law enforcement as a career
Everything in law enforcement depends on where you live and what agency you work for.
When shopping for an agency:
(1.) Find out what they pay. Do they have a defined pay progression based on years of service? How long does it take to hit top pay? Do they have educational incentive pay and or/tuition assistance?
(2.) How much VOLUNTARY overtime is available?
(3.) How often might you be ordered in or held over? It happens to all of us sometimes, and in some places, because of the staffing level and the amount of calls for service they get, it happens A LOT. That makes it difficult to plan anything outside of work and can interfere with daycare.
(4.) Do they rotate shifts or do they work straight shifts? Some places have you rotate from days to evenings to midnights. Some places may have you rotate in relief between two shifts, and others just have straight shifts. (Rotating around the clock has been proven to take years off your life, and is less common than it used to be)
(5.) How do the days off rotation work?
(6.) How easy is it to get time off and how much notice do you have to give?
(7.) Do shifts get picked on an annual basis, or do you get hired and put into a spot and don't have an opportunity to move until there is a vacancy?
(8.) Do you have a union? How detailed is your contract?
(9.) How much leave time do you get in a year? How much sick time? Does sick time accumulate?
(10.) Being a cop means nights, weekends, and holidays. Depending on circumstance and your expectations, that can be really hard on family life. Or not that big a deal.
(11.) Rookies in most places start on the midnight shift. If you can't get accustomed to working the late shift, being awake at night and sleeping during the day, maybe being the police is NOT a good idea for you.
(12.) If you work the evening shift you won't see your wife & kid much.
(13.) What kind of arrangements can you make for child care?
(14.) How well is the agency staffed? How well are they equipped? Do you have a reasonable opportunity for specialized training? Do they pay education incentive for your degrees?
(15.) How is the retirement program? Is there a state-wide retirement program or is the program agency specific?
It's hard to make any kind of blanket statement about police work as a career because there are WAY too many variables from agency to agency and from one part of the country to another.
(I'm fortunate. I've been on straight 11p-7a BY CHOICE since 1977, because I'm a night person. I like the flexibility of working nights. My evenings are free to do things with family & friends and to do recreational things EXCEPT that I can't drink before going to work. We have rotating days off, reasonable pay and benefits and reasonable opportunity for voluntary overtime. As much as a few of the guys at my PD bitch and whine about everything, we have it pretty good, and they're too dumb to realize it)
If you're married and have a wife & kid(s), then you also have responsibilities as a husband and father. Which means you need to be home sometimes. Don't make the mistake lots of guys do, and get hired on, work evenings so you don't see your family much anyway, and THEN get on specialized units like SWAT or Search & Rescue or Narcotics or something, which places even more of a demand on your time. Take a good interest in your career, feel free to pursue interesting training & education on your own time and at your own expense once in a while, but don't let the job become your life. If you have kids, having a job assignment where you have to carry a pager and be on call all the time may NOT be a good idea . . .
Lots of guys work all night and then baby-sit all day, and then try to catch a nap before going back to work at 11pm. They spend their whole life all jet lagged and burned out, they can't function effectively at work much of the time, and they never get to see their wife. Try to avoid that at all costs if you want to be effective at work and stay married.
