The Plant City Police Department (PCPD) has a bicycle squad of three people it can deploy as needed.
PCPD started the squad last year. Officer Hartmann, Officer Wise, and Sergeant Tester took a 40-hour training class to qualify for bicycle patrol. “You might think it is just riding a bike, but they put you through some cruel obstacle courses,” said Wise. “It’s not just riding like a normal person. It was a very difficult class and it was challenging.” There were many officers at the training from different agencies that are starting bike squads.
Bicycle Squad Officers Hartmann on the left and Wise on the right.
“Those bicycles are great,” Officer Wise continued. “We’ve been given the opportunity to go out on nights because they are so quiet we can ride up on people….we have been able to roll up on people committing crimes and they don’t even hear us coming.”
PCPD also deploys the bikes to parades. During the Christmas Parade some teenagers and young adults were fighting and generally causing trouble. When officers attempted apprehend them they ran. But even though they were young, fast and difficult to catch on foot, they could not get away from the officers on bicycles. “We were able to corral them back in and the other officers were able find out what was going on,” Wise said.
When the squad is working parades they are also able to easily patrol up and down a parade route because they can move through a parade area quickly and easily since the bicycles are able to go places that vehicles can’t. At the last Christmas parade someone broke their leg. Bike officers were able to quickly identify the injured person’s location and were among the first to arrive at the scene to help.
When the bicycle officers are on patrol, they have also found that the bicycles connect them to the community in a new way. “There is something about the bikes that the younger kids want to come up and talk to us when we are on them,” Wise said. “They just love it when they see us on them when we ride them through the neighborhoods.”
One 10 year old had become a habitual runaway. Living in a foster care home, any time something would upset him, Tommy (not his real name) would run away. On one particular runaway night, Officer Wise was one of the ones who located Tommy. Rather than just take him back to his foster home, Wise sat and talked with the child. “The little boy told me that nobody loved him, and that is why he ran away all the time and why he was upset,” the officer said. “Of course it is upsetting to hear he thought nobody in the world loved him. So I talked with him some more and spent time with him.” Wise found out Tommy loves cars. It turns out Wise had access to a remote-controlled car that had been donated to police.
When Wise took the boy back to his foster home, he found there were two other boys in the home who were about the same age. The officer had a great idea. “If you don’t run away any more and behave better, then I will give you this car,” Wise told Tommy. “And I will keep coming by to check on you and make sure things are good.” The officer did keep checking on Tommy. The officer waited for the foster mother (about whom Wise says, “She is a great person. She takes very good care of them.”) to tell him that Tommy had not been running away for some time. With Christmas approaching, Tommy had stopped running away, and his behavior had been good.
During Christmas people donate gifts to PCPD to be given to people in need. Rather than show up with something for just Tommy, Wise and other officers visited the home with several presents that he thought the boys would need. The officers gave gifts to all three boys. Wise gave Tommy the donated car that he wanted so badly. “I told him that people do care about him and there is always going to be somebody that will,” the officer said. “He’s been so much better according to his foster mother. He still has his episodes, but he is doing a lot better. Because he is having a little trouble in school—he’s not doing his daily work and he is not behaving the way he should—I recently made a new deal with him.” By the end of the school year Tommy has to get his work done and do better at school. The other two boys were also having a little trouble in school, so Wise made a deal with all three of them. Tommy, in particular, wants another car—a Challenger SRT remote-controlled one. “I go by quite a bit to check on them and make sure that they understand I am not going to just disappear, Wise said. “I said I care, and I do. They are good kids but they have had bad luck in life—a raw deal, so I am trying to make it better.”
Some PCPD officers carry stuffed animals, toys, and candy with them. “So when we see these kids on the streets and they wave at me, I stop and talk to them and give them something,” Officer Wise said. “I want them to remember we don’t always show up to arrest people. Whenever they see us we are arresting mom, dad, cousins, brothers, sisters—and the kids can begin to fear us, so when I do what I do I feel like they might not run from us. They might remember. They might come to me and tell me when something bad is happening. I just don’t want them to always associate us with someone going to jail. Because we are so much more than that. We help people.