If you live in Central Florida, you have likely heard of Volusia Sheriff Mike Chitwood.
From speaking out about controversial topics, to fighting crime alongside his deputies and taking an active role in the community, he regularly makes news headlines as one of the area’s top cops. But, he didn’t always like the police force.
Chitwood said his father was a cop.
“As a teenager, I discovered that cops were a**holes... and my father was the antichrist,” Chitwood said.
He said that was a major shift from how he felt when he was younger.
“As a kid, my father was my hero -- and I wanted to be just like him,” he said.
But when Chitwood went to college, he said they did not see eye to eye.
“I got married young, had a couple of daughters, was working on the docks in Philadelphia,” said Chitwood, who added that his perspective started to change. “I realized there’s got to be more to life than this. The money is great, but (working on the docks) is like mind-numbing work and I slowly gravitated to police work, then at the age of 23 I got hired by the Philadelphia Police Department. I walked through the doors of that academy and I knew that first day that I belonged and this is what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”
He said his experience growing up in Philadelphia helped shape him into a better law enforcement officer.
“Philadelphia is obviously a very, very diverse city, and while you may have grown up in a predominately white, Irish, Italian, Catholic enclave, when you were playing basketball, baseball and football, you were going to different neighborhoods to play ball. You were going where you were the only white guy in the gym, or you are going to a Jewish neighborhood or a Hispanic neighborhood to play ball, so I think when you are out there, and you are meeting different cultures and different people from different backgrounds, and you are competing with them and against them, to me it gave me a different global perspective of what the city was really like.”
He carried that perspective with him to Volusia County, where he now serves as the sherriff. In addition to addressing violent crime in the community, Chitwood has also addressed a wave of anti-semitic threats. As suspects were being taken into custody and extradited back to Central Florida Sheriff Chitwood chose to come face-to-face with them at the airport.
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Then things escalated.
“What happens is, after I do this and I turn the cameras on the Nazis, that’s when this 4Chan and all these websites light up about how my big mouth needs to be shut, I need to have a pole put in the back of my head. They go to Google Earth and publish my address, what my house looks like and directions on how to get there. These trolls even discover about my daughters and start sending death messages to my daughters. They called in a thing that my mom and dad committed a murder-suicide and that someone was in the house waiting for the first officer to show up so they could kill the officer and then have the officer kill them,” Chitwood said.
The sheriff didn’t shrink back, but spoke out about the suspect’s actions even more boldly.
“For me, it’s really simple. If you don’t forcefully get out in front of these things, if you don’t get out in front of racism, if you don’t get out in front of bigotry, if you don’t get out in front of these hate groups it’s cancer, it metastasizes. So people are like, ‘Oh, just let it go, it’s not a big deal’. No! It is a big deal because in these groups they are perpetuating violence and eradicating human beings based on those factors: race, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity. You gotta go out and confront it. I’m not afraid. I gotta gun. I wanna shoot back. Let’s see how much balls you got and come and get me,” Chitwood said.
The Volusia sheriff also shared details of how he has helped fight crime alongside his deputies and how a simple bike ride turned into a crime investigation. You can hear more about Sheriff Chitwood’s road to becoming a law enforcement officer on Florida’s Fourth Estate. You can download the full conversation from wherever you listen to podcasts or watch anytime on News 6+.
Watch previous episodes of Florida’s Fourth Estate below: