COBB COUNTY, Ga. — After serving a little more than two years as police chief over the Acworth Police Department, Jesse Evans is returning to the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office as Deputy Chief Assistant to newly elected District Attorney Sonya Allen.
“The bittersweet part is I’m leaving a place that is home to me. But I also know there is a lot of work that needs to be done down in the judicial system and I’m prepared to shoulder some of that weight to try to make things better,” Jesse Evans, Deputy Chief Assistant of the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, said.
Evans was sworn into his new role Monday afternoon. Prior to Evans’ time as police chief in his hometown of Acworth, Evans served as Chief Assistant District Attorney for the Paulding County District Attorney’s office and spent 20 years before that as Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney in Cobb County.
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“What an immense sense of pride it’s been for me to be able to serve as police chief here in my hometown,” Evans said.
During Evans’ time as police chief in Acworth, he said some of his biggest accomplishments were using technology to police smarter, not harder and helping victims of crime.
“We’re the first agency in the county to have a full-time victim advocate,” Evans told Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell.
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Now Evans is passing the baton to Mark Cheatham. The two stood in a packed room as Cheatham was sworn into the department as police chief, Monday morning.
Chief Cheatham began serving the city of Acworth in 2001 as an officer. He worked his way up the ranks to detective, Sergeant, Lieutenant, to Captain and as Major.
Evans is returning to a new administration at the Cobb County District Attorney’s office at the request of newly elected District Attorney, Sonya Allen.
“She’s asked me to serve as her chief at the DA’s office, to come in and address some systemic problems that have been going on at the judicial complex. We’ve heard stories of cronyism and perhaps people able to get deals that would not be appropriate in a prior administration’. I served under that’s just an example of some of the things that we need to look at and try to fix,” Evans said.
Evans told Channel 2 Action News he is focused on leadership.
“My mission is to go back there and focus on leadership and focus on recruitment and focus on how we can better the system that has candidly been suffering for the last several years. There’s good people that work at the DA’s office and that’s the great foundational thing. There are a lot of good leaders that are down there at the district attorney’s office, but they’ve been lacking leadership for a period of time now. Now as a positional leader hopefully I can help with the management of cases and those otherwise talented individuals that remain at the office.
Evans said the DA’s office has already brought a number of new prosecutors onto the team.
“We’ve been able to recruit a lot of talented prosecutors that have gone to different offices and are coming from those offices and want to return back to Cobb,” said Evans.
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