Do capers have something to do with cops?
The word caper can mean several things, including a prankish bit of mischief (or downright larceny) that might warrant police attention. You may find capers of a different sort on your plate, if you order or prepare a dish served with these pickled flower buds as garnish.
In literature, capering can describe a way of walking or playing. To caper is to leap or jump about, romping and frolicking in fun or in frenzy.
James Joyce writes in Ulysses:
He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.
And from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:
. . . the joyful surprise that lighted up their faces, and displayed itself over their whole bodies, in a variety of capers and frisks, was the first pleasing earnest of their welcome.
Nathaniel Hawthorne pens in The Scarlet Letter:
"Tell me! Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing and capering about the floor. "It is thou that must tell me!"
And as written in The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair:
You can feel them in the air round about him, capering frenetically; with their invisible feet they set the pace, and the hair of the leader of the orchestra rises on end, and his eyeballs start from their sockets, as he toils to keep up with them.