133 Arrests Made in Volusia County Over Spring Break Weekend

The Volusia Sheriff’s Office arrested 133 people over the past weekend, the agency announced on Monday. The sudden spike in people taken into custody coincides with the ongoing spring break festivities in coastal communities across Florida. 84 of the weekend’s arrests came in Daytona Beach, the VSO said. The other 49 were in New Smyrna Beach. Volusia Sheriff Mike Chitwood has been adamant in recent days that his deputies are patrolling areas where spring break activity is most tightly concentrated. The VSO and Sheriff Chitwood have pushed back against widely-circulated social media clips claiming that shootings have broken out on the beaches of Volusia County in recent days. They say these clips are either incidents other than shootings or old videos. “People can post stuff, they’re reposting things from 2020, and there’s no way to really defend that,” Chitwood said in a news conference on Monday. “This incident during last weekend was clearly social media driven. ‘Let’s all go and invade Daytona’. And there ain’t a hell of a whole lot we can do other than what we did.” There is a sliver of truth to online rumors of spring break shootings. The Daytona Beach Police Department is currently investigating four separate shooting incidents that took place on Saturday at four locations in the city. But regardless, Chitwood is adamant that no shots were fired on the beach. “So you hear all this stuff, ‘Oh they were shooting guns on the beach’, that is absolute bulls–t,” Chitwood continued. “There were zero gunshots on the beach. What they were doing was crushing a water bottle to make it sound like a gunshot to stampede the crown. I was out there, the chief was out there, we were in the middle of it. People might not wanna hear this, but everyone who we came in contact with was absolutely polite.” Details were not provided by the VSO about the types of charges levied in the 133 arrests made over the weekend. Crowds numbered around 2,000 at events like the Hands Up Guns Down event at the Volusia County Fairgrounds and the Big Daddy’s Block Party in DeLand. Both of these went safely, the VSO says.