CHARLESTON, W.Va. — City of Charleston Chief of Police Scott Dempsey is continuing to express excitement for the newly-selected police headquarters after it was approved at Monday night’s council meeting.

The city chose the new Charleston Police Department headquarters to be at the former site of the Truist Bank data center on 1 Piedmont Road. They will soon be entering into an over $2 million dollar purchase agreement to officially acquire the building.

Scott Dempsey

Dempsey came on 580 Live Tuesday to talk more about the building. He said while the department has been spread out across six locations for decades now, they have been growing their police force and outgrowing their space, so this move will provide them with better working conditions overall.

“To have this building, it has plenty of space to grow and everybody will be under one roof, and why that is so important is for communications and efficiency of operations,” Dempsey said.

He said operations flow much more smoothly with face-to-face communication between all units as well as helps to build morale and camaraderie.

Dempsey said, and while almost everyone will be located under one roof, however, they will still continue to have some other offices in other areas of the county as well.

He said they are also currently working with the mayor to reserve some space at City Hall to have a presence there due to heavy activity in that area downtown.

“You know, with the special events we have in that area, the Boulevard and Court Street, we’re still going to have some presence there at City Hall,” he said.

Dempsey said they have been working with Silling Architects throughout the process of transitioning to their new facility. As Silling has built police departments before, he said they have the capabilities of providing a lot more opportunities to put the advanced technology they need in place.

Dempsey said the new facility is projected to be the largest, most state-of-the-art police headquarters in the state.

“It’s so important for us operationally, because it will help us not only build our offices morale and give them a nice environment to work in, but it will help us fight crime, and that’s what we’re here for,” Dempsey said.

He said after originally choosing a building out of 14 different locations and then whittling it down to six, the old Truist location proved to be the best option for them.

“Just from the building itself from the shell of it, it has just about everything we need, of course, it was an old data processing center, so we need to do some renovations inside to make it exactly what we need, but yeah, we’re excited, we can’t wait to get our hands on it,” Dempsey said.

He said once they have everything in place, they are looking to move into the facility within the next 18 months give or take.