ROSWELL, Ga. -- Roswell named James W. Conroy as its new police chief on Thursday.
Conroy served as DeKalb County's police chief since 2013 before recently retiring.
In its announcement, the city described Conroy as a "transformational leader with the DeKalb County Police Department for 28 years."
Conroy replaces former Chief Rusty Grant, who resigned earlier this year amid multiple 11Alive investigations into the police department.
That year-long investigation by our 11Alive’s The Reveal investigators led to multiple firings, resignations and a top-to-bottom review of the department by an outside vendor.
The first story revealed that a driver was arrested after two officers flipped a coin to decide whether or not she would go to jail.
Then body cam obtained by 11Alive uncovered an attack on a teen suspect by a police K-9 despite multiple commands from his Roswell police handler to stop.
The Fulton County district attorney opened a criminal investigation into the intentional freezing of a 13-year-old boy that also lead to the demotion of a sergeant in the case.
Since that time, 11Alive Chief Investigator Brendan Keefe, has uncovered even more cases where police command staff knew or approved of verbal counseling, only to take more serious action after 11Alive requested records from those incidents.
The city commissioned an audit of its police department by an outside agency in 2018 as a direct result of 11Alive's investigations. The 182-page audit was released last month. The overwhelmingly-positive audit did not directly address the incidents we uncovered that resulted in terminations and criminal investigations of Roswell officers.
A city spokesperson said Conroy led a major restructuring in Dekalb County that resulted in a more streamlined and efficient command structure. He begins at the end of the month.