Cape CopCast
Welcome to "The Cape CopCast," the official podcast of the Cape Coral Police Department.
Hosted by Officer Mercedes Simonds, and Lisa Greenberg from our Public Affairs team, this podcast dives into the heart of Cape Coral PD's public safety, community initiatives, and the inner workings of our police department. Each episode brings you insightful discussions, interviews with key community figures, and expert advice on safety.
Cape CopCast
Chief's Chat #16: How We're Adding More Officers and Prioritizing Calls
In this edition of the Cape CopCast "Chief's Chat," Chief Sizemore breaks down the science behind prioritizing police response and staffing in this transparent, informative discussion about department operations.
Using a simple visual metaphor of "tennis balls in buckets," the Chief explains how the department allocates officers across the city's four geographical quadrants. Each quadrant (or bucket) contains four zones, and each zone has its own officers (tennis balls). When priority one emergencies occur—active crimes, injury crashes, or immediate threats to safety—these officers must respond immediately, leaving non-emergency calls to wait longer. It's not that your non-emergency call isn't important; it's that someone else's life may literally depend on that immediate response.
The good news? The department's "Project 35" has mapped out staffing needs for the next decade with unanimous support from city leadership. This science-based approach to scaling police services has received backing from city management, finance teams, and elected officials, ensuring that as Cape Coral grows, police staffing will grow proportionally.
The episode concludes with the announcement of Captain Matt Campion as the department's new Interim Deputy Chief. Fresh from graduating the prestigious FBI National Academy at Quantico, Campion brings refined leadership skills to an organization of over 400 employees, highlighting the department's commitment to succession planning and professional development. Subscribe to hear more insider perspectives on how your police department operates and evolves with your community!
Welcome back to another episode of the Cape Cop cast Chiefs chat edition.
Speaker 2:I'm one of your hosts, lisa Greenberg, and I'm Officer Mercedes Simons. Together we make up the public affairs office. This is probably going to be my last Chiefs chat for a while. Yeah, if you can't tell, I've probably grown a little bit over the last couple of Chiefs chat all the podcast episodes. So it'll be Lisa Chief and, who knows, maybe a special guest here and there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe we'll add in some guests or something. It'll be fun. It's been a few weeks since we've done a Chiefs Chat podcast. We've had a busy few weeks here at the department.
Speaker 3:We have. There's been a lot going on and we didn't do any show prep, just so you guys know. So they have no idea what I'm going to talk about. But earlier in the week I had a meeting with our finance department and I wanted to kind of let everybody know where we're at in the budget process and what does that mean to you at home. So how this connected with me is, I had a friend of mine that lives in the community that needed some legal advice and ended up needing our services.
Speaker 3:So they called me and said hey, this is what happened in our life. You know, I think I might need a police report. I said, yeah, no problem, just call the non-emergency number. These are the key phrases and key things that you want to talk to the officer about. When they get there and this was a Saturday afternoon I said just be mindful, it's Saturday and the afternoon turns into the evening, turns into the night, and it's Saturday night. Around here it can be pretty busy. So you may you may have to wait, because what they told me was not a occurring right now. You know, vital situation in the immediate past occurred. So they ended up calling me a couple hours later and said hey, I got to pick somebody up at the airport. Should I wait? You know what it's now after 7 on Saturday night and, with the situation that you have, it's important to you but it's not running, gutting, crashing, burning.
Speaker 3:So, why don't you go to the airport and we'll try again tomorrow and call in the morning? Sunday morning is a lot different than Saturday afternoon, saturday evening, and that's not an uncommon thing to hear and it's not ideal for people to have to wait, but it is a reality. You know, we bounce between the eighth and seventh largest city, depending on what website you look at, in the third most populated state in the country. We're busy, right. I use that analogy all the time. If it's out there, it's in here.
Speaker 3:So a Saturday is rocking and rolling metrics and our staffing plan and our building based upon priority one calls, meaning how many cops do we need to be able to respond to a priority one emergency in a set amount of time, and we get our onboard people to be able to meet that metric. That's an easy, conversational way to do budgeting, explain budgeting, do it with policymakers and with finance people to be able to outfit your agency. But fortunately for all of us that live in Cape Coral, we are predominantly not a priority one call town Right, meaning if you need the police. We have plenty of priority one calls, but the majority of them are not. So what that means is if you are experiencing a priority one call that's an active in progress crime. Somebody's getting attacked, there's a crash with injuries, there's something on fire, something really that you know in your mind would be a priority one call. Somebody's breaking into your home.
Speaker 1:Active emergency essentially.
Speaker 3:Then we're going to get there. They're always going to be number one. We triage calls for service when they come into our communication center. So if you had a non-emergency call and you had been waiting and you're moving up the queue, we don't go by first in, first out. So if somebody calls with a break in sorry you got to wait no, that's going to go to the top and you're going to wait. That triaging makes our priority. Twos, threes and fours have to wait. So we have that metric of we need this many cops to get here in this amount of time for a priority one. We don't have that metric for twos, threes and fours because it's way too complicated, not the best science.
Speaker 3:Now what does that mean for the average person? When you call the police because something's suspicious or I want to report something or something happened to me at work or something happened outside, but it's not happening right now, is you could wait? I don't like that. You don. Now is you could wait? I don't like that. You don't like that. The people don't like that.
Speaker 3:So what do you do? You use the same formula that you have I need more cops to be able to respond to your priority ones. Well, when all of your priority ones have been saturated and taken care of, you now have available units for your twos, threes and fours and convers, the response times will decrease. I mean, you'll get a cop quicker for your type of call.
Speaker 3:So that hit home for me when I was talking to a friend of mine who was experiencing it and I get emails from time to time that I called the police on Saturday at 830, and it took two and a half hours for the officer to get there. They were great when they got there but nobody got hurt. But geez, two and a half hours, how is that right? Well, at that time, just this past Saturday night, we had a traffic fatality, we had another near fatality, all in the same precinct. That's a saturation of your workforce. Therefore, when another priority call comes out and you clear somebody to go to that and you clear somebody to go to that, somebody's waiting with a non-priority call longer and longer and longer and we do sometimes take somebody from another district or precinct to go respond.
Speaker 3:But now that precinct gets exposed and you can get stuck out here and then there's another call. I'm close to that, I'll back that one up and then you're longer exposed and you're exacerbating the problem in another part of the city and we call it getting upside down. So that's not the preferred way to do it. What you need to do is adequately staff where you're at. So I thought of a visual that would explain to people how we're situated in a pretty quick mental diagram and then what we're trying to do and the support that we have from city management, finance and the elected officials to meet that shared vision, right? So picture a five-gallon pail, right? Everybody can kind of picture that in their head and then you take a cardboard divider and put it into it. So it's an empty five gallon pail with a cardboard divider that divides it into fours.
Speaker 3:Okay, so one of those buckets is a precinct. We have four of them. So there's four buckets with dividers in it. One is up here, southeast, southwest, northwest, northeast, and in each one of those precincts or buckets it's divided into fours. There's four response zones. That's how we're laid out Very symmetrical, very easy to comprehend. One looks like the other. There's not a. Southeast is busier, so there's a multitude of zones and then we spread them out big over here. We used to do that, we've outgrown that.
Speaker 3:So, it's very simple, very scalable and you don't have to change it again. So we mirror We've talked about this before on the podcast, but we mirror the geographical quadrants of the city. So you've got your four buckets. Take a tennis ball, put it in one of those. That's a cop. So a tennis ball in all four of those zones, in all four of those precincts. That is our minimum staffing. There's a cop in every single zone, in all four precincts. Minimum is certainly not optimum right and we have more than that. We have more than one per, but you can't go below one per. That is every section. Every piece of real estate in the city is protected and patrolled and covered by a police officer. If they get tied up on a call, then there is no available tennis ball in that section. So busier parts of the city or busier buckets or sub zones, we put two tennis balls and the goal and a lot of them have multiple tennis balls in there the goal is to have multiple in every single one of them.
Speaker 3:So, right now. Where we're at today is there is a minimum of one tennis ball in every divided bucket. The busier zones, the busier parts of the city, certain areas of the Southeast, southwest, even the Northeast, have more than one in each bucket. And as we grow, or a or an area of the city, so let's Southeast is southeast is pretty grown, so let's go northwest New apartment complexes, new shopping centers, a lot more people that's growing, so that bucket has one tennis ball in each one as it grows. You don't get another bucket, you don't get another divider. You put another ball in each zone and that's how you're scalable. So you don't have to redesign your geographical boundaries because they're not changing. We're not annexing large swaths of land and we're not going to put more dividers in the bucket. It's four and four, nice and easy up here for me, and then what you want to do is add more.
Speaker 3:So eventually, as we grow and as we scale, certain sub zones within each bucket might be very busy and they could have a lot of tennis balls in there. But the geographical boundaries don't change. They serve as their own backup officers. Two can go to a priority, one call and you still have an available tennis ball to respond to your non-priority calls. So hopefully that kind of shows where we are and where we're going. So in our project 35, we have scaled ahead 10 years. What do we project to be the required amount of tennis balls in every one of these? And we are now building towards that. We have cleared the hurdle of designing that plan. We have pitched it officially. I spoke about that plan. I didn't use the buckets and the balls, I did more business-like, but it was well-received, it was understood and it's not really going wild or out on a limb If you take all of the available information and you process it.
Speaker 3:That's the most sensical way to do it. Our policymakers and elected officials believe in it. Our finance department understands that. They believe in it. They're scientific in their brain. They don't have a motion to it. They don't have to like it or dislike it. They fund it or don't fund it, and their desire or decision to fund it or not fund it comes from the city manager who works with me and our team, and the city manager and his staff work with the elected officials.
Speaker 3:So what do you need is what comes down. What do we need to be safe? That's the directive or the marching orders I'm given. We need you to keep us safe. I tell you what I need to keep you safe. As long as it's not some harebrained scheme, they believe in it. That vision gets shared to city management. We work that out and then city management directs finance to fund it. That's kind of the flow of how we do it. So we are deep into that process now. So it's been developed. I have presented it officially at a budget workshop. That's the first foray into this. Is what I need. It was a unanimous head nod. Yes, absolutely, if you like what we're doing, if you like the way the food tastes today as our restaurant gets bigger. We need this to be able to continue to deliver that.
Speaker 3:And then we start the meetings with finance, and I met with them and our plan so far is intact, so that my friend and your friends and friends we haven't met yet that are priority twos and threes, thankfully won't have to wait and go. What in the world? Why did it take so long? There's still going to be outliers like that, there's still going to be times like that, but we'll have more people to respond to our priority ones and our key metric of response time will diminish. Priority ones and our key metric of response time will diminish. And then, by flooding that, that oversaturation, to be able to do that, you have extra people that can diminish your response time to your quality of life and less life threatening calls for service, cause we are a thankfully, a priority to and below town that still has our share of ones. Yeah, so if I thoroughly confused you, let me know.
Speaker 1:No, it makes perfect sense and it's good to hear that there's backing for that, because I know it is frustrating. Every call is important to us, of course, but obviously we're going to have to respond to the active car crash that has people with injuries, are going to have to respond to a domestic violence situation that's actively ongoing. Those types of situations obviously take priority to. Oh, I just noticed that someone broke into my car last night and it's 2 pm in the afternoon. You know, nothing's going to change between now and an hour from now, if that's how long it takes us to get there. So it makes complete sense and I think it'll be good because, like you said, as we add more tennis balls, that wait time goes down.
Speaker 3:Right, and to that scenario that you pointed out. You know, somebody broke into my car last night. You shouldn't have to wait. We don't want you to wait. And the question is, well, what are you doing about it? That's what we're doing about it. We're scientifically designing and building and scaling up. One point of interest here is if all we had to do is staff the street, we could do that in probably one and a half budget years. It would be easy to be able to do that. You know, this fiscal year starts in October. We'd be almost caught up, and then the next one we'd be completely caught up.
Speaker 3:But you only see that what happens when you have an increase in calls for service, an increase in crimes, an increase in other social demands, like schools, having officers in schools, the value of that? Having more crimes means more detectives to investigate. Criminals get more sophisticated. When you have a lot of financial crimes, you still have property crimes and, unfortunately, as population grows and gets more dense, you have crimes against persons and sexual crimes and crimes against children and all of these things that. If you're not experiencing that, thank God you're not, but when you do, you want to know my police department's competent that if my loved one God forbid has fallen victim to a violent crime or a homicide or anything like that, you need to know that we have the staffing, the technology and the people to do it. So much like the road or the street is growing, so is the need for those other roles. Well, they are staffed from people on the street who are gaining experience and becoming seasoned police officers. That's where they get plucked from and go.
Speaker 3:So we take a couple of steps forward and then a couple of steps back, because we graduate 10 out of an academy, get them trained in-house and deploy 10. You don't net 10 on the street because there's traffic officers that are vacant and we've got to stay on top of that. There's property crimes units that are, that are not fully staffed. So you take a percentage and put them in there, and a percentage and put them in there. So out of 10, you maybe you net six out of a class, and those priorities fluctuate. So if there's a, an unfunded mandate that comes down from the government that you have to start doing this, that's going to be the priority. So, 10 graduating, maybe four go to that, and then traffic and investigations wait to the next group. So you're. As the population grows, we have to continue to to hire, but the demands and other parts of the of the organization continue. So you, you, you net less than what you think.
Speaker 3:So that's the multiple gears spinning within a big year.
Speaker 1:Right, it's not as simple as just. Oh, let's add 10 officers to the road. There's a process, like you said, multiple gears spinning at once but it's nice to remind people that we are staying on top of it, that the plans are in place and we are going to get to a place where, most of the time, they're not waiting.
Speaker 2:I think it's important for people to realize like, yes, you are a priority to us. Yes, like we don't want you to wait. But sometimes you take those tennis balls and you might have one person in one zone and one in another and suddenly there's this bad domestic violence issue that goes out. You need two to go to that. So now you have two zones that you might have had calls that were priority two or three, and now they're both holding and sometimes that's okay because they're they're other priorities. That's why we call it priority. One is because it becomes a safety issue. So I think it's just great to bring that back to the importance of remembering it's's not a priority to us, but in a way, it's good that it's not something that needs to be handled right now.
Speaker 1:People should be glad that they're a priority too, for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the goal is to have each one of these subdivided buckets, independently staffed and independent to be able to hand self-sustaining right. That's the ultimate goal. Where you don't want to pull from other parts, that's going to happen, that's just the nature of it. But the more you can minimize that and make each one of them self-sufficient, the response times within each one of those divided areas will exponentially get better.
Speaker 1:For sure. I know we like to end on a positive note, so I thought we would give a little shout out. We did publicly name our interim deputy chief this week. Captain Matt Campion is now our interim deputy chief after deputy chief Phil Van Lanshoot retired, and I know that this is obviously very exciting for our department to continue to move forward.
Speaker 3:It's excellent and Matt was, within a week, a recent graduate of the prestigious FBI National Academy in Quantico, virginia. Matt was nominated to go. We have a very formalized succession plan in the building. Leadership. Training starts very early and we put people on pathways to different, appropriate career tenured training and he is entering the executive level and he was identified as somebody worthy of that and ready to do that. So Matt had the base, had the talent, had the ability, and then we were so fortunate to send him to Quantico.
Speaker 3:It's world-renowned and it teaches you a lot of the. It polishes off a lot of the rough edges for somebody who's already talented in things like how to lead large, contemporary, dynamic organizations like ours. We're over 400-plus people and growing every day and doing multiple things. It's a busy place. And growing every day and doing multiple things. It's a busy place.
Speaker 3:And to lead in that fashion where you don't see your subordinates face-to-face every day, like a small business, you rely on other people to do it and that takes an educated leader. So he learned skills in emotional intelligence on how to do that. How do you lead a diverse group of people with a diverse set of motivations and what makes them tick? Learn how to do that, learned psychology, learned advanced criminal justice techniques and just unbelievable. We're so thrilled to have him graduate from there, represent us, do so well and represent Cape Coral as a whole and the Cape Coral Police Department, and come back and I can already see what was a talent is now refined and for us to put that into action. It's going to benefit everybody in the building and everybody in the community. So couldn't be more proud For sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's great, and on top of that, it's like a level of physical fitness that's very challenging to maintain, and he did that too, and I think that just speaks to overall. Being a well-rounded law enforcement officer is is maintaining all of that, including physical fitness, which is awesome.
Speaker 1:So he's a lead by example guy hard worker for sure, so big congrats to him. All right, chief. Anything else, that's a full plate. That is a full plate. We are pushing 20 minutes here, so awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and we'll catch you next time. Stay safe.
