DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Daytona Beach Police Chief Jakari Young is claiming a major drop in violent crime in his city, largely due to a team he put together of tough, aggressive enforcers.
Young gave them one direct order: Go after the most dangerous criminals and do everything in their power – legally – to prevent violent crime.
The 10 men and women call themselves the Violent Criminal Apprehension Team, or VCAT.
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The Daytona Beach PD has been posting body-worn camera videos of VCAT’s success stories since it was formed in 2022: Car chases and foot chases taking down suspects wanted for stealing cars and guns, murder, assault and drugs.
Lt. Chauncey Hampton, who Young picked to form VCAT, said most arrests end with his team using restraint and without force.
“I refer to them as the dream team,” Hampton said. “Our goals for our mission are to identify, locate and apprehend the most dangerous fugitives. The most dangerous in the community.”
Hampton said that responsibility does not come without risk.
“And it takes a lot of trust from the chief to have this position,” Hampton said. “The chief has worked hard in bridging the gap between the police department and the community and that in itself has played a major role in the apprehension of bad guys out there. The citizens of Daytona are great. They help us out. They’re not against us, they’re with us.”
Chief Young created VCAT in September 2022 to prevent yet another unexplained uptick in crime that occurred every November.
“So in 2022 to get ahead of that I had a command staff meeting and I said hey we need to come up with some form of a team they can just get out there and be extremely proactive so that we can prevent a rough November,” Young said. “And it has paid off big time. Because for me it was a roll of the dice because with the makeup of our city we have to be really, really careful and how we go after bad guys because everybody’s going to flee in a car and what we don’t want is innocent people getting hurt fleeing from the police.”
Young said violent crime has drastically dropped, in large part because of VCAT.
“Let’s go back, in 2022 I had 16 homicides, so far this year I’ve only had five,” Young said. “And only one of them is related to gun violence. And a large part of that is what that team is doing on a nightly basis out there. They’re stopping cars, recovering firearms, recovering narcotics and making those critical arrests of those would-be shooters.”
Lt. Hampton said just in the first three months that VCAT was operational, it made 136 felony arrests of 64 wanted suspects and confiscated 51 guns. Just in three months.
“And within the fourth month, which was December, we ended up with 210 felony arrests by that time,” Hampton said. “And as a result from 2022 to 2023, we were responsible for at least 22 homicide suspects arrest or homicide-related arrest.”
In all of 2024, Hampton said it has only needed to pick one homicide suspect.
“We’re traveling to the hottest spots in the city where all of the crime is at and we’ve gotten to the point where we can drive by and go to the street and come back and within one minute everyone disappears,” Hampton said. “You could probably hear a pin drop out there. We don’t know what we’re deterring, but we’re deterring something when we pull up.”