Chief's Chat #40: How We Use Tech & Teamwork To Stop Crime In-Progress

A Memorial Day morning can reset your sense of what “service” really means. We begin with Chief Anthony Sizemore reflecting on the Coral Ridge Memorial Day Ceremony and the way fallen heroes are remembered not just in speeches, but in the families who return every year. When the Eggers family is honored in Washington, DC, it hits home here in Cape Coral, especially as the next generation steps forward to continue a military legacy.

Then the tone shifts hard into the work: an early-morning call about a vehicle burglary in progress escalates into a coordinated response that leads to five arrests, including juveniles and young adults connected to a wider pattern of crime. We walk through what it looks like when policing is both fast and precise, from UAV drones with thermal imaging to K9 tracking, plus support from Lee County Sheriffs' Office Aviation and real-time intelligence that helps connect suspects to warrants and prior cases.

We also dig into the question we hear all the time: where do public safety dollars actually go? Staffing, training, supervision, and law enforcement technology are not competing ideas, they are a system that has to work together while the rest of the city still needs help. 

Transcript

Welcome And Memorial Day Reflections

SPEAKER_02 0:04

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

SPEAKER_01 0:10

And I'm Officer Mer Mercedes Simons. Together we make up the public affairs office and we have Chief Sizemore today.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Good morning.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hello. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

I'm good. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:18

I feel like I haven't seen you in much this week because we've been so busy and we've kind of missed each other a lot. But uh, you're very tan from the Memorial Weekend holiday.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Had a good day?

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Uh yeah, pretty good day. Um started the day like I do every Memorial Day at Coral Ridge for the ceremony. I saw officially. Very well attended. Um, it's an honor to be there um just to honor the memory of all of our fallen veterans, but we have uh members on the department who have family. Uh matter of fact, one of our sergeants in violent crimes, uh her brother, um Daniel Eggers, has been uh uh his family is a fixture there. They they never miss uh very service-oriented

The Eggers Family And Service Legacy

SPEAKER_00 1:04

family, and um just a shout out to that family in particular on Monday. I was looking for Mr. Eggers. I look for him every year, got a great relationship with him, and I saw the organizer, uh Chuck Warren, who runs Coral Ridge, and greeted him and I said, Where is he? You know, his spot was vacant. And he said he's not gonna make it today, and my heart sank like, well, you know, is something wrong, uh, health concern, you know, I didn't know. But actually, um in Washington, uh, the president picked of all the families of fallen service members, and there are many, they honored two, and one of the two were the Eggers family, and they they celebrated um his story, his life. So it was a a wonderful reason for him to miss. I mean, he was missed at our ceremony, but what a what an honor. Absolutely. But uh, yeah, it's very sunny at that uh event.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

And then uh I went home and did probably what a lot of people did, just relaxed and went in the pool and got some sun.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Family time too. Celebrated the freedom people fought for. It's actually kind of cool with the Eggers family. Um, our sergeant's daughter on Monday, on Memorial Day of all days, they actually shipped her off to go into the army, same branch as Daniel Eggers. So that was really cool. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

She got uh dropped off at MEPS up in Tampa, and she's continuing the legacy of service in that family. So very cool.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Shout out to Kylie. She's not listening.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

She's she's very busy right now.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

That's so cool, though. That's so awesome. It's um always a good reminder, and especially when you have people that you know um locally that have been impacted.

Crime Spree Call And Five Arrests

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Um, I know we had a busy week this week, which is why we haven't seen much of each other, and we're just now getting to sit down and talk about it, but we had a pretty big case. We've gotten a lot of media inquiries about it. Our phones were blowing up a lot, especially yesterday, about this uh case involving some juveniles and some uh young adults who were committing crimes in a neighborhood here in the Cape. Uh Grand Theft Auto, one of the crimes.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yep. Early in the early morning hours on Wednesday, um, we got a call. There was a on vehicle burglary in process, we send out a bunch of units because we knew that we'd been having a huge problem in that area. So they go out, they put up the our UAV drones, they've got canine. We end up getting Lee County Aviation out, and it's a team effort. We end up arresting five different people, two adults and three juveniles for a litany of charges. Um, and whether it was charges from that specific instance, a lot of them had warrants, a lot of them had um prior cases we were able to tie him with. Like um one of them had uh stolen a vehicle a couple days prior in Cape Coral, and they were able to use the vehicle tracking data and the guy's ankle monitor to tie him with the GTA and charge him when we arrested him.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Right. And they were involved in a lot of stuff. Yeah, right. Um, even a very significant case from uh the recent past where we had a shooting that was affiliated with the nightclub, and they were involved in that. Um, just it and it really highlights a couple of things I wanted to talk about. First of all, it's a it's from a viewer listener standpoint, it's very interesting to hear that because that's real stuff happening here. And I I say that, I've said it on the podcast, but I say it in community groups, I say it in one-on-one conversations. People ask, you know, what's the crime rate here? What's it like in Cape Coral? And there's a there's a formula for that. Uh it's called Dimers uh National Incident-Based Uh Reporting System, which used to be UCR, the FBI, and I probably put half the people to sleep already. So there's a number that's affiliated with that. But if you don't have anything to compare it to, it means nothing, right? I could tell you that it's 2.13 or it's 1.78. And oh, okay, that sounds good, but you don't know what that means. What I tell people is we're the seventh biggest city in the third biggest state in the country. And that means if it's out there, it's in here.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

And what we try to do is um if you're looking for trouble, you're gonna find it. There's plenty, right? But if you're not, then you should be fairly safe. And that's that's a common language conversational way to say it. So if you're going about your daily life, you should be good. If you are looking for trouble, we've got all varieties, right? But the the the rub here is that when these individuals that are out looking for trouble, and they found it, they intermix and they intertwine with the people who are not looking for trouble. So if you're uh selling drugs, there are robberies affiliated with that. There are shootings affiliated with that. If you're stealing cars, you drive away very, very fast, right? The and you try to get away from the police. You you have um the crime is not just a pinpoint, it has like an aura around it. And you want to keep that aura from impacting regular folks. So we what I found interesting in this case

UAV Drones Canine And Air Support

SPEAKER_00 6:15

was it was a mix of all the different resources that we use, right? So we talk about carbon-based human beings. We send police officers out there uh that are working the precinct. Um, they're aware of what's going on historically in their precinct. So when something like this comes out, a report comes out, there's a pretty good idea because of our intel sharing and in internal data sharing that it may be this group. So they get there very fast. We also have invested heavily in technology. So you got people and then you got the tech. And we've talked about it for a while. Well, this is a great illustration of how that pays dividends. Instantaneously, we don't have to call somebody in, we don't have a special unit for that. We have our UAVs, our unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, as they're called, or people kind of refer to them. The UAVs get deployed. And we have officers on the street that are controlling them and they're an eye in the sky. They're just like aviation. They have the FLEAR technology or the infrared, you know, it looks just like the pictures that you see. And we were able to track them. And not only did we find them and hover, and and we we could guide the officers responding to where they were bedded down and affect arrests. And then you got the canine out there as an asset to be able to help track. We have a tremendous partnership with our regional partners, and our our partner for a lot of things is the Lee County Sheriff's Office. So we have a pilot embedded with them. So it's a shared aviation program, and they came and helped uh and everything that that comes with that. So uh, and then you have the uh real-time intelligence center capabilities and the fact that ours talks to theirs and can talk to Fort Myers and and so in real time, that's why it's called real time. Um we had a case. I don't know if we did it in this particular case, it unfolded so quickly, but we had another one just a week ago where our analysts in the real-time intelligence center had a grand theft auto case that happened, and immediately they have a mapping software and they did an overlay with all of our known offenders in real time and said, There's a cluster of known offenders in this particular area. Lo and behold, it was one of them, and we apprehended them. So these technological investments that we're making are paying off when you plug them all in. So you go back to what we decided we wanted to do. We we knew that we needed a certain amount of people to meet a metric that we wanted to achieve. And we worked really hard to onboard that number of people. And that's a whole other podcast on how we do that. But we got them here and then we use data-informed decision making to strategically align and deploy them, and then you dovetail that with intelligence that's in real time, accessible, not a fire hose of information where the answer to the test goes by and you don't even see it. It is um curated in a way that you can consume it and act on it. And that's what happened, where these are the people we're looking for. They're in this area, um, the eye in the sky is up. We have the people, they're running, this is where they're hiding, and we're able to affect the arrest. And there's some stuff that we really can't talk about that's that's even further in this investigation, but very serious stuff. So the the takeaways that that I would want if I was a member of the community is where are my dollars going, right? So the dollars are going to investments in training, recruiting, hiring, paying people, getting the people here, outfitting and equipping them, investing in technology that is going to make a difference right now. And then um having talented, trained individuals to put that into place is going to affect arrest, get people off the street, and it's a very proven thing. If you have a list of people doing bad stuff out on the street, and you pick off those people off the street, they're no longer doing that, and your your crime rate is positively affected by that. So it's just a good illustration of all of us working together to be able to get this done to keep the community safe and um being good stewards of the funding that we get. And it's a it's the the last point I'll make on this is you had a theory or hypothesis, you put it into place, it worked. Now that you know that it works, you continue on. You continue to invest in those technologies, invest in those people, invest in those training sessions that we do. And by doing that, the machine operates and the output is

Staffing Strategy And Resource Leadership

SPEAKER_00 11:05

what we're all looking for.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

Yeah. I think it's an interesting point that proves also it's not just about the police officers and it's not just about the technology. It really has to be an investment in both. You know, you see so many people who are like, well, I don't get why you're investing in this technology and spending all this money on this. Why don't you just get more officers? And it's like, well, just the officers alone couldn't have done all of this. They needed the real-time intelligence, they needed the uh crime analysts, they needed the UAVs and all of that. But then you can't just rely on that technology either. You need the feet on the ground that are on scene, tracking the per the people down, and and it needs to work in tandem. So you need to make investments in both. And I think this is proof of that.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Yeah, and it takes a lot too. If you have five people that you're looking for arresting, that's that's five people, that's five different cars that need to transport people. You have a perimeter that's a couple extra handful of people, uh, you know, bodies, officers, um, UAVs. You're at a pretty high number on of resources that are tied to this, let alone the technology that's integrated in. And that's why we need the staffing and technology that we do, is because we have these huge scenes that evolve into something that take a lot of resources.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Here's something I learned when I became a lieutenant. A lieutenant is you're the shift commander. You're and especially at night, at night, you're you're basically the chief of police at night, you're the highest ranking person, and everybody's out there operating. You have a scene like that that is absorbs a lot of resources, right? And on a quick uh evolution of that two hours, that would be fast.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

That would be fast.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

That's about a three a three-hour unfolding of that. There's still a quarter million people that live here that need services. And when you are oversaturated there, you as a as a supervisor or leader at the line level have to make sure you have enough tools to get this job done, but it's not the only thing you got going, and you gotta make sure that you have only what you need because there are a lot of people, a couple hundred thousand people are still depending on you. So that's one thing that I want to give kudos to the supervisors for, is it's easy to get sucked in to the cool thing, but there's everything else that's going, and people are expecting a response and expecting a response time, and that's where management leadership comes in to be able to allocate those resources and and be a boss. That's why span of control, which is how many subordinates to one supervisor, are important. You have to have the requisite number of supervisors to manage those operators out there, and there's a formula, and if you get outside of it, you run into problems. But it's just a it's everything that you just said, and then there's an accident with injuries two miles away. Domestic disturbance break in or domestic disturbance or a bar fight or a prowler call or at that time of night, you know, that that's kind of stuff you have, and you have to have people available to go do that because it's not just one thing at a time. We're not a custom home builder, right? We're that's all we're doing, is a beautiful, wonderful structure. We're building a lot of different things at the same time, and that's what we have to manage.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

So great work by our people. Yeah, I love it. The last couple weeks, there's been a lot of good work. There's been a few uh good emails I've seen. So it's nice to be able to talk about that great work as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

100%.

SPEAKER_02 14:41

All right, Chief.

The Coffee Truck Banana Latte Verdict

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Anything else? You know, I did want to ask you, I wasn't here when you got to try the um we've been doing oh yeah. The only way coffee coffee truck has been showing up at the police department. They've been here every Wednesday, which has been a personal treat for me.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Yeah, we love it.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

I love it. I uh knowing that they're gonna be here every Wednesday moving forward, though, I need to have some restraint. Uh, but I had told you that my favorite is the banana bread with biscoff added in. And so you said you were gonna try it.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 15:13

What's the verdict?

SPEAKER_00 15:15

I am a black coffee. I drink not junk, but I like good, bold, real deal black coffee. No cream, no sugar. I'm sweet enough. I like espresso and americanos and and bold stuff like that. And I really can't do dairy getting older. Um, but you guys have been like cult-like raving about this food truck, this coffee truck.

unknown 15:46

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

So I said, I'm gonna try it if they have oat milk like a non-dairy option. So I got keep in mind, we're talking decades of just black coffee. I got a iced, very complicated order, iced banana latte with biscoff cookie additive. I don't know what it's like a spread. Okay. With oat milk, shaken, delicious. It was like a birthday cake in a cold glass. It was awesome.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

It was amazing. It's dessert coffee.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

So it's not gonna be a iced black Americano, but it's so your evaluation this year will be high because you recommended something good. He didn't know that you can generally recommend.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Oh, I'm sorry. My my evaluation will not be high. Yeah, we'll not go for the case.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

All right. Well, I had to know. Um, I'm glad you enjoyed it. And I'll see you there on Wednesday in line next week because you know we'll be there with our banana lattes. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today, and we will see you next time. Have a good one. Stay safe.