From Dispatch to the Street with Public Service Aide Jennifer Wein

In this episode of the Cape CopCast, we pull back the curtain on the quieter machinery that keeps a city safe: Public Service Aides who investigate crashes, document burglaries, gather fingerprints, and build the reports that solve everyday problems. Jennifer Wein, a 14-year Cape Coral PD professional who moved from dispatch to the street, shares how PSAs shoulder the report-heavy calls so officers can stay available for high-priority incidents—without sacrificing quality or accountability.

You’ll hear what a PSA can and can’t do. PSA Wein breaks down the training path, including traffic enforcement coursework, forensic fingerprinting, and a structured field training program she now leads as an FTO. She talks through a typical day in those new PSA trucks, how she and her teammates split the city to cut response times, and why some days bring twenty crash scenes while others are all about burglary fingerprints or fast-moving fraud reports.

We also tackle misconceptions—PSAs are not volunteers—and talk prevention. Lock your car. Slow down in school zones as “red speed” cameras generate a steady flow of citations. Watch for modern scam tactics that use pressure and fear to separate you from your money. For anyone curious about a future in law enforcement, the PSA role doubles as a powerful pipeline: start at eighteen, learn the craft of field work and report writing, and build a foundation for becoming a sworn officer.

And a reminder about our upcoming Fraud & Financial Crimes Town Hall on Monday, March 2nd, 2026 at 1 PM at the Lake Kennedy Center. To learn more: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1H8UFCY6xC/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to another episode of the Cape Copcast. I'm one of your hosts, Lisa Greenberg.

SPEAKER_02 0:09

And I'm Officer Mercedes Simons. Together we make up the Public Affairs Office. And today we have an awesome guest. We have public service aide Jennifer Wien. Welcome.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hi. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here. We're so excited. When you said you would be willing to do this, we were like, this is gonna be a good one.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Yeah, because you're so you're so sweet. Like you're one of those people that you show up and you just bring a whole lot of light and love to whatever you're doing. You handle business, you're good at your job. You always make sure to take accountability for what you're doing, and that goes a very long way.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Yeah, we are so happy to have you here. Uh, how long have you been with the Cape Coral Police Department?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

I have been with the department for 14 years.

Why Leave Dispatch For The Road

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Oh my gosh, 14 years. Have you always been in this position?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

No. I worked in dispatch, I was there for eight years, and in 2020 I came out on the road to be a PSA.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

That's so cool.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Why'd you make the switch? Honestly, to get more time with the people out on the road. I really loved dispatching. It was something that I loved doing. Um, I came from Miami and I did it over there. Came over here and I loved it. But I felt that I wasn't in dispatch, it's kind of different because there's a point where you only know so much of what happens. And then it's kind of like you're cut off and you don't know what happens afterwards. So we don't know the resolution as to what happens on a call. And I always felt kind of like I would go home kind of empty handy-handed, not knowing what happened at the end. So I felt like going out on the road would be pretty cool and having that one-on-one interaction with people, being there for them in person, I felt like would be a lot better for me.

What A PSA Does And Doesn’t Do

SPEAKER_00 1:50

That's awesome. That's so cool. And so you decided to become a PSA. For people who don't know what a PSA is, what is a PSA?

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Okay, so PSA is public service aid. They assist officers in calls. So we take reports such as accidents, hidden runs, we do past occurred burglaries, thefts, uh, fraud reports. We do all of those. So it's pretty much all the same reports the officers do, except we don't go to anything where we're gonna be in danger. So we don't do anything um that is disturbances in progress or anything, you know, uh shots fired. Calls like that we don't go to. Um, we are low-key, we don't have any weapons, so we don't have power of arrest, so we can arrest anybody. If I encounter something where I need a backup, I call for an officer to come and assist me. Um, it's a lot of paperwork, I'll say that. And with as many accidents that occur in Cape Coral, I definitely take a lot of reports.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Um, when we try to do productivity and see how many accidents and reports we take, PSAs take a huge chunk of reports for the city.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

I it doesn't surprise me that you're busy with things on the road like that.

How PSAs Boost Response And Service

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I know when I when I was on patrol, it was always nice to there was an accident that came out. You were like 10, 10 calls behind trying to catch up on everything, and then all of a sudden one of the PSAs would hop on, they would take the report, and you're like, oh, thank you. And we would we would go help, but it's like, you know, sometimes um being a police officer isn't just jump into action, everything's crazy, and you're shooting guns all the time it's not it's not like that at all. A lot of it is going, solving problems, and taking reports. That's basically what it comes down to. And things are very report heavy, um, especially in a city where like we try to that's one of the things that we try to be really good at is um not only response times, but also our level of service. Sometimes our level of service includes documenting something and doing it well. So trying to do that for all of the calls is a lot. And that's where when we have the PSAs come and take anything, basically anything past occurred is awesome because it spreads out the workload. Right and um, and it it it's I think honestly cheaper for um the department as a whole not to have to pay a police officer. They can pay somebody who's still taking reports, still in the field, but not necessarily having to go and handle all the disturbances and and high priority calls.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

And it leaves the officers available for high priority calls where they're needed at times, and sometimes they're caught up with an accident or a burglary report where they're fingerprinting a vehicle, and that's gonna take them a lot more time, and they're not able to get to those high priority calls. So those are things that we can assist with.

Training, Fingerprinting, And FTO Path

SPEAKER_00 4:44

That's incredible. What kind of training did you have to go through in that transition from dispatch to PSA?

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Um, well, we did a course uh with the county for being able to do traffic enforcements because I'm able to give citations at accidents. Um, so that was one course that we had to take. We also do we get with forensics and we do fingerprinting and all that. So we can learn how to do that.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

I would imagine the the on the job type of training too, of like working with a PSA who is currently doing the jobs you can kind of get an idea of all the things that go on day to day. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

Yeah, what was your what was your FTO period like? Field field training. Sorry for people who don't know all the acronyms that we have.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

So the field training uh was a little different. At the time when I started, we were hiring four at the same time. So it was kind of difficult because we needed to train all four of us at the same time. So we went out with officers and learned from them. So nice. It was a little bit different. Now we have a set plan for FTOs. I'm the only FTO right now, four PSAs. So any new trainees that we would get, I'll go ahead and train them. It's depends on the person, but mostly around 12 weeks or so.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

That's so cool that you're now the one that is training the new ones. How many PSAs do we have now?

SPEAKER_01 6:02

We have a total of four.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Nice. Yes. Nice. Do we want more?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

We just hired two more. Yeah. We're hoping that everything passes with background check and we can get them going. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

I know they make a huge difference. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Well, because a couple of you are kind of tied up with the red speed stuff, right? So two of them are stuck right now doing red speed only. They're they don't have enough time to go out on the road because there are so many red speed tickets being taken out.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

So and for those who maybe somehow are not familiar, red speed are the school zone cameras, the cameras that capture people going more than 12 miles an hour over the speed limit in a schooled zone. So yeah.

A Day In The Truck

SPEAKER_02 6:42

So what's any given day look like for you out on the road? You have your own car, right? You guys have actually have really nice new trucks and I like the designs.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Yeah, super nice. Super nice pickup trucks, which we love. Um, but it's pretty much just we look at the calls that are dropping and we pick up the ones that are in our area right now because it's only two of us on the road. Um, Anastasia and I, she'll do the south, and or actually the north, and I'll take the south. So we divide the city in half so we're not all over the city. Because if not, it gets a little bit too much where we have to be driving a lot of miles. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

So and by the time you get there, the call's probably done and over with.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

So that makes sense. We try to equal it out for us.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

That makes sense. That's awesome. And yeah, what kind of tip? So you're in the south. What's typical in a any given day?

Accidents, Burglaries, And Fingerprints

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Honestly, it could be so many things. I take a lot of accident reports, maybe maybe because I'm a little biased and I like doing accident reports. Um, Anastasia likes the burglary reports because she likes fingerprinting. So we have our stuff that we really like, but we take them all.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Depending on how many calls. I mean, we can have a burglary in an area where it's like a bunch of cars got broken into, and then I'll ask her, hey, come and help me. We got a lot of cars, we got a fingerprint. Um, we'll just work on that all day. So it all depends on what happened the night before, how busy it is, or how many accidents. When it's accident day, we'll get 20 accidents in a day.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Wow. Yeah. And here's here's the PSA for everyone, lock your vehicle. The PSA for the PSAs.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Yes, please lock your vehicles. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

Sorry, bad joke, but whenever we can throw it in, we like to because I think we say it all the time. People still don't do it. We see burglaries from the night before of cars being entered just because people left their vehicles unlocked. So it's a preventable crime. That way you don't have to go out.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Exactly. So true.

Fraud Trends And Town Hall

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Well, and then the other thing, so I was thinking the crashes are probably what keep you the most busy, the the the most frequent. Are the vehicle burglaries the second most?

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Yes, they are, and fraud reports. Fraud reports.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Fraud reports are just so if someone's insane, you know, credit card information got stolen, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Yeah, we'll go ahead and go out there and do the whole report for them and then gets assigned to a detective. That's great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

Hey, another PSA on March 2nd. We have a uh fraud and financial crimes town hall where we're educating people about the different red flags that we've been seeing, how to avoid becoming a victim of some of these scams. So it's at the Lake Kennedy Center at one o'clock. If anybody wants to join, we would love to have you.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 9:20

Um, because we we don't want crime in our city. So if there's any way that that we can help prevent it or help to educate people and prevent it, we want to do that.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Oh, absolutely. It's so important. And as we continue to become more and more digital and online, these crimes are becoming more popular. So I'm sure you see you've even noticed in your years here.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

There's so many different ways that people get tricked out of money. And it it's just gotten to the point where I feel sorry for all these people because it's it's different ways that they try to trick them that you're like, wow, is this a new way now? Like there's just they keep coming up with different methods on how to take their money.

SPEAKER_02 9:59

And they're creative. Yes. Because for some of them, you're like, oh, you fell for that. But but in general, most of them now are so creative that it's like, oh, and they threaten them. Yeah, and they don't get off the phone, your family members at risk, and it's all kinds of like it's not just you know, falling for something silly, it's like serious situations that that really take people by surprise. So if we can educate people on the red flags to look for, hopefully that'll help out all the time.

From Music Teacher To Law Enforcement

SPEAKER_00 10:26

That would be amazing. Yes, definitely. Did you know always that you wanted to do something in law enforcement?

SPEAKER_01 10:33

I did not. I actually studied to be a music teacher.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Oh my god, I could see it.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

I could totally see it.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

I love music. Um, I sing at church, I just I used to teach little kids, and just it didn't pay enough, the the school system. So and I always loved law enforcement. And looking back, I saw my ancestry, and I actually have a lot of family that was in law enforcement. So my grandfather was a police officer in Cuba, so just pretty interesting, and I I've always loved it.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

That's so cool. Yeah.

Clearing Up PSA Misconceptions

SPEAKER_02 11:08

Is this the career path that you're gonna keep going on until you retire?

SPEAKER_01 11:12

I'm yeah, I'm just gonna stay here. Um, hopefully, they're looking hopefully into a supervisor position in the PSAs, and that could be something I can go into. Um, I do like teaching all of them, so that's probably why I became an FTO for them. I was a CTO in dispatch as well. I would train the new dispatchers. So the teaching is already in me. I like teaching, so kind of get the best of both. Yeah, that's cool.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

That's awesome. It seems like a really natural fit.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Yeah, I love it. Is there anything else that you'd like to share? I'm sure your position's kind of different. So I'm sure people run across a lot of questions that they have.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

So one major thing is we are not volunteers. So everybody always says, Oh, you're just a volunteer. No, we are not a volunteer. We work for the police department, we are paid employees. Um, we are doing a job. We this is our job. This is we know what we're doing. A lot of people don't like when we get on scene. They're like, Oh, we want a police officer. It's like, you're gonna get the same response. I'm doing the same job that they are. I'm gonna give you the citation just the same as they are. Yeah, you don't have a gun.

Finding Closure Through Field Work

SPEAKER_02 12:22

Do people get mad when you you give them citations? Oh, yes. I feel like they'd probably feel like, you know, they wanted a police officer when you first showed up, and then they somehow think that you giving them a citation is not good enough. I've ran into a lot of people that believe that you can, and you definitely can issue them a citation.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

So I'll get on scene, and usually the person that's not at fault is upset because they think that I'm not gonna give a citation to the one at fault, and they're expecting an officer to come out and do that. And I tell them, no, I I can do that. It's I'm here to do that. I'm gonna investigate the accident and I will give a citation to whoever's at fault.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Another PSA. The PSAs will do the same thing that a cop will do if they show up to your scene.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Yes, yes, yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

And I do have to ask, so you transitioned from being in the call center to doing this because you felt like you wanted to be more involved in the outcome. Do you feel like you've gotten that?

PSA As A Pipeline To Policing

SPEAKER_01 13:19

That's I do, I do, and I I love being able to actually have that one-on-one in person with them and talking with them, making making them feel more comfortable. I know when they call 911, they're upset, they're crying, they're hysterical. I I understand that because I was there on the other side of the line. So now actually getting to the scene and talking to them, I feel that that just it gives me a peace of mind that I'm able to give them peace of mind that I'm there to help them.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

For sure. It's so interesting to think too. I've never really, I guess, thought of it that way. When you call 911 and you need help and and you're on the phone with someone, you never really know who you're talking to, and and you you don't get the outcome of what happened. And it's just like, oh, but I answered the call, and then uh the call was hung up and the officers took over, and you're inside this building and you're not going out and and being involved in the case in that way. So it is interesting to think of it that way, and now you're actually getting that like hands-on, this is my case, or this is you know, my call.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

It's like starting a book, and now she gets to finish the end of the book. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Which I always wanted to do.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

And this is another one of those things I think we look at um at PSAs as a good career path for people who are a little bit younger, yes, who want to be officers later, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

I think this is a great gateway to becoming a police officer. If you think, oh, maybe an officer is what I want to be, I say go ahead and try out for PSA. And if you love being a PSA, you will definitely love being an officer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah. So you can start this job at 18, PSA.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Yes, at 18, correct. That's perfect.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

So you could get three years under your belt, then become a police officer. I know we talk awesome a lot about the pipeline between you know being a call taker and then the police officer. But this is another great path that kind of gets you that hands-on experience.

Hiring Notes And Closing

SPEAKER_02 15:09

Yeah, I think it's great. So if you're interested, reach out. I think we have different times when we're hiring, but we're always looking for good qualified people for the job. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Like Jen.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

Like Jen.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Jen, is there anything we're forgetting?

SPEAKER_01 15:22

I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

You did so awesome. One of my favorites so far for sure.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Oh absolutely. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

All right. Well, uh, everyone at home who is listening or watching, thank you so much for joining us, and we will catch you next time.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

Yep. Stay safe.