By Joe Johnson
Watkinsville’s police chief has resigned after serving for just 7 months.
“It’s really disappointing, really disheartening,” Courtney Gale said in a brief statement to the media.
“I really thought I would end my career working here. The best way to summarize the situation is there was a difference in managerial philosophies. I know it’s vague,” she said. “It wasn’t going to be successful for me to stick around.”
When hired in January by the small city in Oconee County, Gale had returned to the Athens metro area where her career in law enforcement began a quarter of a century earlier.
That career got its start in 1998, as an officer with the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, and then with the University of Georgia Police Department from 2017 to 2021, to more recently serving as chief in Thomson, a small city in McDuffie County.
Gale had earned widespread recognition and admiration for her tenacity for never losing sight of her lifelong goal of becoming a police chief after battling back to fully recover from a near-death experience.
While a supervisor in ACCPD's robbery-homicide unit when in December 2007, Gale was stabbed nearly to death by a shoplifter at the Alps Road Kroger.
She remained in a coma for two weeks and had several surgeries to save a leg, and upon release from St. Mary’s Hospital she underwent intensive therapy at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta.
Doctors called her recovery extraordinary.
The sidelined police officer made use of her long medical leave to earn a master’s degree in public administration at the University of Georgia, a prerequisite for becoming a police chief in many cities.
“My goal of becoming police chief has not changed,” Gale told this reporter at the time. “I’m just picking up where I left off."
Though her doctor deemed Gale ready to return to work by December 2011, police officials were not ready to take her back as an officer until she could demonstrate she had recovered the physical and cognitive abilities required for the job.
In the meantime, Gale was re-hired by ACCPD as a civilian employee in the training division.
In June 2013, she was re-instated as a sergeant with full police powers and assigned as a supervisor in the Downtown Operations Unit.
Four years later Gale took a position with the University of Georgia Police Department as a sergeant and in 2018 was promoted to lieutenant and served as shift commander over 16 patrol officers and was a team leader for UGA football events and co-commander for the UGPD Crisis Negotiation Team.
The McDuffie County city of Thomson in June 2022 hired Gale as its police chief, a position she held until she was hired by Watkinsville.
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