Columbia County Sheriff's Office unveils new Appling headquarters

Alexandra Koch, Augusta Chronicle
·2 min read

The Columbia County Sheriff's Office unveiled it's new headquarters on Tuesday during a ribbon cutting ceremony.

The building, located at 2273 County Camp Rd., Appling, is more than 27,000 square feet and features upgraded technology that Sheriff Clay Whittle said will assist deputies in real time.

The project started nearly 14 years ago, according to Whittle. The agency was previously unconsolidated, with different departments housed in various offices scattered throughout the county.

"The day we moved in here, we went from as many as three investigators in one office to investigators having their own office, where they could actually sit down with people and have interviews with victims and their families and not have to ask the other two investigators to leave the room," Whittle said.

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The conference rooms in the new building feature integrated TVs, closed-circuit monitors and other technology that Whittle said allows employees to monitor what is happening in real-time, adding to the agency's manpower and decreasing time spent searching for criminals.

He specifically noted a chase on Lewiston Road last week, where the agency was able to use traffic cameras to monitor an armed suspect who fled to nearby businesses and then eventually into the woods.

"Ultimately, the crime scene was huge," Whittle said. "We knew he had a gun based on what the victim was saying and within a matter of a minute or two, with the crime analyst working on the cameras, we could prove he had the gun.

"... For the CID folks, while they were out on the street, we were able to give them the locations within a matter of minutes of where [the suspect] was when he did certain things like pulled the gun on the victim. We were able to release that to them right away and actually took some short videos and sent it to them via text message."

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Columbia County Sheriff's Office opens new headquarters in Appling