Sandy Springs Police’s new HQ ‘a game changer,’ chief says

Ken DeSimone said he already had a top-notch department as the Sandy Springs Police Department’s chief, but now he has a first-rate facility to work in.

In April, the department’s new $56 million, 170,000-square foot headquarters opened on a 7.2-acre lot on Morgan Falls Road.

Previously, the department operated in four different buildings spread out in an office park where most of the city’s other departments were located prior to the new Sandy Springs City Hall complex opening in 2018. Today those police divisions – administration, uniformed patrol, criminal investigations and special operations – are united in a building that also includes the city’s municipal court.

“Before, we were working in an environment where you’d have a victim or witness come in to patrol and then had to walk another 100 yards” to take them to the right division, DeSimone said. “It’s like going to Northside Hospital and then they would push you across the parking lot to the operating room. It wasn’t conducive for doing business. Anytime you move a prisoner, that’s the opportunity for an escape right there. We’ve had two escapes in the past.”

New building ‘a game changer’

He added that the new headquarters has the latest crime-fighting technology. “And the technology is just phenomenal, what we can do with traffic cameras, automatic license plate readers,” DeSimone said. “The technology in our radios, body cameras, cars, it makes the officers a lot safer. We had an officer in a foot chase a few weeks ago and it went well. He said, ‘Track my radio.’ The supervisors pulled up his location on a map. The officer doesn’t have to know where he is because he’s running, and we’re able to track him.”

The suspect was caught minutes later. DeSimone leads a department that was formed in 2006, months after the city was incorporated. The department has 195 full-time and part-time positions (with 152 being full-time officers), plus another 10 sworn reserves and 10 part-time officers. The new building has been “a game changer” for the city in staffing terms, DeSimone said.

“Since we’ve built the building, our recruiters have had 25 calls a day from people interested in coming here,” he said.” Right now we’re fully staffed with a waiting list. We’re still recruiting.”

A Kentucky native, DeSimone has nearly 40 years of experience in law enforcement, including service in the Marines and with the University of Louisville Police. He spent 20 years with the Charlotte- Mecklenburg Police Department in Charlotte, North Carolina, before joining the Sandy Springs force in 2009. He was named the chief in 2013, replacing Terry Sult. Gene Wilson was the department’s first chief and served in that role through 2008.

Crime rate low

Overall, Sandy Springs’ crime rate is low for a city its size (107,763 residents according the U.S. Census Bureau’s website). Sandy Springs averaged 6.2 reported murder cases in the past five years and had only three reported homicides in 2024. The other reported crimes are fairly low, with averages of 18 rapes and 31 robberies in the past five years.

“For where we’re located in Fulton County and the issues that come along with Fulton, we’re very fortunate to have a crime rate so low with DeKalb County our eastern neighbor and Atlanta being just south of us,” DeSimone said. “Plus, the roads, [Georgia] 400 and [Interstate] 285, bring a lot of traffic and a lot of people [and] law enforcement issues, whether it’s crime issues or wreck issues with those two major roads. GDOT estimates that every 24 hours, over half a million pass through that intersection, making it one of the busiest intersections. The Sandy Springs Police Department is responsible for all of that.”

DeSimone said only one murder case, the death of a baby in 2006, remains unsolved, though some suspects in other cases haven’t been caught yet because they fled the state and/or the country but were identified.

When asked how the city’s police has kept the murder rate so low, he said, “The murders in Sandy Springs usually stem from two issues: domestic violence or drugs. If you fight those two problems with a strong narcotics unit, we have two victim advocates that work with victims in the first report of it. That way you can drive down your murder rate. Domestic violence is really hard to stop because we’re not in charge of who is married or dating who. Our patrol officers taking the initial report and our detectives following up on it [is key]. If you catch the domestic violence incidents early, you can have some kind of intervention, and sometimes that’s successful.”

In March, the department made the largest fentanyl bust in Georgia history, confiscating enough to kill 2.5 million people, according to a WSB-TV report. Authorities believe the individuals involved had cartel ties, and a U.S. Attorney’s Office news release stated that suspect Antwuan Brown of Alpharetta appeared in a court hearing on the case.

“Good detective work leads to good cases,” DeSimone said.

Appen lawsuit

Other than the individuals accused of committing crimes in the city, the department’s biggest enemy might be Appen Media. The company sued Sandy Springs in 2023 in Fulton County Superior Court, accusing the police of not providing all the info it requested in its monthly open records requests as part of its coverage of Sandy Springs and other cities. Appen lost the county suit but won in part its appeal to the Georgia Court of Appeals, which ruled on the case in March.

Appen claimed that when the city would email its latest incident reports, they only included officers’ comments of one to two sentences instead of the full comments, which were several sentences and provided more details on each case.

The city argued that the longer reports, called narrative reports or supplemental reports, were exempt from disclosure under the Georgia Open Records Act, and the Fulton court sided with the city. In March, the Georgia Court of Appeals’ three-judge panel of Brian Rickman, Amanda Mercier and Christopher McFadden gave a split decision on the case, ruling in three parts.

“1. The Open Records Act should be construed to require the disclosure of the more detailed narratives to the extent they concern law enforcement’s initial response to an incident,” Rickman wrote in the court’s opinion. 

“2. The evidence suggests that more detailed narratives may exist for the incidents that were the subjects of Appen Media’s requests and, therefore, the city may have violated the Open Records Act by failing to disclose them.

“3. Neither party is entitled to summary judgment at this stage. Because questions of fact exist as to whether the city produced all initial incident reports requested by Appen Media, neither the city nor Appen Media is entitled to summary judgment. For this reason, I concur in the majority’s ultimate conclusion that we must reverse the grant of summary judgment to the city and affirm the denial of summary judgment to Appen Media.”

Because the city is appealing the appeals court’s decision, DeSimone declined to comment on the case.

Hans Appen, Appen Media’s publisher and CEO, said the court of appeals has turned the case back to the trial court, and his company is waiting for the city to respond/resolve it by sending the full reports to it.