Headline Surfer® snapshot graphic / Crime mapping shows Daytona Beach overrun by crime, especially the heart of the tourism -- the beachside as shown in this image from crimes plotted Jan. 1 through 5 p.m. today, Sunday, Dec. 8.
This is the same tired theme we heard a decade ago when the Volusia County Council took the cars off the core-tourism section of the beach so that the developers and marketers of the Ocean Walk and former Adams Mark -- now Daytona Beach Resorts -- could sell prospective time share visitors on having their own private beach.
The results have proven disastrous. By taking the cars off the beach, the day trippers simply went elsewhere -- mainly New Smyrna Beach and Cocoa Beach.
As if that wasn't enough, the Ocean Center was expanded into the steroid monstrosity it has become where there's too much space and hardly anything of significance to draw sustainable overnight crowds.
Everything is hyped with advertising in the News-Journal and through the Daytona chamber, but the end results are far less impressive.
Photos for Headline Surfer® / Daytona Police Chief Michael Chitwood's name-calling act is popular with citizens who are fearful of the crime situation, but resented by others who feel he is labeling and stereotyping people. The 'Scumbag Eradication Team" is something he got from his father of the same name who is chief of police in Darby, Pa.
The Volusia County Fair last month not only didn't see the increase that was promoted, attendance was down. Though the Turkey Run was nice, anyone who believes there were 137,000 people at they Speedway for the extended holiday weekend is on something.
Until the politicians, the business leaders, the advertising executives and the media come clean about the great hype that revolves around advertising, things are not going to get any better. Let's be real about this: Taking cars off the beach didn't translate into profits for the new hotels in the past 190 years. If so, then why do we keep hearing about foreclosures?
The Hard Rock Cafe and the Russian Towers aren't going to matter if the city continues to see deterioration of its neighborhoods.Where are the jobs? And let me be perfectly clear about this: When Daytona's police chief is bigger than Bike Week itself, then it's time to make a change.
And that change in police administration needs to be made now. Mayor Derrick Henry campaigned with the mantra: "One City, One Vision." So where's the vision, Mr. Mayor? You, too, have to be held accountable for your promises, if you can't make the tough decisions.
We realize you are ending your first year, but the results are not there. What's been accomplished to curb the ongoing gun violence? The murders? The drugs?
The prosecution sweeps accomplish nothing unless you push for more vigorous zoning and building code enforcement. Daytona is in serious need of jobs -- full-time jobs that pay the bills. People are suffering in squalor in the traditional neighborhoods while the focus is centered around the Ocean Center.
Does anyone really buy into Police Chief Michael Chitwood's manipulation of crime stats or tough-guy shtick? It's great that he rides a bicycle. But it's not so great that he calls people names like "Scumbag" and "Dirtbag" like his father does up North.
And then you wonder why there's little cooperation in the community, especially in a city where nearly 50 percent of the population is black and poor. Drugs and handguns rate rampant.
Does Mike Chitwood really expect us to believe its safe for Mt. and Mrs. Tourist from Cincinnati, Ohio, with little Suzie in a stroller and Junior on his skateboard can take a leisurely stroll by the moon's light?
I seem to recall this year a man was purposely run over and killed? And if my memory serves me right, an elderly man was stricken with a heart attack and died after he was carjacked.
Then, of course, there's the Peabody Auditorium where a man was stripped down to nothing but a pair of socks and beaten to death, a beating so bad that his genitals were destroyed in the process.
And how about the brazen armed robbery of a sporting goods store right across the street from Daytona International Speedway during the height of Speed Weeks?
Instead of working with Volusia County Sheriff Ben Johnson and the Crime Stoppers program that gets results, Chitwood instead dismissed Johnson as a "moron," and whined when he couldn't get cooperation from the public.
If I were a young black man or a teen in Daytona and hung around outside for lack of AC in a cramped public housing apartment I wouldn't be so kind to portly white cops hassling me and my friends.
Leadership starts at the top. And while Chitwood has held the few black cops employed up for ridicule for getting into a scrape here or there, he's gone out of his way to protect his captains -- two of whom would have been fired had they worked any where else.
Capt. Jim Newcomb was promoted to his current post by Police Chief Michael Chitwood early last year despite a history of alleged sexual harassment of women cops under his command and Capt. Kerry Orpinuk received a written warning from Chitwood for fixing a ticket for a lawyer. Neither situation has been reported by the News-Journal, which has written extensively on rank-and-file cops caught up in scrapes with plentiful quotes critical of them from the top cop.
Let's started with Capt. Jim Newcomb.
His personnel file is replete with allegations of sexual harassment of female cops under his command. One of them, a lesbian, was fired after prolonged investigative interest by Newcomb only to be hired back two years later. No questions asked.
Then there's Capt. Kerry Orpinuk, who fixed a ticket for a lawyer after a female cop -- one of the tormented female officers under Newcomb -- who wrote this lawyer up for impeding the movement off an ambulance in a distress call, almost causing an accident.
While a black officer allegedly was getting free coffee and front page headlines in the News-Journal for Chitwood, and eventually was restarted to his position, the News-Journal never touched Newcomb. Headline Surfer® won two Florida Press Club awards for investigative reporting a year ago and Chitwood responded by cutting us out of his press release distribution list. And Orpinuk hasn't seen the light of day in the News-Journal.
Meanwhile, the print newspaper under Editor Pat Rice, is grousing because Port Orange Police Chief Gerald Monahan has victims of crimes signing an order prohibiting them from talking to the media during an open investigation. And that explains why Port Orange is a safer, cleaner, family-destination site just a few miles down the road on Nova or Dunlawton.
Monahan is one of the best if the best police chief in Volusia County, along with Sheriff Johnson. And then we come back to Chitwood himself, a caricature of Buford Pusser's Walking Tall who gets his ass kicked by a mentally ill man he was jawing with during Bike Week.
There was Chitwood on the front page of the News-Journal and holding a press conference in his office with his heavily bandaged hand; complaining to WESH-TV's Clare Metz and company that he couldn't take care of himself in the bathroom (and he wasn't referring to taking a leak or wiping his butt).
If you think I'm being crass, then you should hear Chitwood. And how convenient of him not to have a written statement of the incident with the police report. The story changed from day to day like the sexual exploits of Sgt. Penny Dane, tossed out like yesterday's garbage by Chitwood -- portrayed as a sex vixen engaged in online porn.
Of course, this, too, was exaggerated.
All of this will come to light in the new year in a Headline Surfer® year-long investigative report: How Safe Are We? In Daytona Beach, the answer is obvious. Not very safe. As for declining crime, that's the case everywhere, but Daytona Beach remains among the most violent cities in Florida.
Until City Manager Jim Chisholm, Mayor Derrick Henry and the elected commissioners need to start dealing with the crime situation, it's only going to take one time where a tourist is murdered (God forbid a child) and those hotel rooms will go unoccupied.
Rice and his boss, Michael Redding of Halifax Media had better get something straight: When it comes to reporting what really matters, Daytona also is our turf.
PostScript
Above is a snapshot of the Google News Directory for Daytona Beach, FL at 9:32 p., Sunday, with coverage from the Daytona Beach News-Journal favoring Chief Chitwood who complains in the print newspaper's online version that he's not gtting public cooperation in solving two murders fro a year ago without mentioning his name calling. Headline Surfer®, the 24/7 internet newspaper points out that Chitwood himself is part of the problem with his name-calling cowboy antics that have worn thin in a tourist town beset by continuous violent crime violent crime. And while Headline Surfer® points out the politics behind office holders selling out to insiders for campaign support, the print newspaper focus on promotional tourism without acknowledging the crime situation in the same story.