Hanceville had been through eight police chiefs in as many years when mayor Kenneth Nail named Bob Long to the position. In the 12 years since, the city hasn’t needed to search for someone to fill the chief’s role Long first accepted back in 2011. Instead, for more than a decade with Long at the helm, the Hanceville Police Department has been able to focus on the pressing task at hand: Searching for actual criminals.

“I’d like to think I’ve left things better than I found them,” says Long, who’ll turn 61 this year after serving a combined 28 years in Alabama law enforcement. “The department has grown substantially, as we’ve adjusted to accommodate the higher and higher call volumes that we have every day and every month. Technology has advanced a lot from when I first started out, too — and we’ve tried to advance along with it.”

Long already had been serving as a part-time Hanceville officer when Nail appointed him to the chief’s position shortly after the historic 2011 tornado outbreak racked the city. Twelve years later, it’s a decision Nail says he’s never regretted. “Bob has been a dedicated employee, and he’s always been willing to do for the city anything that I’ve ever asked,” he says, before making a slight play on the chief’s last name. “And,” he adds, “Bob’s as honest as the day is long.”

An Indiana native who came to neighboring Blount County for love rather than law enforcement, Long first moved to Alabama in the 1980s to pursue his original passion: training show horses. He’d already trained Arabians as part of an apprenticeship in Arizona, before moving to the Deep South to continue his career — and, as it turned out, to go ahead and get hitched himself.

“Once I was living and training horses in Alabama, one of my clients set me up on a blind date — and it’s the only one I ever went on in my entire life,” he jokes, “because I ended up marrying her.”

Yolanda, Long’s wife, is a Blount County native with deep local ties, and that’s where the freshly wedded couple ended up settling. These days she’s supportive enough of Bob’s horse hobby to serve as the namesake for the Longs’ fledgling new “Y.O.” Ranch — but horses weren’t on the early career agenda back when the two first got married.

“She told me I had to go out and get a ‘real’ job,” Bob recalls. “So I went into law enforcement … and it has been.”

That was around 1993, and Long started out as a reserve deputy for the Blount County Sheriff’s Office. By 1995, he was working as a corrections officer, paying his own way through the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Academy before moving on to patrol officer roles at police departments in Sumiton, Dora, and Adamsville.

Now with a career’s worth of police perspective, Long says that combatting crime, even in small towns, is an eternal balance between the proactive and the reactive. and he’ll be the first to tell you that no well-run police department — no matter what kind of city it serves — can ever completely stop perpetrators from perpetrating.

“It’s here to stay,” he says. “Anybody who tells you they don’t have a crime problem, and especially a drug problem, is either mistaken or naïve. The drug may change, but it’s always a problem. Methamphetamine was the big thing we were fighting for a while, and now you’re looking at fentanyl and even heroin, which is coming back in a way that we see locally. As long as there are drugs, there’ll be crime. In a city like Hanceville, you can pretty much tie most of your crime — especially most of your property crime — back to drugs.”

The Longs are happy with the city Bob has protected and served; happy enough to make it their permanent home in his retirement. They’re midway through construction on a bardominium-style house on the city’s east side, complete with an adjacent arena and pasture, where horses Rabbini Damas Amir (a half-Arabian who goes by “Ben”) and Black Magic Romance (an Arabian purebred who answers to “Mac”) await Bob’s return to his pre-police equestrian passion.

“Yeah, I’d say we like it here,” Long says as an understatement, surrounded by shop tools in his unfinished kitchen. “We raised our children on Blount County land; land that my wife’s grandfather bought in the early 1900s. I built my own house down there. But we liked Hanceville so well that we bought these six acres; liked it well enough to build our new house here … and sell our other place down there.”