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 #20: Creating a Culture of Department Wellness
What happens when the people who respond to everyone else's worst moments need help themselves? In this episode of Cape CopCast 'Chief's Chat,' Chief Anthony Sizemore brings us inside the cultural transformation at Cape Coral Police Department, where officer wellness has evolved from a taboo topic decades ago to an organizational priority.
The stark reality of law enforcement creates a unique mental health challenge: officers and professional law enforcement staff witness trauma at rates far exceeding the general population while balancing family responsibilities and the everyday stresses of life. For far too long, seeking help was viewed as weakness. Today, the Cape Coral Police Department is leading a different approach, deliberately weaving wellness into every aspect of department operations.
From developing a robust peer support program to applying for federal wellness grants, the department is investing in comprehensive solutions. The initiatives cover physical fitness, healthy meal planning, family support systems, and leadership training focused on early intervention. Chief Sizemore shares how supervisors are being equipped to recognize warning signs – late arrivals, behavior changes, performance issues – that might indicate an officer is struggling, and to respond with compassion while maintaining accountability.
This isn't just about officer wellbeing; it directly impacts public safety. As Chief Sizemore explains, "A well officer is better for the community because that's what's going to be showing up to your home." When officers have tools to process their own trauma, they're better equipped to help people during crisis moments. By transforming how they support their people, the department is ultimately enhancing how they serve Cape Coral.
Welcome back to another episode of the Cape Cop cast Chiefs chat edition. I'm one of your hosts Lisa Greenberg, mercedes is still on maternity leave and, of course, I am joined by Chief Sizemore.
Speaker 2:How you doing this week. I'm good. How are you?
Speaker 1:Good. My voice sounds a little raspy, but I promise I'm okay. I sound worse than I feel. I feel good.
Speaker 2:I hope so. We're in a closed space and we're talking about health and wellness today.
Speaker 1:So I think it's probably good that I addressed that up front that we're good to go. I know we kind of wanted to dig into all of the different initiatives that we're rolling out that focus on the health and wellness of our department. This is something that's been a priority for you. Really, since I've started this has been a conversation, but especially in the last six months or so it's really started to ramp up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we're late in the month, but it is Mental.
Speaker 1:Health.
Speaker 2:Awareness Month and we've talked on the podcast. But we talk in the community and we talk in the building about all the initiatives and CIT, Crisis Intervention Training that we do for our interactions with members of the public. It's big, it's very front of mind, our interactions with members of the public. It's big, it's very front of mind. But one of the things that's behind the scenes to the public but very front of mind in this building is health and wellness initiatives for our people.
Speaker 1:This is something that's such a priority to our department that we've even started including health and wellness related content in our monthly newsletter. That's something that you know different tips, different tools, different resources for people, so they have that right at their fingertips as well.
Speaker 2:Right, all of the things that the community is doing and we are doing with the community. You look at the NAMI walk that we just did. The whole purpose of the NAMI walk is to get the conversation out right. You don't want to hide mental health and wellness from positive initiatives to people in crisis. Well, the same thing happens here. We don't hide it.
Speaker 2:That used to be the case, right? I'm almost 30 years in the biz and in the beginning of my career you just did not talk about it. It was a tough job. You deal with it If you needed help. It really was looked upon as a sign of weakness and a big mistake for the profession. So what we're doing now is getting the conversation out, to normalize it. So it's not weird and it's certainly not a sign of weakness to say, hey, I'm dealing with a lot. We're seeing a lot of things child drownings, death investigations, domestic violence. Just your own personal struggles with schedule and juggling kids and paying bills and regular life like everybody else has. We're not immune to that. And then on top of that, you put traumatic events that you see Even here in Cape Coral. We see as officers and professional staff it's not just the officers, but people that work in this building are exposed to a really higher degree of exposure to traumatic things than the average person and we're normal people.
Speaker 2:that compounds and it can have a toll or take a toll on you.
Speaker 1:I remember shortly after I started here, we had the death of Kayla Rincon Miller and the communication. After that happened, I remember hearing oh, if you worked on this, call you know. Please come talk to me. We want to make sure that you're doing okay. Because so many of the officers at the time of the scene thought, okay, she obviously was shot, but she's going to be okay. And then to hear this, I know it had a big impact, so they were checking on the officers that were on that scene and that's more common now.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's obviously the officers on the scene. We had officers that administered CPR and life-saving measures and you go into that believing that you're going to win. You're going to succeed, we're going to get her back because we've done that, and when you don't, it's a shock and it hurts. And even yourself, right, you're in our public affairs team. You need to be up to speed on what's going on, so you're privy to a lot of meetings. Right, you're in the room, so you're hearing that.
Speaker 2:And it's a it's a level of trauma for you and it's a level of trauma for our records, personnel, who, who read and redact or watch body camera footage, um, all the way up to including, obviously, the front lines. It can be a lot. So what do you do with that? Right? So you want to have um intentional form formulated, um measures and efforts for wellness for our officers, because a well officer, total body wellness, physically fit but emotionally prepared, is better for the community, because that's what's going to be showing up to your home.
Speaker 2:You want somebody who's not um overwhelmed you know, and and a smoldering wreckage to show up at your house with your crisis because you want to get top flight service and you got to make sure that the the individual showing up is prepared to do that. So we invest in the human being because we believe in in people out on the public, but also also our own people. But also it delivers a better product by doing that.
Speaker 1:Definitely, you want the people who are responding to your crisis to not be dealing with their own crises. It's crises, crises, crises. I know recently, too, we had leadership training for all of our command staff, for the people who are in top positions here within the department, to kind of help create a model for this and also, to you know, it starts at the top down. If our leadership isn't believing in this, if our leadership isn't learning about this, if our leadership isn't handling this, how are we going to expect the people all the way down to believe in it and buy into it? So we recently had that leadership training that was focused on health and wellness.
Speaker 2:We did. A good friend of mine, chief Neil Gang, who is out in Pinole, california, the Bay Area of California is, I would say, one of, but I believe he is the leader in the police officer wellness space. So I met him through professional networking and developed a friendship with him and I was really impressed with what he was doing with his department and it was starting to spread about intentional wellness. And what I learned from him is we've always had little bits and pieces of wellness here. You could go talk to somebody. We have EAP or employee assistance program. We've had critical incident stress debriefings that were mandated. You go and you quote, unquote, talk about it and then we check the box. We're good, we're doing that.
Speaker 2:And what I found is that wellness in an organization isn't a program. It's not a person like oh, you're not feeling well, go see Lisa, she's our person. That's not it. A true wellness program is not a program at all. It's woven into the fabric of the entire organization, from myself believing in it and supporting it all the way down to the newest member, all jobs here, whether you're a professional staff or sworn officer, a high-ranking person or just started yesterday that you need to understand that wellness is a major component of what we do here. It's not just one group or one office that does it. It's woven and sprinkled into everything that we do. So a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So we proactively do things like peer support. We are initializing a robust, formalized peer support program here whereby we get training so that our people aren't doctors or psychologists but they know how to provide peer support at all levels of the organization. So if you're a sergeant, you may not feel comfortable doing peer support with a line level person. Maybe you do, but maybe you don't. So we have somebody that's an appropriate rank for you.
Speaker 2:We are excited to apply for a grant. It's an acronym called the LIMWA grant and that's Law Enforcement Health and Wellness Grant, and it's through the Department of Justice, the COPS or Community Oriented Policing Grant. That grant, providing service, has been around since the 90s. They provide police officers and community policing efforts, but they also have a specific grant for health and wellness and we have applied for it. I'm very confident that we're going to do well with it. It's a robust grant that we can get and one of the important things here is there's no local match and what that means when you get grants, sometimes there is local match applied to it. It's just like that If you get $10, then you have to match it with a percentage.
Speaker 2:Either 100% would be we give you $10, you provide $10, or a different percentage. There is no local match for this, so it's money provided because nationally that this conversation is getting around and there's a high level of of officer suicides annually and we believe that number is greatly underreported. We're a larger organization. We're almost 500 people in our organization. We're the eighth largest city and the third biggest state. We talk about that for everything for crime, but also for things like the social issues.
Speaker 2:If it's out there, it's in here. We're not unique. We experience all of the things that other larger places are having. So we need to take a proactive stance or posture and apply for things like that, and I'm excited because it will enable us to bring on a wellness coordinator to be trained through the IACP or the International Association of Chiefs of Police. They're big into wellness, iacp or the International Association of Chiefs of Police. They're big into wellness, so they have a defined curriculum that we are working towards getting funding from the COPS grant and taking just initiatives within the building, because it is serious, I believe in it and I think that the public will reap the benefits in spades.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. We can't preach it to our community. We can't be saying, oh, our officers have crisis intervention training to help you at home, or to help your neighbor or to help the kids in schools, without actually turning inward, looking at ourselves and making sure that we're taking those same steps to protect us and our people. So I think it makes sense. And another focus of all this, too, is physical health, because we are in a time where it's more difficult to be healthier. When it comes to diet, exercise, there's just so many different factors that weren't at play even when you started. Physical health is also of importance here.
Speaker 2:It's a big key towards mental health. They're not in silos right. They all work together total body wellness. So we have a gym here at the police department.
Speaker 2:It's nice too, it's a very nice gym and we've we've had it for since we've been in the building. But we are intentional and out loud about our willingness to allow people to work out, stay physically fit. It's good for health insurance costs, it's good for a lot of different things, but for the individual right. We're a people-first organization. So we want the Cape Coral Police Department to succeed and to do well, but you can't yell at an inanimate object like police department. Get better. You have to address individuals and we encourage our individuals to have access to that gym. The wellness coordinator will help with healthy meal planning. It's cheap and easy to be out of shape and lazy right.
Speaker 2:Food is cheaper. The options are very convenient to go the wrong way. So we're going to teach people how to live a busy lifestyle and be healthy, provide access to physical fitness, have a robust peer support plan. We adopted something called the Asher model at our police department that has seven different components from our robust 30-year chaplaincy program where, if you need faith assistance, we have it for you.
Speaker 2:Family support, because it's not just you, it's you. Go home to a family, so we embrace the family and that's one of the new initiatives that we're doing is welcoming the support system of our new officers when they come in, when they onboard, providing ride-along, training and show-and-tells and meet-and-greets with the family so they know what their loved one is getting into and the officers and support staff that we hire will know that their family supports what they're doing and that helps with wellness. And then, when they need to talk to somebody, encouraging it, providing the resources for them to be able to do that and not stigmatizing it. Encouraging people to get help, not treating them as broken or damaged or weak, but that's a show of strength to be able to do that and we celebrate that. So that's the shift and that's really the definition of what the total package of a robust health and wellness program in our organization is.
Speaker 1:And what's the timeline you think for all of this, with the grant and hiring a wellness coordinator? Knock wood, assuming it all goes according to plan. Do we have a timeline?
Speaker 2:The timeline has already started and we're into the program. It's not something that you gear up and then you know, like the start of a race.
Speaker 2:We've already begun in earnest, where we had the formalized training to come in and I was mentioning my buddy Chief Gang and he talked to us about leading in a wellness-oriented culture. So it's not just police stuff over here and touchy-feely wellness over here. It's integrating the two Right, both with our interactions with the public, but also our interactions in the building and then your interaction with yourself. And it was for our frontline supervisors and middle managers that actually touch and shape and influence our officers and our professional staff at the line level how to lead in a wellness culture.
Speaker 2:Because when people are experiencing a crisis, it doesn't manifest itself differently. It's not I'm having a crisis, no, it's I'm showing up late, there's some absenteeism, there may be some complaints about your demeanor, there may be late work turning in, and there are times and there are many times when people just exhibit that because something's going on, but it may not be a crisis or bomb going off in their life, but a lot of times it is, and that's the beginning of it, that's the ticking of the bomb. So what we do is we learn how to intercede and intervene as a leader with those people in the early steps or, if they're in crisis, to be able to navigate, know the resources and how to just lead with care and still hold people accountable, still be mission driven but also do in a humanistic way that people will want to be here and help. You know, inspire and get a robust, healthy workforce.
Speaker 1:I've heard conversations that you've had where it's been, you know, oh, such and such person is starting to be a little more late. Their attitude's changing. Bring them up, let's have a talk with them, make sure everything's going okay. That's kind of the culture that we have here, so I think it's only natural that these are our next steps.
Speaker 2:Right. The only time that you see me should not be when you're sworn in and when you're in big trouble. If you get in little trouble, you deal with your supervisors, but you've got to come see the chief. That shouldn't be an automatic negative. We do things enough so that it doesn't become weird. So if I'm hearing that about somebody, I we all have, but I'm accountable for we've invested in you, in money, in time, in care, and when we hear that there's something going on I'm not the only one, but I will do that I will reach out and say hey, are we not providing you with all of the tools to succeed? Do you have the equipment that you need? Do you have all the training that you need? Are you deficient in some way? Is something going on at home? My wife lost her job, or my kid is very, very sick, or I'm caring for a sick parent now.
Speaker 2:Now that we know that we can help and we can eliminate the problem, but we can help you mitigate the problem or provide you with steps to ease that burden. That's the thing about wellness programs they don't eliminate things from life. They give you the tools and the ability to deal with them. And that's what it's about is reaching out to people, finding root causes, giving them tools, giving them the ability to provide self-care and make a better, more sustainable human being. That's good for them period. That could be the end of the sentence. But it also is good for their teammates. It's good for the people that they interact with in the community and by all of those individuals doing that. That raises an organization and raises the service that we deliver and puts us on path to achieving our vision, which is to be the best police department in the state of Florida.
Speaker 1:Absolutely All right, chief anything else?
Speaker 2:Be well.
Speaker 1:Be well everyone and have a safe weekend. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time.
