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 #19: Closing the Gap on School Threat Laws ft. State Rep. Mike Giallombardo
A legal loophole exposed by a recent school threat case in Cape Coral has sparked an urgent conversation about public safety and legislative reform. When an individual made a verbal threat that was subsequently recorded and posted online, the Cape Coral Police Department was able to charge the person who shared the video, but not the person who actually made the threatening statements.
In this week's episode of the Cape CopCast 'Chief's Chat,' Chief Anthony Sizemore shifts to co-host with Public Affairs Officer Lisa Greenberg. We sit down with State Representative Mike Giallombardo to unpack this critical issue and explain the path toward closing this significant gap in Florida's threat laws. We dive into how legislation actually works—the methodical, multi-layered process designed to produce thoughtful, effective laws.
State Rep. Giallombardo walks listeners through the complex journey of a bill, from initial conception through committee stops in both chambers of the legislature, highlighting the deliberate "speed bumps" built into the system that prevent emotional reactions from creating problematic laws. The conversation reveals the careful balance legislators must strike: addressing genuine threats that endanger school safety while avoiding overcriminalization, particularly when it comes to young people who may say foolish things without genuine intent to cause harm.
This behind-the-scenes look at government collaboration demonstrates how professional relationships between law enforcement and elected officials can lead to real-world solutions that protect communities. Listen in to gain rare insight into the machinery of government actually working as intended—identifying problems, formulating solutions, and navigating the complex path toward meaningful change.
Learn more about State Rep. Giallombardo here: https://www.flhouse.gov/Sections/Representatives/details.aspx?MemberId=4783&LegislativeTermId=91
Welcome back to another episode of the Cape Copcast Chiefs Chat Edition. You can see I have a different co-host today. I have the Chief your elevated as co-host for us.
Speaker 2:I've been promoted, congratulations. Yeah, how's it feel?
Speaker 1:It feels good, yeah, so Mercedes is still on maternity leave. She's going to be back, don't worry, but the Chief is going to be my co-host today because we have a special guest. You might have just heard him. We have State Representative Mike Giolombardo with us today and we wanted to kind of take a deeper dive into the next steps when it comes to how we address legislation and things like that. This is all born from a conversation that we had about the recent school threats. Chief.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is at the end of that episode we talked about. Just to recap, for those who might not be aware, we had kind of an oddball case where there was a school threat where an individual made the threat verbally. It was videotaped and uploaded to social media by another individual and the statute captures that activity, the posting of it, which resulted in the felony charge of a written or posted school threat, and the individual who made the comments did not meet the criteria for that charge. We were able to subsequently arrest him on a different charge, but the question was why? Why couldn't we arrest him for?
Speaker 3:that.
Speaker 2:And the law is the law. And at the end of that episode we said on Next Steps, we're going to engage the state representative for our community, which is Mike G Lombardo, that I have a relationship with. I talked to him that weekend and said Mike, are you aware of what happened? You talk about a guy who's in tune locally. Yes, he is. He's from Cape Coral, like myself, a Mariner grad. He's got kids in school, so it was very front of mind for him. And he said absolutely, I saw it. What can we do? And that's where that partnership had already been there but for this particular issue really went into action.
Speaker 1:Well, it's nice to have these partnerships, because now you can not to say this in a negative way, but take advantage of it, right? This is where we can actually create some action to come from something like this. So thank you for coming today no, absolutely. It is awesome to have you here. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm doing well. First, I graduated from North. Oh, okay, so I went to North for my senior year. So well, it's all right.
Speaker 1:Marist for three. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Set me on a path.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly. That's awesome, well, thank you for coming and for being part of this conversation, because I think it's important for a lot of people. It's crazy how much this really blew up and exploded here in Cape Coral. So many parents understandably concerned about this situation. So I think it's good to be talking about the next steps here for sure.
Speaker 3:Well, I would say first, the statute came. I think it was 2021, where we passed a digital threat spill. Right, if you make a threat over any type of social media text message, anything like that, that is elevated to a felony. In this case, the individual who posted the threat is the one who transmitted that threat over a social media platform, and the individual that said something wasn't necessarily because they weren't the one that. It wasn't their account that they posted that. It wasn't their account that they posted. So there is a gap in the statute that we're hoping to address.
Speaker 3:Now, when you're looking at a bill, it's not just going up to Tallahassee and saying, hey, I want to submit this, so you've got to have a Senate sponsor, you've got to have a House sponsor and it goes through the committee process. So a bill like this would probably hit criminal justice, possibly hit criminal justice appropriations, and then the big judiciary committee. Before going to the House floor, it has to go through the same process in the Senate, so that Senate sponsors now got to push that bill all the way through. They may have different committee stops and then eventually go to their floor and then either. Sometimes the bills don't exactly align the exact same language, and sometimes you know, there's little tweaks that got to be made. And that's when the negotiation happens and say, hey, which version are we going to take? Right, and then either we'll pass ours over or they'll pass theirs over, and then we'll take that up, and then, once it passes, then it goes to the governor's desk.
Speaker 2:And when you said ours and theirs, you're talking about the two different chambers of government, much like the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. We have the same thing in the state of Florida state Senate and state house. So you guys will do your bill, the Senate will do their bill. They jive. Some of the language will be congruent, Some of it won't. You pick the best of the two or the most that's going to pass. And those speed bumps, if you will, are intentional to take this case out of it, to keep emotion from letting something steamroll through that. Oh, we didn't think about that. We didn't think about that. We didn't think about that. We were letting a motion drive the train. And then you get a law that really wasn't fully thought out and formulated. So that's done on purpose.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'll tell you this. So this year I passed a bill on large scale events. You know, people just breaking and trespassing. It's a trespassing bill. It's really for large scale events. So 5, people just breaking and trespassing. It's a trespassing bill. It's really for large scale events. So 5,000 people or more. So if it's like a football game or a concert or something, and this was all in a response to the soccer games where everybody just trampled over all the law enforcement and just and just busted through the gates, most of them didn't have tickets.
Speaker 3:And that bill, as it started and we worked with Miami-Dade County Sheriff with that didn't. I mean the way it ended up on the end was not the same right. It went through a process. They looked at, well, you know, juveniles at a county fair. What if they just jumped the fence? You know we can't up that to a felony Right. So they took all those things into account before it got to the final stop, because we wanted to make sure that we did our due diligence. We ran out of the traps and we don't have unintended consequences when we pass a piece of law.
Speaker 2:So grownups getting paid to do grownup things.
Speaker 3:Right, we're kind of grownups sometimes yeah, politics. But yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:No, that's exactly right, because you don't want that. I remember that law that was the Leo Messi law.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yep, that's it.
Speaker 2:The Messi law. Yeah, very, not messy like a mess, but like the M-E-S-S-I. Yeah one of the greatest soccer players. That caused such an excitement that we now have legislation because of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because it was all a misdemeanor, right, Right. Same thing with the gaming bill. I know we have these little arcades and casinos that pop up all over the place. They're illegal and so we had a gambling bill that addressed a number of things, but it did say that essentially it was a felony if you were a manager of any one of those establishments. Because it's a misdemeanor, it's very difficult for law enforcement to be able to enforce that. And if it's a misdemeanor storing all the arcade equipment, if you seize it all, there's a lot of cost that goes into those things.
Speaker 3:So, in order for us to kind of shepherd this piece of legislation through, had to go through my committee, which I chair industries and professional activities and I had to go through criminal justice. So there was a process that I had to go through. I mean, the way it started is not even close to the way it ended, just because of all the tweaks and all the things that you have to flush out. And we have a great staff in Tallahassee that will go through and rooms of lawyers that just kind of comb through the legislation to make sure that we're not violating constitutional issues. And when the bill passes, our goal is to not prevent it from having to go to the Supreme Court and go through the whole process. So there's a lot of due diligence that goes into these bills. Our goal is to not prevent it from having to go to the Supreme court and go through the whole process.
Speaker 2:So you know so there's a lot of due diligence that goes into these bills and, because of those different committees, there's a different lens to look at one particular problem. So you talk about a business lens, you think you have all of it figured out, and then you take what you have and you give it to the law enforcement side and they're like wait a second, there's X, y, z or the other way around, right when, if it was police driven, these are all the things that make our life easier to do this. And then, well, wait a minute, there's a lot of business components that you're not aware of and you have to put those together to make a solid piece of legislation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know there's a great examples. There was a piece of legislation that the state attorneys were really, really working on and there is an issue we just gotta we the. The solution that the bill it's a social media bill um that was proposed is not necessarily the business friendly way to do it and it could cause a lot of unintended consequences. Um, essentially getting rid of end-to-end encryption, so that could pose a whole other issue when it comes to cybersecurity, privacy, all those different things. And I get the intent is great. They want to make sure that kids that are on social media, parents have access, law enforcement has access, but the bill was initially just to end an encryption and that is next to impossible for a platform.
Speaker 2:That's a multi-billion dollar business model for a lot of people and you're trying to create legislation to end that and that's not going to work To their credit they're.
Speaker 3:I mean, I've had great conversations. We have an amazing state attorney, amira Fox, yes, and we talked extensively about this. And next year we're going, and next year I'm hopeful that we're going to put something together to kind of get something through that helps safeguard. And sometimes legislation doesn't make it through the process and it takes two, three, four, five, six years to actually get through because of just all the complexity of it, you know. I mean sometimes it's really uprooting a massive, you know, lots of industry, a lot of changes that really have to be vetted out very carefully.
Speaker 2:So on a visual, you think of legislation in Tallahassee as one big gear wheel, but really inside of it there's a lot of different gears that are spinning and they all have to align for a bill to pass. So if we circle back to the one we're talking about with the cyber threat that was posted, it's not as simple as hey, wait a second, that doesn't make sense. Let's get up there and just get this through. There's a lot of different levers and hurdles that would have to go. So an example would be a kid right, not a grown man that we're talking about in this case, but a kid is 15, his brain isn't fully developed, says something stupid and it happens to get witnessed by somebody. Somebody else is on their phone filming, and I'm filming over here and I pick you up saying something stupid if we're not careful. The intention isn't for you to go to jail for saying something stupid with a major felony. We have to make sure that those things are vetted out, right.
Speaker 3:Yes, and then how do you differentiate the case that happened with the adult just recently at the school or regarding the school? And then how do you differentiate that between a kid just being so angry they don't know how to express themselves but other than say something dumb, right, right. And so you and that's because I brought this up to judiciary when we had the conversation and that was the concern Like hey, well, what happens if a 10-year-old kid just said something stupid, right?
Speaker 3:Which happens often. What happens? I have three kids that you know. And so then what do you do, right? You can't just go and say, oh well, it's automatically felony, done right, or so. You have to be really careful on how you do this, otherwise you're causing way more damage long term for people's lives, you know, than than any good.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of nuance to it, which is why the gap is there to begin with. I'm sure it's. You know, there's so many different scenarios and trying to find a piece of legislation that covers all of it, but not overextending, you know very smart, well-intended people wrote this law when it first came out.
Speaker 2:They didn't just without thought do it, but it's impossible to envision every scenario that would come up, and there are times like this where it falls outside and it is a gap. But that's why we're doing what we're doing, so to differentiate between a 10-year-old doing 10-year-old things and a 25-year-old man with a very specific location, date method. I think there's some work in there and that's what we're doing right now. And we started long before this blew up. We were having these conversations. This blew up, we were having these conversations. So I think that's one of the main takeaways I have is that this is what your government in action looks like. You have people that are entrusted, like myself, to run the police department and I'm accountable to safety in this community, and when it's out of my purview, you don't just quit.
Speaker 3:You find the people that will help, pick up the baton and work with them, and that's what we're doing here yeah, and if you look at like the, the digital uh, digital threat spill that that passed a few years back, that this other kid that uploaded it got essentially got in trouble for I mean it's pretty clear. I mean you have to think about it, take it and post it right, so that was very easy to say hey, hey, this comes under the digital threat. You, you took the action to say I'm going to, I'm going to take the next step and post this Right, so that's, that's a little easier. But when somebody is just anger, there's emotion or something, and and says something, then you're like all right now is that like real? And? And I talked to some of the Sros and and and and I mean they do a great job, um, and a lot of them. They said probably 90 of the things that kids say is out of stupidity, right, right and this is a new one in that it's a a tag team effort.
Speaker 2:you know the legislation and when you close your eyes and envision a threat or envision what this law was for, it's a sole operator Formulated the thought, posted the thought, communicated the thought in some digital fashion and did it. It's all encompassing. That's what it was intended for. That's easy. That's the majority of these cases. But you get these oddballs that happen like this and we can't just wash our hands of it. We've got to find a way to do it, but it's got to be balanced with common sense.
Speaker 3:And I think you know, maybe also taking the approach, as you know, a specific action, right, like you know, they say they're going to take their you know, ak-47 or AR or whatever and do X, y and Z to to X, y and Z, right, like that is a specific action. There was some thought behind it, right, you know. So, maybe addressing that, and that's the conversations that we had in Tallahassee, kind of figuring out what's the balance between you know, a kid just one-off saying something dumb to you know, somebody actually saying what they're going to do?
Speaker 2:how they're going to do it and when they're going to do, how they're going to do it and when they're going to do it, which is very specific and thoughtful. That's what's comforting to me on many levels as the chief of police, that we identified a problem. We work with the legislature and we're moving that professionally. That's comforting for me that we're moving. As a resident of the city take my profession out of it I'm comforted to know that the people that are elected to represent me and my family are doing that action and then, as a parent with somebody a child in the schools here, to know that they're doing that to protect our kids. I'm very comforted by that.
Speaker 3:Yeah we do that with. I mean I get a lot of other. I mean the building industry. You know people at school like they always come up and talk to me about different ideas or thoughts and you know sometimes you know we'll take that and figure out if it's got legs and if there's something that really needs to be done or sometimes it's just a one-off right.
Speaker 3:Can't respond and create more words on a page. Just a one-off right and can't can't respond and create more words on a page for just one-off situations. So but we got to make sure and be thoughtful when I don't like creating unnecessary laws.
Speaker 2:Right, because then it gums up the works and it's never going to be enforced. Or it's really?
Speaker 1:it's more of an emotional response instead of a tactical response but and it gets in the way of other things that have a chance getting done, because it's bogging down the system.
Speaker 3:And that happens a lot actually. I mean there's I mean, yes, people have, you know, take an emotional bill, they file an emotional bill, but normally by the time it gets to the end it's no longer emotional. Right, there's a lot of folks that weren't tied to that situation or that are kind of going through it and saying, okay, we've got to change this. I get the issue. We've got to tweak this to make it actual, something that could be enforced. You know, enforced or, you know, does it have a huge fiscal impact?
Speaker 2:I mean, kind of a professional way of going. What are we doing here? Right you need somebody at the end to go wait. What are we doing here?
Speaker 3:Yep, what's the? What's the intent? What are you trying to achieve? And maybe this is not the way to do it Right? Yep, and that that happens a lot. And then fiscal impact. You know last year we did that happens a lot. And then fiscal impact. Last year the state's budget was like $116 billion. We're proposing $113 now. As the house, we're trying to drop that budget down.
Speaker 3:Florida's been good for many years. We don't need to keep increasing spending. So we're trying to pull back on a lot of the spending. And so when we look at these bills that come through you know some of these bills. You know we've had a.
Speaker 3:We had a bill that um was coming through my committee and ultimately I didn't hear it Um, it had a $16 million fiscal impact. Yeah, nothing's free, nothing's free. So I knew that, if you know so, I told the bill sponsor. I said, hey, if you got to get rid of this fiscal impact, I can't. We can't go and just pass a bunch of bills that that have these huge financial burdens to the state. So they went back and they tried and there was just no way to to cut out the fiscal impact. And I said, well, you know, then you go. What's the intent? What are you trying? What's the goal that you're trying to? What are you trying to fix?
Speaker 3:In this case it was, you know, with animals and stuff. So I said, well, this is what you're trying to achieve. Let's figure out another way to do that. There may be something already in place, correct, you know? Figuring out another path to get there without causing a 16 million dollar impact to you know, I think the impact would have been to Commissioner of Agriculture. So it's, it's. You got to look at all those things in place and I have a personal rule If, if, if the bill has more than half a million dollars in a fiscal, I'm going to take a little bit closer, look and figure out why All those things are part of the equation.
Speaker 2:End result and goal will always trump process.
Speaker 3:Yes, oh yeah, to possibly go through an appropriations committee and each committee, each one of those subs, probably have around 17, 18 people on it. The big committees, which is commerce, judiciary, state affairs, would have about 24, 25 people. So there's more people on it. There's 120 members in the House total and 40 in the Senate. The house total and 40 in the Senate.
Speaker 3:And um you know once it goes to those committees usually I mean I've seen bills after the budget committee stop. Or if it gets to that big committee commerce or state affairs, um, it just won't get passed, it won't just, it just won't move through Right. Um, a stalled bill stall, it stalled right for whatever reason. And we usually try to let the members know hey, this is why we're not going to hear it. Sure.
Speaker 2:So a couple of takeaways that I get from that. Very educational, first of all, and I knew a little bit about the legislature and that process, but I still learned Very informative for our viewers. But this particular one that we're talking about with the school threat, this does have merit. There is a winnable path. We're already moving towards that. We can't guarantee anything on the end after hearing everything, but we are moving forward.
Speaker 2:And here's some inside baseball for people that maybe don't know about Mike G. We've had a relationship for years. We worked through Ian together and all kinds of different legislative sessions and Mike calls me 10 to 1, then I call him and the calls that Mike gives me are what do you need? What can I do for you? What will benefit you here? Or our work in Tallahassee. He's always doing hometown servant stewardship for us and I feel bad because, like Mike, we're good, we're good, we're moving, we're moving. And I hate that it was this particular case, but I went. I know who to call and it was. I finally get to call him instead and what was really great about it wasn't oh man, I call you all the time because you know politics stuff, absolutely not. It was right away man Number one. I know about it, I saw it, I'm invested in it, let's go. And that was something.
Speaker 3:Well, and I appreciate that and again, that's my job, right, that's what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to, you know, respond, but I get more calls from other areas of the state, you know, asking for stuff than I do from home. So it's, but it's good. I mean, you're resourceful, you know you only ask when you need something, and that's good and that's noted.
Speaker 1:So we appreciate that. We appreciate you doing all this and coming here to have this conversation today. I know you're a busy guy, so coming all the way to the Cape Coral Police Department, cape Copcast, checking out our podcast studio, we appreciate it.
Speaker 3:For sure, thank you for having me when do you go back?
Speaker 3:I don't know, we haven't. So we extended session because we have not finalized the budget yet. We're still in negotiations with the Senate. I'm hopeful, I think, we'll be back at some point next week to start going through. We call it conferencing. Um, to start going through, we call it conferencing. So we take, you know, we have a framework right now of kind of an idea of where we're going to agree on when it comes to the budget, um, with the Senate. And now it's just line by line saying okay, what about this, what about that, how much money would I want to put to that? You know, um, so, uh, so healthcare is by far the largest chunk of the state's budget and schools are right around second.
Speaker 3:But we'll go start going through and figuring out places to cut. It's interesting when you start going through that process and you see some of these agencies and they ask you know they ask for money and they ask for lots of money and you start to look at places where like, can we cut here? Can we cut there, can we get there? And ultimately, you know we're looking at large tax cuts for the state. So we're trying to figure out how do we reduce the budget. You know we've been. You know the budget's been large. You know 116, $117 billion last year. Let's's try to reduce it. So that's what we're going to be doing just moving forward and some of these bills that were attached to a budget, kind of like what I said some of the bills do have huge fiscal impacts um, uh, 100, 200, 300 million dollars so and most of them are education and health bills, things like that. But we will go in and start negotiating on all those parts. So I think we'll be, we'll be good Hard work man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, seriously.
Speaker 2:But I appreciate it because it's a it's difficult. These are some things are are very important to people. And then relief fiscal relief. Especially now it's very important for Floridians and Southwest. Floridians especially, so we're grateful, yeah, I know, absolutely Happy to do it.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you guys so much and we will catch you next time.
Speaker 3:Have a good one. Have a great weekend, thank you.
