CCPD: Growth driving need for additional officers
Need for 24 more sworn officers, one deputy chief, 9 professional staff presented at budget workshop
The Cape Coral Police Department plans to ask for 24 more sworn officers, one deputy chief and nine professional staff in the Fiscal Year 2027 budget.
Right now, the agency should have 198 officers on the street and are 57 short, Police Chief Anthony Sizemore said at Wednesday’s budget workshop, adding they are short 11 detectives from there they should be in terms of population and calls for service.
Sizemore said calls for service are increasing.
“In policing, our trends are independent of for sale, for rent, full-time, selling or moving here. What that does is results in gaps in capacity to deliver service,” he said in his presentation to Cape Coral City Council.
Sizemore said every 1,000 additional residents generate around 850 additional calls annually.
Some of the key performance indicators is 87% for officer utilization – optimal of 75%, overtime expenditure is up by 23% and case backlogs is 34%.
The officer utilization, Sizemore said, is based on what they are doing with 100% of their day with 75% optimally set for committed time spent responding to 911 calls, non-911 calls, and predetermined area checks. The remaining 25% is left for ancillary duties such as following up on crimes already investigating, proactive patrols and quality of life issues.
“Today our officer utilization rate is at 87%,” Sizemore said, adding that the ancillary duties get compressed.
The overtime is unsustainable with $1.8 million for patrol and $4.8 million for other positions.
“The overtime is structural to be able to put out the product that we need today,” Sizemore said. “We have to get functional. The structural overtime is what we are spending to maintain the standards as far as response time, investigation.”
The overtime levels are unstainable because too much burns people out, he said.
“When you care about wellness, you don’t want to burn people out,” Sizemore said.
Case backlogs for forensics have a technology component to it, which increases the workload, he said.
As far as the turnaround time for public records request for paper items is a day with requests for digital evidence approaching five weeks due to current staffing.
“That is a tremendous amount of time to expect someone to wait for that,” Sizemore said.
The supervisor ratio is one to 10, meaning for every operator there needs to be one supervisor. In better times, that was a one to seven ratio.
“You get to 10 and that is the max,” Sizemore said. “You exceed best practice and liability when you exceed 10 to one. We are at 10 to one.”
The response time for police has a standard of six minutes.
“As you can see our response time is decreasing,” he said.
When moving to a quadrant four precinct model it freed up the workload for faster, better deployment.
“Once you have a system that is working, you have to feed it and invest in it,” Sizemore said.
He explained the request for 24 sworn officers, one deputy chief and nine professional staff.
The new deputy chief would have oversight of the operations division.
“Since I have taken over as chief in November 2020, we have onboarded 250 people to maintain that goal. We promoted 70 people of the 250 hired. Sixty to 75% are uniformed officer based,” he said.
Sizemore said there is a deputy chief over administration and operations. He said within operations there are special operations, investigations and patrol.
“Patrol has grown to a level that is too much for the deputy chief of operations to handle,” Sizemore said. “It is now its own division. It’s a very vital rank I need to expand to obtain quality control.”
The nine professional staff positions include a grant writer, forensics supervisor, Telestaff coordinator, five records coordinators and a records supervisor.
Sizemore said the detective division is 11 detectives short of where they should be staffed. Last year there were 11,000 cases reviewed and assigned. The economic crimes are 2,000 plus.
The department previously averaged about 34-40 search warrants. The number has increased to 348.
Sizemore said that’s almost one a day.
The request for 24 sworn officers does not always net that number on the street.
“We should have 198 on the street. We are 57 short just for the street today,” Sizemore said. “I don’t have the bandwidth to onboard 57 people in one year. I have the ability to onboard 30 a year.”
Currently the police department sits at a 4.7% vacancy rate.
“As of today, we have 13 applicants in background and 16 in first stage of hiring. We don’t have vacancies, we are just short of where we need to be,” Sizemore said. “We have strong recruiting right now. We developed a strong culture that is a magnet.”
To reach MEGHAN BRADBURY, please email news@breezenewspapers.com