Marsh says the biggest change is the people since taking over as Police Chief – Forsyth County News Online

The Cumming Police Department has seen a lot of changes over the last year, including a new chief, new hires and new vehicles, but Cumming Police Chief David Marsh said experience might be the most important change of all.

In July 2019, Marsh was sworn-in an as the new chief of the Cumming Police Department, after working with the Forsyth County Sheriffs Office since 2004.

Marsh said since he stepped into the role, the department has made some cosmetic changes for vehicles and patches and added new equipment, but the reality is the biggest change is the people, 100%.

We have, including me, 21 people working here at the Police Department, Marsh said. When I first started, we had seven, so we had a pretty strong push to get good people in, to get good people hired, to get good people working, and Im pleasantly surprised that we have been able to get that mark.

The chief said those hires have all been for uniformed officers and have run the gamut from new officers to those with experience in Forsyth, Hall and Gwinnett counties and the city of Atlanta, which he counts as a big benefit for the department.

What were really looking forward to in the future is just training and cultivating our police department around that leadership, Marsh said. We dont have a ton of shootings in the city of Cumming, which is great, which is awesome, but should we have one, its nice that we have people that know how to handle that kind of stuff.

Experience is one of the things that everyone wants to have but no one wants to get because it takes years and you have to go through hard things to learn from experience, so when you bring people in that have truly lifetimes of experience from one of the hardest places in the country, it just changes the dynamics of this place exponentially.

Experience isnt the only change the new employees have brought.

Marsh said when he came to the department, officers were not handling calls at all hours of the day, and now they are.

So that was one of the biggest pushes was to get enough officers in who we could kind of fulfill our duties as a police department and handle calls for service, he said. Thats the real basic mandate of what our job is, when 911 calls come in, we need officers that are working around the clock, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and we didnt have that.

Another internal change has been the addition of a criminal investigation division to look at property and person crimes that have been committed, whereas before the job fell on one officer and was done in addition to their other duties.

What theyve been able to provide in way of investigations to our city, you cant even imagine what its like, Marsh said, and it even concerned me a little bit because, essentially, this agency, we werent investigating any property crime. Anything that was considered a person crime, we were sending to the sheriffs office and they were adding that to the list of however many person crimes that they have. I have been just so proud of their ability to take cases and work them as completely as possible.

Over the past year or so, the department has also seen some additions of new equipment including body cameras, cameras in vehicles and nine new police vehicles.

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Marsh says the biggest change is the people since taking over as Police Chief - Forsyth County News Online