When you keep seeing the same broad brush applied to law enforcement across the country, you start to wonder if everyone’s looking at all the facts about the police in their own community.
Here are some facts about the Volusia Sheriff's Office:
We hear a lot about excessive use of force. Do you know how rarely force is used here? We had 65 use of force incidents in 2019, or less than 1 percent of 9,370 arrests and less than .02 percent of more than 260,000 calls for service. The vast majority of those incidents involved non-deadly force, like restraining physical force, a K-9 apprehension or a Taser.
Are we perfect? No. But our use of force numbers are way down. We had:
123 use of force incidents in 2016
122 in 2017
87 in 2018
65 in 2019
That reduction didn’t happen by accident. Our policies, our training and the underlying philosophy of our entire organization made that possible.
It’s worth noting that assaults on our deputies are also decreasing, down 40 percent from 2016. We attribute this to our ongoing emphasis on de-escalation.
We even have a medal for it. We added the Medal of Tactical De-Escalation to recognize deputies who use their skills and training to achieve safe resolutions in potentially dangerous situations. That’s a reflection of our values and our priorities.
In 2017, we spent about $90,000 in confiscated funds on a Police Executive Research Forum study on our use of force incidents, our policies and procedures, our culture. When we got the report back in 2018, we didn’t just put it on a shelf. We implemented the ideas they recommended. The reforms you’re hearing about in the national news are changes we’ve already put in place here, because they’re good ideas, and they work.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that crime is on a steady decline, too. The Sheriff’s Office total index crime rate in 2019 was down about 19 percent from 2018, and down more than 40 percent compared to 2016. The 9,370 arrests we made last year were down from 12,454 arrests in 2016. Fewer crimes, fewer arrests and fewer victims means a safer community.
We hear about body cameras. There is no bigger proponent of body cameras than me. Anyone who follows us knows that.
We hear about better training, more focus on de-escalation and crisis intervention. Those principles are central to the training we provide at the Sheriff’s Office, and they are ingrained in everything we do. I got some criticism when I took down the sign over the front door of our Training facility. It used to say “Confidence in the line of fire.” Today, it says “Enter to learn. Leave to serve.”
That doesn’t mean this job doesn’t take courage, and it doesn’t mean our deputies won’t come under fire. We have courageous deputies who are trained to run toward danger to protect innocent life. But we also know there’s much more to policing in America, and every day our deputies are asked to solve problems and resolve conflicts without ever touching a firearm or a set of handcuffs.
We hear a lot about over-militarized police. We do have surplus military equipment at the Sheriff’s Office. Our high-water rescue trucks carried people out of their flooded apartments in Daytona Beach during Hurricane Irma. One of our MRAPs served as an ambulance during Hurricane Matthew. We have a Bearcat that protects our SWAT team when they’re moving in on a barricaded, armed subject. This equipment is imposing and terrible on gas. But we’re not patrolling the streets in these things. There’s a time and place for special equipment that can save lives.
We hear about community relations and involvement. Does anyone know how many events our Community Relations Unit and our deputies attended in 2019? I know about almost 300 of them. We’ve done safety seminars, youth sports, Easter egg hunts, classroom visits, backpack giveaways, career days, carnivals and fairs, Boys & Girls Club events, migrant community outreach events, the list goes on and on. Through our Foundation programs like Shop With a Deputy and the Deputies Toy Shop, we enlisted private donors and helped more than 500 families. A lot of the families we took on shopping trips used their gift cards to buy basic essentials like food and household supplies. We distributed dozens of tablets to high-school and middle-school students, along with bicycles, toys, even toiletries.
I have often said that the best cop in the world is economic development. Anything we can do to help families make ends meet has the potential to reduce economic desperation, and I know that has a positive effect on public safety.
At the Sheriff’s Office, we have a current budget of about $94 million, the vast majority of which is dedicated to personnel costs (about $73 million) for our 840 deputies, detectives, dispatchers and civilian staff. We receive about $16.4 million to provide law enforcement services on a contract basis in the cities of Deltona, DeBary, Pierson and Oak Hill.
Like just about every law enforcement agency in the country, we’re never fully staffed, and no matter what we do, our hiring and recruitment can’t keep pace with demand.
Clearly, more funding is needed in K-12 and higher education, in social services, in community programs that give our young people a pathway to a bright future, and provide everyone a fair shot at success. I support those with all my heart.
I don’t think that funding should come at the expense of law enforcement organizations that have been and will continue to be a crucial part of the solution. Cutting law enforcement funding will only reduce the amount and quality of training, stretch resources too thin, and exacerbate the problems we’re already facing. Even with those cuts – and all the consequences of those cuts – does anyone really believe that we’ll cut our way to solving America’s problems?
So many of society’s most difficult challenges have always been placed on the shoulders of law enforcement. Mental health, substance abuse, lack of economic opportunity, inequality – all of these are real issues that have been shoved off on the police to some extent in every community in America. We haven’t solved them yet. If we make organizations like ours the scapegoat for all of our failures as a nation, I fear we never will.
