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CompStat
CompStat, which is at the heart of Sheriff Mike Chitwood’s pledge to accountability-based policing, is a high-tech crime-fighting program designed to help identify and combat community crime trends. Sheriff Chitwood implemented this highly effective program in the Daytona Beach Police Department while serving there as Police Chief from 2006-2016 and then instituted it at the Volusia Sheriff’s Office shortly after taking office in January 2017.
Through CompStat, which is short for computer statistics, crimes are plotted on a map to help identify trends, patterns, connections and hot spots. Then tactics and strategies are discussed with the Sheriff and his commanders in response to the crimes that are occurring. The program is designed to enhance information-sharing and hold supervisors responsible for employing strategies and resources needed to effectively solve, combat and suppress crime. The program also encourages community participation and feedback from residents about crime in their neighborhood through regularly held crime control strategy meetings that are open to the public.
The four primary crime-fighting principles behind CompStat are:
- Accurate and timely intelligence information (Know what’s happening!)
- Effective tactics (Have a plan!)
- Rapid deployment of personnel and resources (Do it quickly!)
- Relentless follow-up and assessment (If it works, do more of it! If it doesn’t work, do something else!)
Please note: The Volusia Sheriff’s Office has transitioned from the summary-based reporting system to the FBI’s Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and FDLE’s Florida Incident-Based Reporting System (FIBRS). This transition has caused significant changes to collection and categorization of crime data. Because the new NIBRS/FIBRS data includes a broader array of crimes, comparing current data to the more limited summary data of previous years may provide an inaccurate reflection of changes in crime rate. While the CompStat reports provided may show a significant rate change in certain categories of crime, that change may be attributable to the transition from summary reporting to the NIBRS/FIBRS standard of data collection.