Daytona Beach is famous for its parties and fast cars. When former Philly cop Sheriff Mike Chitwood rode into town with a commitment to demilitarize policing, increase transparency and work toward reform in racially charged and politically polarized Volusia County, Florida, it made some people mad. As the first police chief in Florida to mandate body cameras, he’s got a cult following of supporters that span the political divide and a small but mighty contingent that wants him out.
Story & Photographs by Jordan Blumetti
Sheriff Mike Chitwood needs a new knee. He tells me this outside a district office in Volusia County on a cloudless December night. Christmas lights twinkle on the side of the building. He lumbers through the doorway, favoring his left leg as he walks. The right leg wheels out and dangles in midair with each step. He looks to be in pain, but assures me it doesn’t hurt. It’s just worn out, he says. At 56, he’s dinged-up but far from debilitated. His signature mustache is flecked with gray. Above it hangs the tip of his broad, aquiline nose. Deep wrinkles are worn into his grizzled face, which bears the look of a lawman from an old western or a weathered bird of prey.
The bum knee is low on his list of things that need replacing — the Volusia County Council is what keeps him up at night. I was visiting the sheriff on the heels of an ugly dispute with the council. The week before our meeting, Chitwood was set to deliver his semi-regular “Scumbag of the Week” briefing, during which he berates suspects and known criminals in a room full of reporters and news cameras. But instead of the usual dour mugshots on the corrugated display board, it was the face of County Chairman Ed Kelley and six council members.
Chitwood stood at his podium, facing microphones and news cameras, pointing to Kelley’s picture as he issued his polemic.
“It’s absurd to think that the most powerful individual in the county, who oversees the entire budget, is the unelected county manager,” Chitwood said during the press conference. “This is a corrupt ruling class that will do anything to hold onto power.”
Sheriff Mike Chitwood calls out criminality at all levels, he even took on Volusia County Council members, “This is a corrupt ruling class that will do anything to hold onto power.”
The drama could have been anticipated. It stemmed from a dispute over Amendment 10 on the 2018 midterm ballot. Chitwood strongly favored it and the county council was opposed. The same council members tried to keep the amendment off the ballot before the election, and now that it had been passed by a statewide majority of 60 percent, they were suing again to keep it from being enacted.
The amendment puts an end to Volusia County’s home-rule charter, which consolidated governing power into the hands of the council. With its passing, some of that power would be delivered back to elected officials — such as the sheriff — in matters of budgeting and executive decision making.
Chitwood argues the amendment increases transparency and accountability. The county council says the transition costs too much money, and the voters didn’t fully understand what they had voted for.
“What you have is a group of individuals, led by a slime-ball county attorney, who decided that the voters are stupid,” Chitwood fumed. “This is an affront to democracy.”
The sheriff’s opponents say he’s trying to cast aspersions on the council to curry favor for himself. Chairman Kelley likened Chitwood to a cyberbully. Chitwood’s predecessor Ben Johnson suggested he’s “playing politics.” Even friends in the media said he may have crossed a line. They decided it was one thing to call suspected criminals scumbags, but wholly different when directed at county government. After the press conference a reporter from the Daytona News-Journal asked Chitwood what he thinks of his detractors.
“They can go fuck themselves.”
Before he was elected sheriff of Volusia County on a progressive platform in 2016, Mike Chitwood spent ten years as chief of Police for Daytona Beach — Volusia’s largest and most populous city — where he came to be identified by the wild manner and unconventional approach to law enforcement manifest in his “Scumbag of the Week” schtick. “Don’t want to be called a name? Don’t do the crime.” He’d shrug imperiously. Daytona residents were unsure what to make of him. Some found his antics disreputable, others relished his truculence.
Nevertheless, early in his tenure he started turning converts. His base widened, and the mystique grew. In Chitwood, as in Donald Trump, praise is not a strong enough word for what supporters feel; it’s closer to ecstasy. On his social media channels they heap adulation, writing solemn messages of support such as “Thank you, Mike, for continuing to bring the corruption in our county to the attention of our citizens.” Other times they use idiomatic phrases of the right wing, like “Drain our swamp!”
He responds directly, urging them to “Keep the heat up and stay tuned.”
Complaints about vulgarity and disrespect are also common, especially since the Amendment 10 quarrel, disrespect for something abstract like “the office,” or “the county” — a county that, it’s worth noting, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016. Chairman Ed Kelley, a registered Republican, took to the sheriff’s Facebook page to defend himself shortly after his public lambasting. “Name calling has no place in society,” he said towards the end of his statement. “As for the language used by a sheriff of our county, it’s disgusting...You wonder why children are growing up and saying the things that they do.”
The pearl-clutching did not program well. Chitwood’s supporters were quick to run to his aid. They called Kelley a scumbag and a moron and a fool. “Get over politically correct speech and face the fact that he tells it like it is in what we call ‘Plain English!’ Let them have it Mike!” one woman wrote. “They don’t like Trump’s words either [puckered-face emoji] but he is getting the job done [check-mark emoji],” said another.
As the mob grew larger and more incensed, Kelley slinked off, sensing diminishing returns.
“Do you feel like you ever cross the line?” I ask, once we settle inside the district office. He’s wearing the short version of the forest-green sheriff’s uniform. (He’s usually dressed for his preferred mode of transportation, a bicycle.) He sits reclined, feet propped up on the desk. His outstretched legs look as thick as wet pine logs, and about as heavy.
“Sometimes passion can make me go one step past being politically correct, like the Amendment 10 thing.” He booms South Philly twang, leaving behind a trail of contorted vowels and dented consonants.
This is not his first row with the county council, and certainly not his first toe-wander across the line. A sexist and off-color remark about councilwoman Deb Denys nearly cost him his job a few years back. But where most elected officials would have to resign, Chitwood somehow lands on his feet.
A foul mouth, picking fights with political opponents, harassing criminals: one might start to notice a trope forming — Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, Donald Trump. Despite clear parallels in tone, perhaps the most confounding thing about Sheriff Mike Chitwood is that, ideologically, he’s nothing like them.
With endorsements from the NRA and the NAACP, it may well be the subversiveness of his character that has drawn such fanaticism: he has introduced conservatives to their closeted progressive sympathies and liberals to the cathartic virtue of irreverence and vulgarity, both parties are at once confused and enthralled by it.
There are myriad reasons why Chitwood, registered as an Independent, is so revered in Volusia County. They range from bad-mouthing county council members, to reining in a crime rate that was spiraling out of control, to being the first police chief in Florida to mandate body cameras. Conversely, there are plenty of reasons why he is despised, including all of those just mentioned. He is also an outspoken reformer and Yankee transplant who showed up in Daytona Beach 14 years ago, purged all the good-old-boys from the police department, and managed to get himself elected as sheriff in a ruby red district — one of the last counties in the American South to integrate, he often reminds me.
A certain amount of political fatigue has likely contributed to his popularity. Although the role of a sheriff has become increasingly political, it’s still a nonpartisan election in Volusia County. There is a dissonance to Chitwood’s platform that has resonated with both tough-on-crime Republicans, and reform-minded Democrats. With endorsements from the NRA and the NAACP, it may well be the subversiveness of his character that has drawn such fanaticism: he has introduced conservatives to their closeted progressive sympathies and liberals to the cathartic virtue of irreverence and vulgarity, both parties are at once confused and enthralled by it.
Sheriff Mike Chitwood didn’t appear out of thin air, or reinvent himself to satisfy a conspicuous demand for populists and provocateurs. He was born into it. His father, also named Michael Chitwood, is Philadelphia law enforcement royalty who has been throwing around the term “scumbag” since the younger Mike was a squirrelly teen.
“That was dinner table talk. If you did something wrong, you were nothing but a fucking scumbag,” the younger Chitwood tells me.
But his dad also gave him something more valuable: the blueprint for a dignified new approach to policing. “Mike Chitwood just may be America’s most unlikely and radical challenger to policing’s conventional wisdom,” reads a profile in the Philadelphia Citizen about the elder Chitwood. The quote could just as easily be applied to his son. Both have instituted mandatory de-escalation training, body cameras, a practical approach in dealing with undocumented residents, and something called emotional intelligence training.
As a beat cop in Philadelphia, Chitwood Jr. gained a reputation for chasing suspects on subway tracks, through ductwork, and down city blocks while the night shift napped in their patrol cars. This earned him the commendations of his supervisors, and the ire of fellow officers. By the time Mike Jr. finished his career in Philadelphia, father and son were ranked among the most celebrated and controversial officers in the city’s history. Philly cops had a largely adversarial rapport with the media. The Chitwoods reconfigured that relationship. They understood favorable coverage, or at least a semblance of bonhomie between law enforcement and the media, engendered public trust. It also isolated them from the rest of the police force, their critics would say, and helped to advance their careers.
Mike Jr.’s ideology is a near carbon copy of his father’s, though he tends to downplay it. The main reason Chitwood turned out the way he did, he says, was because of John Timoney. “It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” That is, working as a sergeant under Timoney, the larger-than-life, tough-talking Irish cop — one of the central figures in the reform and modernization of the NYPD in the 1980s. In 1998, Timoney took a job as Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department.
Emboldened by his new boss, Chitwood went back to school, finished his bachelor's and earned two master's degrees. He was coached, groomed even, as he ascended the ranks. In 2003, Timoney left Philadelphia for Miami, Florida, where he would spend the following seven years as police chief. Before leaving Philadelphia, Timoney encouraged his protégé to start looking for new opportunities. In 2005, Chitwood took his first job as police chief in Shawnee, Oklahoma. After a year in Shawnee he got a call from a former colleague who had retired in Daytona Beach.
“He said, ‘Daytona is looking for a new police chief, and this job has your name written all over it. I’m telling you — it’s a toilet; it’s out of control. You will love it.’” Chitwood wanted to lead a larger department and Daytona Beach was about triple the size of Shawnee in officers and in budget. He showed up in May of 2006, to little fanfare. “But it turned out to be the greatest ten-and-a-half years of my fucking career,” he says.
Daytona Beach was a great chimera of criminality: its regional identity had been cultivated by the rum-runner-turned-stock-car racer and the sons of mid-century motorcycle clubs with a nasty racist legacy and widespread economic disparity baked in. It was, in other words, “the Florida of Florida,” as a friend reliably put it, a place that received consistently negative media attention. Esquire once called it the sleaziest place in America. It was perfect.
In addition to body cameras and de-escalation training, Chitwood introduced community policing, bike patrol, and CompStat, a comparative crime tracking and statistics platform developed by the NYPD to manage crime rates and increase transparency. An exhaustive report on police shootings in Florida conducted by the Tampa Bay Times found Chitwood’s department was the least likely to use excessive force in the state. They also started an educational fund for active law enforcement to go back to school for free. According to Chitwood, being educated, particularly about the history of this country, is the foundation of any cop worth his or her salt.
“We’ve always been ethnocentric. And of course African Americans have been treated like second-class citizens up to and including today, as have Latin Americans.” To police these communities, he says, you need to understand them. “You need to understand, for instance, that when you go into somebody’s house and there’s a 75-year-old man in there who was part of the Civil Rights movement and got his ass kicked by a bunch of cops, he don’t give two fucks about you. He’s got no fucking respect for you. You need to understand that when you go in there.”
Of course some of the veterans with Daytona Beach police weren't up for the history lesson, or the body cameras, or the CompStat meetings that were open to the public, in which case Chitwood held their hand into an early retirement. “Ninety-day severance package. Have a nice life.” Some were not at retirement age. He says he rode them until, philosophically, they couldn't stand to be there anymore. Enemies spun off from here and ricocheted throughout Daytona Beach. They filled other public appointments and civilian jobs. Many are still making trouble for him, doing what they can to stop his political career from going further, while he takes to the media as often as he can to maintain his image and credibility.
John Szabo, a young deputy relieved of duty in 2017, was initially demoted by Chitwood for neglecting to turn on his body camera while responding to a call. After the demotion, Szabo aired his grievances on Facebook. Chitwood found out what he said, and told Szabo it violated the county’s merit rule, a fireable offense. Szabo sued the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office and was awarded a settlement equal to almost a year’s salary, but he continues to post dubiously sourced news stories and tabloid gossip about the sheriff to a community Facebook page named “ABC (Anyone But Chitwood) 2020.” On any given day, Szabo emits a torrent of Trump support memes and insults to Democrat leaders on his Facebook feed.
This type of overt partisanship irked Chitwood from the start. He’s never allowed employees to espouse specific political ideologies or endorse candidates while working in his office. “When someone calls the police, they don't say send me a Democrat or a Republican. That’s why you don’t want cops wearing political endorsements on their clothes, or political bumper stickers on their cars,” he says. “In Daytona I had guys that were pro-Trump, and I had to constantly go in [to their office] to take down Trump posters. It had nothing to do with me disliking the guy. No matter who you got up there, it doesn’t belong.”
It has not been an easy decade to be a cop, Chitwood concedes, but in many ways he was prepared for this moment. Microphone Mike (his local moniker) encourages scrutiny, it’s part of his formula, another opportunity to amplify the success he’s had. He’s done so in local reporting outlets and national programs like PBS NewsHour and Radiolab. The high-profile deaths of unarmed black men around the country and subsequent protests that ruled the news cycle for over two years, the Black Lives Matter and reactionary Blue Lives Matter movements – these were occasions to highlight how he’s mending the relationship with Daytona Beach’s black community, which holds a long-standing distrust of law enforcement as a result of events that occurred throughout U.S. history and into the present day.
On Christmas Day in 1951, while Harry T. Moore, the founder of Florida’s NAACP chapter and longtime resident of Daytona Beach, was asleep with his wife Harriette, someone hiding in a grove across the street crawled underneath their home and planted a firebomb. Moore died in the ambulance on the way to the segregated black hospital in Sanford, Florida. Harriette died nine days later. Rumors that infamous sheriff Willis McCall (who shot two of the four young black men wrongly accused of rape in 1949 known as the Groveland Four) was behind the bombing were bandied but never proven, and no one was ever prosecuted. Considered the first martyrs of the Civil Rights movement, the Moore’s killings sparked international protests, a forerunner to the demonstrations of the 1960s. But local protesters and activists were less audacious, the ramifications were too severe.
The 1960s brought Spring Break to Daytona Beach, the first decade of racing at the International Speedway, the home-rule charter that Chitwood is currently raging against, and desegregation through gritted teeth. Before that, black residents were not allowed to cross the Halifax River, which separates Daytona Beach from the mainland. For the most part the city is still separated along these lines. It’s not uncommon to encounter older generations of black men and women in Daytona Beach who have still never crossed the river.
Cynthia Slater, current president of Daytona Beach’s NAACP chapter, said the harassment continued well into this millennium. A standout moment she recalls was during the 2004 Black College Reunion, an annual party on the beachside for Florida’s two historically black universities, Bethune-Cookman in Daytona Beach and Florida A&M in Tallahassee. Despite being a major event since the 1970s, Slater said the reunion was never something the city’s residents or officials were thrilled about.
“The City of Daytona and Volusia County did not want those kids on the beach side. They closed bridges. Hotel owners shut down pools, locked doors, and changed furniture,” Slater said. “The police were stopping and arresting kids for literally nothing.” In 2004, Cynthia herself was arrested by a sheriff’s deputy for passing out legal brochures. She was charged with inciting a riot, and multiple other counts. Her arrest was temporarily upheld by sheriff Ben Johnson, Chitwood’s predecessor. “After the young people saw that it could happen to me, they knew it could happen to any of them. So they just stopped coming to Daytona.”
And then there was Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old shot and killed in 2012 by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, thirty miles southwest of Daytona Beach. A march was organized two months after the shooting, from the campus of Bethune-Cookman to Martin’s church in Sanford. The City of Daytona Beach wanted to arrest demonstrators because they hadn’t applied for permits, but Chitwood refused. Instead he and a dozen of his officers escorted the marchers down International Speedway Boulevard, to the city limits, where the four-lane boulevard narrows into a meandering country road that cuts through the heart of the state.
Liquor and speed are Daytona Beach’s industries. They bring money in, and filter it through the community slowly and unevenly. If it weren't for the handful of stock-car and motorcycle events throughout the year, the economic forecast would be invariably grim. With the exception of the International Speedway – Daytona Beach’s own Olympic village, incongruously futuristic and truly immense in its footprint – the infrastructure has not aged well. Waived impact fees and abandoned development projects have left much of the mainland in various stages of disrepair.
On the beach side there is a distinct off-the-strip Las Vegas vibe – an emptiness briefly assuaged as one nears downtown and picks out the quivering gold windows of Mandalay Bay from the desert mirage. But there is no strip in Daytona Beach, so the feeling never leaves. Vagrants trade wares in the shaded alcoves along A1A. Trucks pass with bumper stickers that read Welcome to Daytona Feed the Squirrels NOT the Bums. Tall condo towers, hotels, and flip-flop emporiums line the beach — parti-colored compounds completely block the view of the ocean for what seems like miles. There are things on the sand that should not be: roller coasters, movie theaters, a giant slingshot. Great effort has been made to turn Daytona Beach into a fun place, and for that reason it has become no fun at all.
After my first meeting with Chitwood, I check in to an establishment whose upmarket name is belied by an inconceivably low nightly rate, a lobby that smells like wet cigarette butts, and an entry on TripAdvisor entitled “BED BUG HORROR!!!” The room cost $57; its receipt carries a palpable sadness. An oceanfront room in Florida at this price, in high season, is virtually unheard of.
Each of the hotel’s balconies kick out at a 45-degree angle to maximize ocean viewing. I remember seeing archival footage of these balconies packed with rowdy spring breakers. With the help of a few local hoteliers, politicians, Anheuser-Busch, Camel Cigarettes, and (later) MTV, Daytona Beach became the Spring Break capital of the world in the 1970s.
The city sold its soul for partying long ago, going back to the days of prohibition when the beach was littered with pool halls and brothels, and the rum-runners and moonshiners brought their stock cars and their liquor and raced on the hard-packed sand. In that Faustian wager, the law was always more of a suggestion than command. Decades later, events like Bike Week and the Daytona 500 started bringing six to eight million visitors to the region each year, a region with roughly 68,000 permanent residents. Historically, this has caused problems for law enforcement. During event weeks detectives were often too busy directing traffic off of I-95 to fight crime.
“It’s like having four Super Bowls a year,” Louie Matthews tells me at the hotel’s lobby bar. “All of the drugs, gangs, and crime come with it.” Louie was a longtime liquor salesman and the former state manager for Jägermeister and Coors Light, which are to Daytona Beach what Pinot is to Sonoma. “My whole life was the liquor industry,” he says. Now he runs a golf cart rental shop and bartends a few nights at the Ocean Breeze: “It’s better than sitting at home.”
In the 80s, 90s, and early aughts, Louie said Bike Week alone would draw something like 800,000 people to the string of biker bars on Main Street each year. Now it’s half that. Slowly, he hinted this had something to do with Chitwood, and the changes he made to the way these events were policed.
“Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing bad to say about the man, but things are different now.”
Drug busts became more frequent. Women could no longer expose themselves in public. No motorcycle support shirts, patches, or colors were allowed; the Outlaws Motorcycle Gang, one of the most notorious in the country, was slowly rooted out.
“If you flashed your boobs, you got a fine; if you revved your pipes, you got a fine,” Louie says. “He was a hard man to get along with. But it was a hard job. I wouldn't want it. I’ve seen him get spit on, cursed at. But he always showed his face; he’s not hiding anywhere.”
Bike Week isn’t a ticketed event. Therefore any number floated by Louie, or anyone else for that matter, is merely a guess. There’s no question that business has changed over the years. Once confined to the ten blocks between the Halifax River and the Atlantic Ocean, the event has grown more diffuse, its focus shifting to neighboring cities such as St. Augustine and New Smyrna. People have changed, laws have changed, motorcycle culture has changed.
There’s no question that business has changed over the years. Once confined to the ten blocks between the Halifax River and the Atlantic Ocean, Bike Week that once dense crowds, has grown more diffuse, its focus shifting to neighboring cities such as St. Augustine and New Smyrna. People have changed, laws have changed, motorcycle culture has changed.
This isn’t Bourbon Street, it’s Main Street, and Main Street is mostly empty all but four weeks out of the year, empty enough that you could stand in the middle of it on a Sunday afternoon and not have to move for fifteen minutes. Local bar owners are understandably concerned. Still, there is little interest in the question of whether or not a dozen biker bars and leather chaps vendors is an air-tight business model in the year 2020. Some blame city officials for expensive regulation; others blame Chitwood for being too heavy-handed in curbing the chaos of Bike Week. But when I ask for a comment they either demur, say business is great, or stop answering my phone calls. (This story was reported before the entire economy came screeching to a halt because of the coronavirus)
Louie tells me about one spot in particular he sold to — Froggy’s saloon, a legendary biker bar with an equally legendary owner by the name of Denny Honeycutt — and I momentarily lose him in reverie. Finally, he belts out: “I had 32 ice-cold Jäger machines in that place...32! The most in the world! I was selling him 100 cases of Jäger just for Bike Week. You do the math: 100 cases times 12 bottles per case, times 22 shots in a bottle, times five bucks a shot. They do maybe 20 cases now.” Surely, he says, Denny will have something to say about all this.
For a man who drove a lime-green Dodge Hellcat, Denny Honeycutt was difficult to track down.* Eventually I found him, and he told me where he’d been, stretching back fifty years, as if to make up for eluding me. At 15 years old he ran away from his home in Detroit, landed in Kentucky, got shot, was in ‘Nam by 18, got shot at, and ended up in Daytona in 1978 with a few hundred dollars to his name. He has done quite well for himself as proprietor of “world-famous” biker bars in Daytona Beach. At 71, his voice is gravelly, and breaks apart at times. He lives in a gated, fly-in community in nearby Port Orange, so named because it has its own airstrip and hangars where residents can land and park their airplanes. "I have a hangar, but I don’t fly,” he says. “I fly on the ground, I collect muscle cars. I’ve just got a bunch of cars and a limo.” The Hellcat is one of his favorites (“790 horses”). He’s often spotted around town, resplendent in an open-collar Hawaiian shirt. For a while he drove around a decommissioned military tank equipped with an M2 Browning and grenade launchers. But the police wanted to inspect it every time he took it for a spin. He got tired of that.
When I ask Denny about Chitwood, he has nothing bad to say. In fact, he says, the sheriff is a friend, and he has great respect for him. There was nothing about the strain on business which, at this point in his career, Denny seems reservedly optimistic about. He was pleasant, charming even. Had that been the extent of the conversation, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But there was more to the story, and he was anticipating my questions.
Front door and signage at Froggy’s saloon
On May 11th, 2016, George Zimmerman placed his Kel-Tec PF 9mm pistol up for auction on an online gun forum called United Gun Group. The state of Florida had released the weapon back to him after his acquittal for using that gun to kill Trayvon Martin. The first round of bids were for millions of dollars. Internet trolls, he reasoned. As coverage of the auction spread, Zimmerman became increasingly paranoid. He feared the gun would wind up in the hands of Black Lives Matter activists who wanted to destroy it. For this reason, he resolved to keep it local.
Honeycutt saw the listing online and contacted Zimmerman a few days later. Zimmerman was no stranger to Daytona Beach; he and his ex-wife had married there. Honeycutt drove to Sanford a few times so they could vet each other. They ate hamburgers, got drunk, Honeycutt says Zimmerman expressed concern about some people that wanted to hurt him.
“He was really standoffish,” Denny says. “But we just bullshitted. I got to liking him, believe it or not.”
When the auction ended, Denny had the high bid of $150,000. But on the day of the transaction Zimmerman texted and said that a woman had just submitted an offer for $250,000. He said she intended to give the gun to her son for his birthday. Zimmerman was reneging on his deal with Honeycutt.
“He screwed me, and I was pissed,” Denny says.
Denny went to the Daytona News-Journal to give a reporter the scoop, betraying his confidentiality agreement to spite Zimmerman. In a matter of hours the story went viral. Death threats were incoming, he says. Honeycutt hired extra security at his house and at Froggy’s.
“Oh, God, it got ugly. I didn’t expect it. I don’t know what I expected. That weekend was hell,” he says. “I learned a valuable lesson. I did not mean for it to be racial, but a lot of people took it that way, and I don’t blame them. I’ll be damned if I ever do something like that again.”
Even with the gift of hindsight, pleading ignorance seems to be the best Honeycutt could do. There is no grand atonement, no reverence for Martin, or the tragedy that was visited upon a family and community; there is no sense of blithely reopening the wound, only the tepid suggestion that he could stand outside of those circumstances. When I ask him now, three years after the fact, his reason for wanting the gun escapes him. In 2016, Honeycutt told the News-Journal he was looking for free publicity; he’d hang pictures of the gun in his bar, make t-shirts. Then he would place it in a safety deposit box, considering it a piece of Florida history.
The majority of the local community, including Chitwood, found this unconscionable. The sheriff told the News-Journal he’d like to buy the gun to turn it into a box of nails. He said he didn’t understand why Honeycutt would want it. “I can’t imagine how Trayvon’s parents feel on a day like this. As a parent and grandparent, it makes me sick to my stomach.”
Zimmerman contacted Honeycutt again in 2017 to tell him that the woman who made the larger offer was having second thoughts and he might accept Honeycutt’s original offer after all. Zimmerman seemed interested in brokering the deal, but became hostile when Honeycutt said he was no longer interested.
The identity of the female buyer was never disclosed. But less than a year later she didn’t want it anymore, per Zimmerman’s story as told to Honeycutt.(Zimmerman couldn't be reached, and his lawyer never returned a request for comment.) It remains unclear whether or not the gun ever changed hands, and it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where another buyer was fabricated in order to fetch a higher price. Much like the events that took place on the night of February 26th, 2012, George Zimmerman is the only living person who knows for sure.
When I visit Retired Police Sergeant Jimmie Flynt at his church he expressed to me how many black community members felt about this deal, "I think he [Honeycutt] just tried to glorify George Zimmerman, that's all it was. I think it's wrong."
*Denny Honeycutt passed away in Port Orange, Florida, August 28, 2019.
Security is more of a concern at Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church than it used to be. I pulled up to the church on a Sunday morning, a week before Christmas, and parked in the overflow lot. As I collected my things and stepped out onto the pavement, I was confronted by a parking-lot attendant in a golf cart.
“Jordan?” he asks. “Jimmie is expecting you. Hop in.”
The driver taxis me up to the entrance of the church where Jimmie Flynt stands with his arms dutifully crossed behind his back. He has round, rheumy eyes and full cheeks above a cautious smile; his hand swallows mine when he reaches for it.
The Christmas Chorale, a musical and nativity play, is about to start. The congregation is milling around the lobby — older men in double-breasted suits, women in wide-brimmed cambric hats festooned with flowers, teen actors in biblical garb. Flynt can’t talk now; he tells me to go inside and enjoy the show. A live band and choir deliver soulful renditions of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The choirboys wear felt reindeer antlers illuminated by the lit garland tacked over their heads on the molding. The cantors’ dresses match the cloth draping the three crosses on the altar. All purple, the color used during advent and lent as a symbol of suffering, bruising and royalty.
Throughout the service I spot Flynt in far corners of the church, doing sweeps of the perimeter, checking the locks on the double-doors. He came to fetch me once the service was over. “I watch over the place to make sure it’s safe. It’s a new thing,” he says. “You just don’t know when somebody’s gonna come in and do something crazy.” His honeyed, sea-island drawl thickens as he ends his sentences. A retired sergeant with the Daytona Beach Police Department, he says he knows what type of suspicious behavior to watch for. This security appointment is recent — since 2015, after Dylann Roof walked into Allen AME’s sister church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murdered nine people during Bible study.
Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Daytona Beach, Florida, tightened its security after June 2015 when a white supremacist killed nine worshippers at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina
Jimmie Flynt was born just down the street in Midtown, one of three predominantly black neighborhoods on the mainland in Daytona Beach, in what remains the poorest zip code in Volusia county. His family migrated to Florida from south Georgia when his parents left the cotton plantation where they lived as sharecroppers.
“My father decided to leave Georgia around the time my second oldest brother was born, in ’39,” he says. “One day the master came out and said ‘Jack, where’s Mammie?’ My father explained that she had just given birth yesterday, and she was inside taking care of the baby. The master told my daddy ‘Go in there and tell Mammie to put that baby in a basket, bring him out here and set him under the shade tree, and get back to picking that cotton.’” Instead, his father loaded their things and headed south.
Retired Daytona Police Sergeant Jimmie Flynt was an early proponent of community policing.
Flynt started in law enforcement in 1978, surprised to have ended up there. When he was a boy he used to run from the police. In the 50s he remembers his father, who had found a job in Daytona Beach laying spikes for the Florida East Coast Railroad Company, being arrested for honking his car horn at a white woman who J-walked in front of him.
“I had a fear of police. That fear came from growing up here, and what I saw.”
Flynt was an early proponent of community policing, finding it absurd most cops didn’t know the names of the citizens on their beat. He used the foot patrols in New York as a model. “Those guys knew every person and every business on their patrol. That was my philosophy: know your community.”
When Chitwood showed up, he reached out to Flynt immediately and launched a campaign to turn the demographics of the police department into something that more accurately reflected the community. Flynt doesn’t spare any enthusiasm when talking about his former boss.
“He came here, he embraced me, and he embraced the Black community,” he says. Together with Flynt and Nathan Mugala, the pastor of Allen AME, the new police chief wrote policies to restore trust.
“Our main objective was to build a relationship between the Black community and the police department,” Pastor Mugala says. “Which has helped us avoid some of the problems the rest of the country is having.”
“We’ve made a difference in this community,” Flynt says, but cautions that it’s tentative. “When we shoot an unarmed Black person, that sets us back. We’ve made gains, but we done lost one or two of them.”
“He’s usually late,” a deputy calls out when he sees me ambling around the parking lot of the Deltona District Office, waiting for the sheriff. Chitwood pulls up in an unmarked, navy blue Chevy Impala. His police-issued mountain bike jostles on the bike rack fastened to the trunk. We’re headed to a Christmas parade in Deltona, the second largest city in Volusia County, a bedroom community whose population is projected to surpass that of Daytona Beach in the next couple of years.
“Whatever’s on the floor just throw in the back,” he says. I brush off the front seat and the floor: loose papers, citation receipts, water bottles, t-shirts, a five-pack of Mike and Ike’s. It’s difficult to hear him over the din of the cruiser. GPS directions play through the stereo; dispatcher broadcasts her muffled soliloquy: a robbery is in progress at the Walmart; his cell phone continues ringing; his seatbelt signal chimes — he doesn’t fasten it. He is busy telling me about a guy he picked up the previous day who was building a bomb in his garage, his girlfriend had tipped off the police.
The traffic thickens as we get closer to the parade. Citizen patrols in reflective vests help direct confused motorists to the detour. The sheriff flips his lights on and navigates around the logjam, to the entrance of the parade, a roped-off portion of Deltona Boulevard.
“They put that god-damn MRAP out there, despite everything I said.” He fumes in reference to the armored vehicle in the middle of the street. It looks to be a cross between a Humvee and a dump truck, a military vehicle manufactured to withstand improvised explosive devices in the Iraq War. Surplus units were given to police departments across the country in 2017. It’s not exactly the look Chitwood is going for as he peels his bicycle from the rack and slides on his fingerless cycling gloves and helmet.
“I’ll meet you after,” he says, pedaling up to meet the rest of his department.
Half the city assembles along Deltona Boulevard, waiting for the parade to begin. A grown man in an elf costume hands me peppermint patties. He is flanked by two teenagers who passed me a brochure that read “Trust Jesus,” with a local phone number scribbled underneath.
I had initially thought the emergency vehicles were present as a security measure. I soon realize that they are the attraction. The parade is called “A Heroes’ Christmas.” Its purpose: to honor local veterans and law enforcement — a great, big “Thanks!” for a purportedly thankless job. The crowd erupts as the first siren rings out from around a bend in the road. Blue and red lights soon fill the sky. An entire fleet of fire trucks, patrol cars, and motorcycles are in procession; lights flashing, sirens blaring. The SWAT team clambers around the MRAP truck like schoolkids in a jungle gym.
In a field of alternating red and blue and black, I see a small figure dwarfed by the motorcade. As he gets closer I notice it is Chitwood, buzzing around the opposite side of the street on his bicycle, waving to the crowd. He does circles and figure-8’s, weaving through his colleagues, full of errant whimsy. He has always been a cyclist, but in Daytona Beach his bicycle is an extra-satisfying rebuff of the ubiquitous tough-guy biker veneer. The townspeople nod approvingly. They loved the great display of machinery, but they seem to love the sheriff more. As he gets closer, they roar: “Go, Chitwood!”
Born into a police family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Mike Chitwood worked in Shawnee, Oklahoma, before taking on Daytona Beach and Volusia County. He’s currently the undisputed candidate for re-election in 2020.
Once the parade is over, Chitwood rides back to his car and climbs off. A small crowd trails him. A group of kids inquire about the special features of his police bicycle. He distributes himself evenly among the many people who lobby for his attention. He speaks loudly, to be understood clearly, but also so he never runs the risk of sounding shrewd or conspiratorial. Hard to imagine him in a whisper, I don’t know that he’s capable of it. Transparency is everything: “If I fuck up, I’m going to tell you about it,” he says.
A moment follows when I realize it would be difficult not to take this man at his word. This is no accident. He guides the narrative because he talks, openly and at length, and seems genuinely thrilled to do so. At the same time it’s hard to believe him when he says that he has no further political ambition. His political acuity is too sharp to be incidental. He is at least aware of that much. And to judge from his legions of adoring fans, which now include residents of counties outside Volusia, his political opportunities are abundant. Was I looking at the future of progressivism in Florida: free from party ties, astringent but effective? I don’t know. What’s clear is that, to Chitwood’s mind, the people sitting in those seven county council seats represent an indefensible past.
Later that night, he drops me off in the district office parking lot. He suggests I follow him back to Daytona Beach, and I oblige. As we merge onto the highway, I see a red sports car cut across three lanes of traffic and proceed to blow past us in the left-hand lane at what must have been twenty miles over the speed limit. It’s late, and I half expect him to let this one go. But then the lights flip on. He has the guy pulled over on the shoulder in a matter of seconds. Traffic slows to a crawl while us rubberneckers sneak our glances. The door of the navy-blue Impala swings open and the sheriff gets to his feet. In the glare of the sulphur lamps, I watch him limp his way to the speeder’s door, and lean in through the opened window.
As the nation came to grips with the spread of coronavirus, Sheriff Chitwood and the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office were confronted with the limitations of enforcing social distancing measures. When I called Chitwood to ask him about this, what stuck out in his mind were the five white cops tackling and tasing a black man in New York City and charging him for not social distancing. “I can’t avoid having someone that does a gunpoint robbery getting released on their own recognizance,” he says. “You think the state attorney’s office would charge someone with not social distancing? Give me a break.”
By mid-March, Chitwood was requesting the names and addresses of people infected with coronavirus, or who were quarantined, from the Department of Health in order to publish the county-wide number of confirmed cases each night and protect first responders from potential exposure. This drew sharp criticism from his usual detractors, among them Chairman Kelley, who accused Chitwood fomenting panic in the community with the list. In April, the Volusia County government was releasing the same information to the public. A few months after this story was reported, Mike Chitwood announced his reelection campaign. If no candidate registers to oppose him on the ballot by noon on June 12th, he will automatically win a second term.
Editors Note: References to “Daytona” as a place have been updated to say “Daytona Beach,” the official place name. Quotes that say only, “Daytona,” remain.
Jordan Blumetti is a writer from the Gulf Coast of Florida. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Oxford American, among other publications. He last wrote for The Bitter Southerner about colonial Florida, and the ruins of Fort Mose.
