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 #28: A Parent's Guide To E-Bikes, Scooters, And Safe Streets
In this week's episode of the Cape CopCast 'Chief's Chat,' we dive into the surge of juveniles on e-bikes, scooters, and even dirt bikes showing up on our streets, and we get real about what’s fun, what’s legal, and what’s flat-out dangerous. From kids riding three-abreast and blocking traffic, to 30 mph sidewalk rides through shopping centers, we unpack the behavior patterns putting riders, drivers, pedestrians and local businesses at risk—and how we’re responding.
You’ll hear how trespass authority at shopping centers works, why citations and bike seizures are now on the table, and where the line is between harmless cruising and reckless endangerment. We break down the basics parents need: the 10 mph sidewalk limit, helmet and lighting requirements, when a “bike” is actually a motor vehicle that needs registration, and the real consequences of fleeing from a traffic stop. Our goal isn’t to crush outdoor fun; it’s to keep kids alive, spare families heartache, and protect the community’s peace.
Amid the tough talk on safety, we share the heart of our December: the 'Holiday Heroes Food Drive' with partners who turn every dollar into more meals, 'Stuff the Cruiser' and 'Fill the Boat' toy collections that go straight to local kids, and 'Shop with a Cop'—pairing officers and students for a morning of joy. These programs stay local, move fast, and meet real needs, from food insecurity to foster family support, with long-standing partners who show up year after year.
If you’re considering an e-bike gift for your child or loved one, this is your checklist and conversation starter. If you want to be part of something good, this is your roadmap to make a direct impact where you live.
Welcome back to another episode of the Cape Copcast Chiefs Chat Edition. It's been a while since we've done one of these episodes, but I'm one of your hosts, Lisa Greenberg.
SPEAKER_00:It's the holiday season now, right? Oh, I'm Officer Mercedes Simons. Together we make up the public affairs office. You see, Chief has his holiday cup today.
SPEAKER_01:Nice-ish.
SPEAKER_00:I like it.
SPEAKER_02:I think you're more nice than ish.
SPEAKER_01:Well, a previous administrative assistant gave me this, so maybe there's something to it.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe she doesn't have to be.
SPEAKER_01:I was a little more ish.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe to her. That's so funny. How are you doing? I'm great.
SPEAKER_01:How are you?
SPEAKER_02:Good. It's been busy. It's been a few weeks since we've been here, but we have a topic that we think is pretty important that we wanted to get to, especially before the holidays, because I know a lot of kiddos might be getting these as gifts. So we want to chat about e-bikes today.
SPEAKER_01:E-bikes, regular bikes, scooters, motorized dirt bikes are a huge issue. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Two-wheeled craziness.
SPEAKER_02:Two-wheeled craziness. That's the episode title. Two-wheeled craziness.
SPEAKER_00:We've we've seen a lot of chatter in community groups. We've seen a lot of reports documented with patrol officers surrounding issues related to any sort of juvenile transportation issue, if we just want to call it that, because it's not one particular category that we see an issue with, but it's overall issues with kids after school, going to a parking lot, messing around with their friends, sometimes torturing people inside of stores. We've had unfortunate documented instances of that. And so we just want to talk, educate parents a little bit more, maybe dig into your kids' life a little bit more, make sure you know the regulations about what they're doing, who they're hanging out with, and that they're not one of these kids that are making the business owners pretty upset because there are some pretty serious consequences that can be associated with what's been going on.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Shopping centers, businesses, but it's also on regular roadways, right? So it's not just limited to e-bikes or scooters, it's regular bikes too. And it's kind of like back when remember the Tide Pod Challenge? Oh gosh. Just all of a sudden, overnight, people were doing stupid stuff in unison. And this is not a Cape Coral isolated incident. It's kind of like a Tide Pod thing where all of a sudden, you know, the door knock challenge, or now it's um ride your bike unsafe and pester people and really put yourself and others in danger challenge where you'll have, and we've all seen it, three to four kids riding abreast or side by side in the middle of the road, car comes up behind, they look back, they acknowledge, and they don't move. Wheelies, um, obscene gestures, just not moving and almost daring the people to hit them. And they're gonna mess around and find out somebody's gonna do that. Uh, we hope not. We hope that we don't have any accidental um crashes like that, or God forbid somebody just isn't gonna take it anymore and hits them. Right. You don't want that. Um, so we need parents to talk to their kids about that. Then you have what you were talking about with just blatant disregard for safety, doing 30 miles an hour on a sidewalk and and near misses or collisions with people walking, um, going the wrong way on the road, across the road. We've had some in in shopping centers that are really uh terrorizing, really. Patrons, the business owners are at their wits' end, they're calling us. We've even had you you mentioned in a report, somebody went into a store on a dirt bike. And I know that's some kind of a um internet challenge or social media challenge. It's stupid. The the challenge is going to be accepted and you're gonna get hurt. And we talked about it, what, a month ago? It was kind of a a warning that hey, this is becoming a thing, and we are doing our education part. And part of what we talked about on the podcast was the education component. Talk to your children, or if you're a kid listening, you know, you you have to have common sense. If you're old enough to be out there riding your bike, you know what you can and cannot do. You have no less of an obligation to follow the rules of the road, even if you're a juvenile. And if they are too young for that, then maybe parents shouldn't let their children go out unsupervised if they don't know the rules of the road. So what are we doing about it? And what can happen, right, to parents and to kids. So what we're doing about it is we're working with the business owners to make sure that trespass authority is there so that if if people, uh, this is for anybody, but if you're misbehaving, acting outside of the expectations of what a private business owner would want, you can be trespassed. So that's number one, making sure all of our ducks are in a row for that, making sure that all of our officers are educated and up to date with the traffic laws because the technology of these vehicles and bikes and scooters has outpaced the legislature a little bit. So some of the rules haven't caught up specific to these vehicles, but there is ample rules already in place for uh safe roadway travel, operating of a bicycle, operating of a motorcycle, depending on what they classify as. And if you are violating the law, if you are willfully, I mean, not learning, you know, mom and dad out there kind of helping the kid ride, we're talking about three or four kids popping wheelies, going right out of car, um, going into grandma's car, or or just circling people in parking lots. We've seen it all.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You are gonna be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law. You're gonna be cited for the applicable traffic statutes for that. So you'll actually get a ticket where mom and dad will have to take you to court depending upon what type of violation you have. We're gonna seize your bike or seize your scooter or e-bike, and your parents are gonna have to come get it. So it'll be an inconvenient learning lesson. So what we're trying to do is is implore you to talk to your kids and make sure they're not the ones that are doing that. But there are a lot of them out there doing it, and the community is is fed up with it. They've expressed that to us directly through their elected officials, and we've experienced it. And even in the in between the time we've spoken and our last podcast and now, we've actually had two that not only were they violating it and we were gonna pull them over, they fled. Yep. And it was pretty egregious. And two of them went to juvenile justice or juvenile detention. We took the bikes, so it can be serious. We don't want to do that, but we also can't let this go.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. I was gonna say we've had a few that have led to arrests for fleeing. So it's you know, there are consequences to this, you know, obviously the most devastating being if someone is injured or worse, and then uh these other consequences of getting your bike taken or getting a ticket or getting arrested. So it's something that we take seriously. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Let's let's say it what it is. If you're on a bicycle or an e-bike and you get in a crash on the road with a car, you're probably not gonna make it. And we've had instances of that where it wasn't this, that they were just pure accidents, tragic accidents where young people or even adults were driving an e-bike or a scooter and failed to stop at a stop sign or pulled out and they get hit. And that's a mismatch when you have a car, thousands of pounds of steel going down the street, even at 30 miles an hour, 25 miles an hour, let alone 40, 50, hitting somebody totally exposed on a bike or a scooter, you are not gonna make it. And we have ample evidence that that has happened. The second thing that can get you, the operator of that bike, hurt is you're gonna come across the wrong dude who's not gonna have it. And they're gonna show you a pretty bad side of the street where if you cut them off or you you terrorize the wrong person, they're gonna hurt you. And we don't want that either.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we don't come at it from the perspective of like, oh, we're messing with kids being kids. It's not that at all. It's the aspect of we come at it from a true safety concern of the lives of these kids, the lives of other people. Um, that's why another thing that we're doing, we're getting with the Lee County School Board and we're putting out informational material. We're sending it home with parents to talk about the laws, the regulations, the safety component, all of that is very important because a lot of these parents don't know. They'll be like, oh, I got my kid this bike off of, you know, Facebook Marketplace or something like that. They don't know that it's a dirt bike. Dirt bikes, depending on um if it's over 28 miles per hour, has to be registered. It needs to be a registered motor vehicle. That is another one of those misdemeanors that unfortunately they can get cited for, potentially go to the juvenile assessment center for. And if these parents are more involved and you just look up what exactly your kid has, and you you need to know the safety regulations around it. If they, if they need to have a helmet, if it needs to be registered, if they need to be riding it at all on at their age, there's a sidewalk speed limit of 10 miles per hour, even on e-bikes. So even if it goes up to 28 miles per hour, if they are on the sidewalk, it cannot go past 10 miles per hour because then you are also risking the people walking on the sidewalk. And all of these are safety components that we need to be aware of together as the laws are changing and these things are becoming more and more common.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Let me speak to the parents uh in a in a real sense, right? I have a child that is of e-bike crazy age. You're little guys.
SPEAKER_00:He's little, little.
SPEAKER_01:But I think back when I was a kid, I have a son now. If he was out, I want him out of the house, I want him off the games, I want him off the machine, I got him a bike, I got him a scooter, I got him an e-bike, go out and go, get with your friends. You think it's back when what we were doing, we wouldn't be that disrespectful back then. Right. So if you think that, well, we did that, we were out, no, we weren't doing this. Plus, depending on where you come from, if you came from a big city, different argument. But if you grew up here, it's three times as big as it was with the same amount of infrastructure that we had back then. So it's a lot more dangerous. The kids, if they're out riding their bikes and going to tree forts and being kids, that's not what we're looking for. We're not even interested in that. They got fishing poles and they're doing what you think they're doing or what we used to do. That that's fine. A lot of police work is how did we come to find you? Right? What drew us to you? So if they're going fishing or riding their bike, doing normal, we want you to do that kind of stuff, that's not gonna draw us together. We're not gonna have that impromptu meet. We're gonna have a meet when you're going head on, you won't yield, you got the the wheelie going, you're zigzagging around people, shooting them the bird, and good tax paying, regular people are becoming affected by your nonsense, that is gonna prompt the meeting, and that's who we're talking about. So that's important for parents. We're not coming down on kids, like you said, we're not coming down on nostalgia, we're not coming down on get out and and enjoy fresh air. Yeah, we're coming down on the stuff that would drive you nuts. Yeah, and it's driving everybody nuts, and it's gonna get somebody hurt.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. These parents might have that argument, oh, it's just kids being kids. But if a kid did that to you, you would not be happy.
SPEAKER_01:So an increasing number of people have said, Oh, yeah, I've had that happen to me, where they encircle the car, they just won't move. And then you're in a real bad position where, well, it's easy in a conversation. Well, I would just go and hit them. No, you wouldn't. You don't want that, you don't want to live with that. The kids don't know. Their brains are still developing, so they're they're exercising their right to be a little stupid. Right. Right. But we need them to be a little less and a little bit more respectful. You can you can learn respect and rules of the road early on, they know it, and we are now cracking down and cracking down anything from tickets, calling parents, seizing bicycles, having the parents have to come in, up to and including uh having to go to court for for a misdemeanor charge of fleeing the police. And that's not the business we want to be in, not what we want to be doing. So do your part, talk to your kids. And if you want to go old school, talk to your kids old school.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Parents need to be chatting with their kids about this, talk to them about the rules, talk to them about not being jerks out there, not doing this type of behavior. So it really does rely a lot on the parents having those conversations.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So before you decide to get your kids something for Christmas, make sure you look up what it is. Switching to Christmas, the holiday season, I think we wanted to talk about a couple of the awesome events that we have coming up. We have we have a lot. There's a lot of opportunities to be very generous in December, to get out there in the community, see what's up. Uh, what do we have going on?
SPEAKER_01:Well, we've already started in earnest. If you go back a couple of weeks, you know, we we've done since 2011, because I remember when we started it, the Holiday Heroes Food Drive, where we kick off the holiday season before Thanksgiving. We partner with Walmart, we partner with the Harry Chapin Food Bank, and we collect canned food, non-perishable items, and even cash. And the reason cash is good is because of the network of buying. This was explained to me by Harry Chapin. Because they network with different food banks and different uh grocers and different food outlets, they're able to stretch one dollar to four of buying power. So for every dollar you give, it's four dollars of buying power. Now, the market may shift, but it it's always going to be more because of their volume and their network. Uh, I got a letter today from the local CEO of Harry Chapin thanking us for um 2011 to now is how many years? I don't know. Wow. Fourteen. Wow. Fourteen? Yeah. 14 years we've been doing it. Every year, at least, I think our worst year was a ton of food. That's right. One ton. And we always get thousands of dollars. And what she said in the letter was she didn't give me the weight total because they it's so much they have to weigh it. Um, but now the just the amount of cash that we were able to work with our community to get fed over 3,000 families. Wow. In a one-day event, which is tremendous. So that's what kicked it off. And then uh yesterday we did the fill the boat the boat cruiser. Stuff the cruiser. We partner with and these are long-term partnerships too. And I I'll circle back to this one uh because it it'll make the conversation better. We have Shop with a Cop coming up, and we've been doing Shop with a Cop, probably the longest in the region. Uh Arnold Gibbs brought it here when he was the chief in the mid-90s. He got here in '94. And if it wasn't the first year, it was definitely the second year. So we've been doing this for decades, and we get um underprivileged children that otherwise would not have a Christmas. And they get nominated by the school or by family, and then on one great morning, we all meet at uh we have great corporate partners with Walmart, and and our business community sponsors it, and we buy um gift cards for the kids, and they show up and they get partnered with an officer, usually their own SRO, so there's a good relationship there, and they shop for mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, sister, brother, whoever's important in their life, and we always make sure they get something for them. And I have yet to see in almost 30 years of participating, an officer not come out of their own pocket to help out the kid, make sure they get something. It's a tremendous, beautiful event. If you haven't been, uh, we'll get you the date, but you can come, it's a spectator sport at Walmart to go watch, it's really, really cool. Well, it's very, as you can imagine, on demand or in demand and limited, right? So there's more need than we're able to fulfill. So we do another event that was started probably back in 05. We had an officer, he's no longer here with us, but he was a Coast Guard veteran. And he said in the Coast Guard they did something where they partnered with a retail center, and we went to you guessed it, uh Walmart because they're always there for us in the community, no matter what is going on. There's other retailers that weren't, then wanted to get in, and then things happen politically and they don't want to be affiliated with the police. And Walmart has been steadfast for us. Always back the blue, always back this blue. So we put a big police boat right out front, and people go in and they throw a new unwrapped toy right into the boat, and we fill it up. And what we do with that, because we're there for I believe one weekend, maybe two weekends.
SPEAKER_02:Yep, it's this weekend, actually.
SPEAKER_01:And we take all of those toys, and I mean it's way more than a boat. The boat is overflowing, there's toys all over the place, and that is what we package for the overflow of Shop with a cop, because there's a limited amount of space to do shop with a cop, but how do you say no to families in need, especially children? So we're able to use that to kind of fill that void, right? Then you back up to yesterday, where we partner with two of our local schools. The Oasis Charter School System has always been a partner, and we put it out to all of the schools that we service, and Cape Elementary jumped on it years ago, and they're they're with us every year. So we have two simultaneous ones where we stuff the boat or stuff the cruiser. Who the benefactor of those toys are is the Children's Network of Southwest Florida, which are foster families. And these families truly they they the foster families get supported from the state, but it's really just basic needs. And there's a lot of a lot of unmet extra in those households. So we partnered with um a wonderful woman. I don't I don't want to say her name because I didn't tell her I would do that, but uh she has been our liaison, and we take right from the school directly over to the children's network, and they do an event for the foster children in our community to be able to have toys. So that's awesome. It's not just a shotgun approach of go out and collect a bunch of toys. And we've tried to partner with some national groups or national movements that do that, but they're not directly local. And sometimes those toys can sit in a warehouse, and it's weird when you see that. Yeah, we didn't want to do that, we wanted to do our own thing, so there's control. And the Cape Coral is a uh wonderful community that has uh two very different sides, right? So there's high end and development and million dollar homes and boating community and beautiful. There's another side that we go on calls for service, and it could be December 24th. You go into a home, three or four kids, some of them sleeping on a mattress, you wouldn't have any idea that there's that it's Christmas. Right. So there is a lot of need. There's food insecurity need, hungry, and there's you're just not gonna have a Christmas need. So it really is great for us to be able to develop these programs or have developed these programs, keep them robust, keep them growing, have lifelong partnerships with the people that the stakeholders involved, like children's network or um the schools, you know, or SROs to be able to get something that we Take for granted. And it's local. It stays in the Cape. It's for the Cape. Toys are given out. They are not warehoused or held. One year we had so many toys from Fill the Boat that we were able to take care of our overflow that kind of the waiting room for Shop of the Cop. And we still had about a pickup truck bed worth of bags. And even on Christmas Eve, we partnered with uh the Vineyard Church and called them up late and said, Hey, do you yes, bring it down? We'll do it today because Christmas Eve, they did a service and they gave out some toys to kids. So even on the last minute, they get dispersed to people in this community in need. So if you're on the fence about it or you see us out there over the weekend and you're like, what's going on? It's scientific. It's not just a crazy approach. There's there's very orderly, and every dollar in is every dollar out into the community.
SPEAKER_02:And to anyone who's donated food, donated cash, donated toys to make any of these initiatives possible, obviously, we thank you. And um, you know, it's just like one of my favorite times of the year to work for the department. This is the best time to work here.
SPEAKER_01:It's pretty cool. It's really busy, but it's like a good busy. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's not crazy on the street, even though it can be this time of year, you know, for personal safety and opportunistic crimes. But it's super busy here because we're doing a lot of extra good community stuff. And it feels good. It really is a fun time to be here.
SPEAKER_02:It's the best. All right. Anything else?
SPEAKER_01:That's a lot.
SPEAKER_02:It is a lot. We crammed a lot into 20 21 minutes. Great work. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and we will catch you next time.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. Stay safe.
