, Richardson praised Hebeish, saying his legacy is one of \u201cleadership, progress, and a deep commitment to our community and the men and women who serve it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWally Hebeish has always been a public servant focused on keeping people safe and a person of high integrity,\u201d said Rep. Robert Garcia, who served as mayor when Hebeish first became chief. \u201cLong Beach has been lucky to have had him as Chief, and I\u2019m thankful to have worked with him.\u201d<\/p>\n
City Manager Tom Modica said the outgoing chief led the department through a \u201ctransformative period in modern policing\u201d and did so with \u201cintegrity, compassion and an unwavering commitment\u201d to the public. \u201cWe thank Chief Hebeish for his decades of public service and wish him the best in his retirement,\u201d Modica said. \u201cAs we begin the search for our next Chief of Police, we will build on the strong foundation he leaves behind.\u201d<\/p>\n
Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish speaks at a press conference at the Long Beach Police Department on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023. Photo by Maison Tran.<\/p>\n
Modica said the city plans to hire a recruitment firm in the next two weeks to begin a national search he hopes to finish by early next year. Candidates will be screened through the city\u2019s human resources department and undergo interviews with a community panel, a technical panel and city department directors. The final choice will ultimately be made by Modica.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The city manager will also be creating a \u201ccommunity input process;\u201d the city will announce something in the next couple of weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gerrit DeJongh of the Long Beach Police Officers Association said the union wants a chief with experience at a department of similar size who is \u201clevel-headed and fair-minded.\u201d<\/p>\n
The union supports a nationwide search, he said, but believes the department has \u201cphenomenal internal candidates as well.\u201d \u201cIf the city manager wants to have a discussion or wants the [union\u2019s] opinion on it, I\u2019d be happy to offer it,\u201d DeJongh added.<\/p>\n
Born in Cairo and raised in North Long Beach, Hebeish became the city\u2019s first Arab American and Muslim to lead the department. After joining in 1995, he worked in criminal intelligence, investigations, patrol and internal affairs, and later served as chief of staff, deputy chief of the Support and Patrol bureaus and assistant chief, a post he took in 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He became<\/a> acting chief in 2021 while Luna, then the chief, recovered after being struck by a truck while crossing a street. Hebeish was appointed to the top job in December of that year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Commanding a department of 800 sworn officers and another 1,200 employees, Hebeish took over the post amid intense pressure<\/a> on police departments nationwide following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Meanwhile, the instability of the pandemic led to a spike in murders<\/a> around the country. Like many departments, Long Beach grappled with new expectations of its police leaders and a need to rebuild public trust against challenges to retain officers.<\/p>\n In Long Beach, it was a balancing act with some success. Hebeish touts a citywide decline<\/a> in murders, particularly fatal shootings, during his tenure. He said the city saw year-over-year reductions in shootings and, in 2025, its first recorded year without an officer-involved shooting.\u00a0<\/p>\n He credited a High Crime Focus Team, created in 2024, which directs patrols to the places where violent crime, illegal firearms and quality-of-life complaints occur most often, with helping to reduce gun violence. He also lobbied for funding for a Real Time Crime Center, established a program for drones that back up police, launched a public online crime dashboard and instituted a yearly accountability report<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n City officials and the department also point to its largest academy class on record, the opening of a new police academy<\/a>, creation of a Neighborhood Safety Bike Team and expansion of its team that handles nonemergency calls.\u00a0<\/p>\n DeJongh is especially proud of the department\u2019s Wellness Division and its Community Services Bureau, which Hebeish helped lead while assistant chief. The program, he explained, watches for traumatic officer-involved incidents and refers them to counseling. It came about shortly after a string of officer suicides rocked the department.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI cannot help but to think or believe that the experiences and the trauma they experienced on this job played into their decision to take their own lives,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can only help but wonder, you know, could we even save just one of them if we had something like this in place at the time?\u201d<\/p>\n But Hebeish leaves a department that has long suffered high vacancy rates, which has slowed response times. An August 2024 analysis<\/a> of city data by the Post found 155 vacancies, about one in five officers. For all but the highest-priority calls, officers were taking more than 20 minutes longer to respond than they had three years earlier, the analysis found.\u00a0<\/p>\n While dealing with a shortage of officers, the department announced it would stop responding to many minor noninjury crashes<\/a> to focus on priority calls. Questions remain over how the department has handled traffic safety enforcement, as the city recorded 53 fatal traffic collisions in 2025 \u2014 the most in over a decade and surpassing the city\u2019s homicide count that year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fatalities continue to climb<\/a> into 2026, reaching more than 40 traffic deaths as of mid-October.\u00a0<\/p>\n Public trust in the city police department continues to be an issue, as well, as criticisms are regularly slung at the department during city council meetings over the department\u2019s handling<\/a> of homelessness and the federal immigration raids<\/a> that have continued throughout Long Beach over the past year.\u00a0<\/p>\n The city\u2019s Office of Police Oversight, established in 2022, has also urged the department to improve how it deals with the families of those killed by police and witnesses to shootings, following the 2024 killing of Brandon Boyd. The oversight commission has previously questioned whether internal investigations are handled in a timely manner<\/a> and asked the department to review<\/a> policies for when officers respond to domestic violence calls.<\/p>\n A previous version of this story incorrectly described the city\u2019s plans to get public input before hiring a new police chief. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After 32 years in uniform and a career punctuated by declining murders, spiking traffic deaths\u00a0 and challenges retaining…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[194800,131,133,132,867],"class_list":["post-503545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-chief-wally-habeish","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-long-beach-police-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/19may24-pride-2-434730-2rgvjtg4-716514-xuP7RROx.jpg\")
Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish walks with other police officers in the 41st Annual Long Beach Pride Parade in Long Beach, Sunday, May 19, 2024. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.<\/p>\n