Meet the Viral Sheriff Who Took on Florida Nazis

When an anti-semitic hate group started harassing Jewish people on camera in Volusia County, Florida, Sheriff Mike Chitwood wasn’t having it.

He held a press conference where he outed members of a local hate group and street performer collective the GDL, by publicly showing their faces and outlining their prior convictions. 

“When you’re trying to crush a radical group of cowardly scumbags, unity and sunshine destroy it,” said Chitwood at the start of the press conference. “The sunshine part we’re going to play on the screen so everyone can see how despicable, cowardly, and reprehensible this group is.”  

Chitwood brought up the mugshots of the GDL members and then walked those in attendance through the members' prior convictions. These included propositioning a 14-year-old for sex, aggravated assault, murder, terroristic threats and more. He then invited members of the Jewish community up onto the stage to talk. 

Clips of Chitwood’s impassioned and insulting words for the neo-Nazis went viral—just this week a New Zealand paper declared the Florida sheriff a “cult icon.”  Unsurprisingly the neo-Nazis also caught wind of Chitwood and he’s been inundated with death threats (which has led to two arrests), piles of hate mail, and his parents have been doxxed. 

The 59-year-old isn’t exactly what would come to a person’s mind when thinking about a Florida cop. For starters, he’s from Philadelphia, where he spent 18 years on the force, partially in the homicide department. On top of that, despite presiding over a rather conservative area in northern Florida, he’s openly supportive of immigrants—something that doesn’t appear to have hurt his popularity. 

VICE News called up the sheriff to chat about neo-Nazis, death threats, and why he decided to speak out. 

VICE News: What do you think of the people who say that you're too brash and should tone it down as a more a prototypical law enforcement figure? 

Sheriff Mike Chitwood: Not going to happen. I am brash. I can be ignorant and arrogant at times. I'm a bull in a china shop. But what I can tell you is overwhelmingly the people in my community will say you're a breath of fresh air. You stay the way it is, and sometimes you're going to hurt people's feelings. But that's not my job. My job's not to worry about everybody's feelings.  

What made you decide to hold this press conference and, you know, for lack of a better term, just completely shit on these Nazis?  

What had happened was, during the Daytona 500 weekend we were invaded. These groups dropped off leaflets extolling murder and genocide and hatred for the Jews on people's private properties. It happened in three different cities in my jurisdiction. So when the people got up in the morning they were greeted with this vile pamphlet in a ziploc bag with woodchips that were meant to represent rat poison, the same thing that Hitler used in the gas chambers in Nazi Germany. 

These guys want to preach and get in your face and scream things and block Jewish folks from getting in and out of the synagogue. We're not going to have it. So we start to gather intel. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Lo and behold, shortly after, a person associated with the same group ambushed and shot two Orthodox Jews outside of the synagogue in Los Angeles. 

I said, ‘You know what? Our community has to know what visited us.’ We were able to pull up their arrest photos or videos that they shot and posted, identify them, and talk about their criminal histories. You know, here's a guy who's been arrested for soliciting a 14-year-old online. Thank God it was an undercover deputy. Here's a guy arrested for murder. Here's one that got arrested for aggravated assault. This is the rogue's gallery of criminals. 

Of course, they went berserk with that, saying ‘You can't do that. We're American citizens.’ No, I can do that, it's all public record. 

Whose idea was it to put up the pictures and call them scumbags? 

Me (laughs.) My team. They were all like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s fantastic.’ We thought ‘we could do the same exact thing that they're doing. Who says we can't do it?’ And everybody said, ‘Nobody. So let's go do it. Let's start researching. Let's start pulling photos. Let's start running these guys and find out what their criminal histories are. But let's do it. Let's turn the tide on them.’

What was it like following the press conference?

My daughters didn’t really get it. You know, they didn't sign up for this so they were a little unnerved. But me, it's been 35-plus years doing this. I've been in two shootouts you're really not going to faze me. I think what really surprised me was how big the story got. I kind of thought it would have been a local thing. 

But there are people that I know from being here 17 years that I'm kind of surprised at their response. When I say surprised, I mean surprised in a bad way, that they kind of look at me differently because I stood up for Jewish people, which I don't get, but that's probably a side of them I never saw.

Would you be comfortable telling me what happened to your parents?

A call came in, because obviously these idiots did all kinds of research and they got my parent's address, which says ‘Hey, I'm inside of this address. I just killed the two residents and I'm waiting for the police to show up because I want to kill the first officer then I want to kill myself.’ 

Fortunately for me, I control the communication center here. The minute the address came in, you're there entering it and it pops up ‘Chitwood’ they're like, ‘Oh, my God, this is the Sheriff's parent's house.’ So they were able to reach out to my parents through their cell phone, say, ‘Hey, this is dispatched for you. Here's the call that came in.’ So they knew what was happening. 

I didn't know because nobody called me, not even my parents. At five in the morning, I'm getting up to go to the gym and my father's driving by and he's like, ‘Hey, I just wanna tell you what happened this morning’ and I'm like, ‘Why are you telling me this four hours later?’ He said, ‘Ah it was all B.S. I didn't want to wake you up.’

What do you think about the death threats you've been getting and the arrests that came of that? 

I think if there's a chance to make an arrest, we ought to make an arrest because we've got to let them know. You can't arrest everybody. There are some that we've identified through the FBI that when they went and paid a visit the person is clearly mentally ill and does not have access to firearms.This last one, this guy we arrested in San Diego, had access to five firearms. So there's a big difference. 

The common denominator, though, is what we're seeing is they're in their thirties, they live at home with mommy, they're unemployed and they spend, according to their parents, 20 hours a day in these neo-Nazi chat rooms. That's the scary part.  

What I've learned in my career is that what GD and the other groups are doing is they're loading the gun and laying it on the counter waiting for that one person who's marginalized, lives with their mom, with a little bit of mental illness who thinks, ‘oh my God, I got to do something about this.’ Then they go out and commit the atrocity based on what they pushed this person to do. That's what really is the danger in getting into these extremist chat rooms. 

You're finding these guys are just sitting in their rooms and stewing on this propaganda?

Exactly. You look at the first guy we locked up, you guys broke out of central casting for Nazi sympathizers. I mean, the only thing I was disappointed about was that he wasn't wearing his underwear when he came downstairs. But the second guy, I think when they got him he was in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. 

The second man arrested allegedly made the threat when talking about the first suspect’s arrest. Do you think the two are going to get to know each other in sunny Florida? 

Well, he'll be getting a trip back here, all expenses paid, travel, lodging, and he'll be staying at the happiest place on Earth, which is our county jail. Maybe we’ll put them together in the same cell.