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Fort Myers Police Chief Derrick Diggs

Fort Myers Police Department
Chief Derrick Diggs

It’s been about a year since we last sat down to talk with Fort Myers Police Chief Derrick Diggs. He's he’s been on the job since August of 2016, having taken the helm of a police department with more than a hundred cold case homicides, a lack of trust from some parts of the community it was trying to protect, and internal issues that were later parsed out in a third party audit- which was made public upon its completion a year ago. We sit down with Chief Diggs to get an update on progress he's made so far, including the recent arrest in the downtown Fort Myers Zombicon shooting that happened in 2015.

 

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.