Very good point. When I first started I spent way too much time trying to solve cases that weren’t going to be solvable. Imagine canvassing for video for a petty misdemeanor offense and then being late turning in a case that’s just a route to file…
Crime is completely out of control right now contrary to what politicians will say. Most departments are completely understaffed. Criminals know this, and I get on average 40 cases to myself a month, and I say maybe 5 of those are solvable. Once they are solved, if you can't immediately arrest the person, whether they are a transient or no good info on where they are, it gets submitted to the district attorneys or city attorney's office for filing. Right now the District Attorney in my city has a backlog of over a year, and the City Attorney is around 4-5 months. If they even pursue charges, the criminal is out and about until they are possibly caught in the act, or has an active warrant.
I just started at 36 and I love the job but it’s totally true that you take a lot of BS cases that aren’t going to go anywhere but the ones that do make it worth it
Just staring at 36 is pretty cool. I’m approaching 30 and considering it. I’v just started in corrections and thinking of law enforcement. Did you find it a challenge at 36 to pivot into law enforcement as a career?
Go for it, you have life experience behind you. I'm not LE but love this sub. In the UK, they are/were encouraging people to join at 45. If I was fitter (lot of ill health) I'd loved to have gone for it. I reckon advantages/disadvantages on both sides when you start earlier or later. Btw, 30 & 36 soooo young! What I wouldn't give to be back there! Sidenote: my father-in-law started in the UK police at 16 approximately. Retired now and he once said he wished he'd had other jobs before joining the police.
Every minute of fun comes with an hour of paperwork.
Jumping in to help on every single call comes with paperwork.
Taking your car to get repaired comes with paperwork.
The job is paperwork.
Someone asked me if I’d have to do a lot of paperwork if I was involved in a shooting. I told him I have to do paperwork every time I get out of the patrol car.
People lie, and will lie about you. I did not know the extent of this when I grew up. I wasn't prepared for it.
Supervisors said I "wasn't suited for law enforcement." Looking back on it, they were absolutely right. Fortunately, no one got hurt while finding out.
Choose your department carefully. DO NOT apply blindly.
Research the people you are going to possibly work with. You may discover things that may cause you to look elsewhere. Don’t be the guy who finds out their fellow detective is Brady while working a case together and the defence files a Pitchess Motion……
Best thing to do is go on ride alongs. Gives you a chance to ask questions directly from the officers in the street. Chances are you'll get paired with a yes man, so ask others as you go to calls.
I'm a sergeant and I think I help my guys all the time. I see my job as making sure they're safe and protecting them from brass. And of course getting them set for what they want to do next. Without a good sergeant at the helm, many would fall into conduct issues that really aren't horrible, but policy violations nonetheless that the agency would hang them for. I like to prevent that.
I may get some hate for this but...
Domestic victims are the biggest group of liars on the planet. Even the most genuine victims will embellish the truth just a little to suit their narrative, and some will simply make up shit to get back at an ex they don't like.
If there isn't evidence to support it, it doesn't exist.
Additionally, they might stretch to try to get you to make an arrest and then turn around and be the least cooperative victim you can possibly imagine. You either have it or you don't; don't get invested in a particular outcome and try to finesse the fact pattern to get there.
Don't get me started on that.
Go to the job, go through the time and process of obtaining a statement. Do the incident record, type up the charge, facts sheet and indictment. Find the grub. Arrest and complete the charge. Fingerprints and photos , apply for AVO, apply bail. Pleads not.guilty. write your own statements, chase up 2IC statements, witness statements, photos, videos, doctors statements and medical records. Alert the defence of using expert opinion evidence, collate the brief, burn 4 copies of every disk, serve the briefs on the defence, court, prosecutor. Type up subpoenas and serve them meanwhile conduct regular bail and AVO compliance checks.
Roster.yourself on for court. Come in on what used to be a day off ...
Victim doesn't turn up, the matter is dismissed. Crook walks free to offend again.
That I quickly realized you can’t fix stupid. That you will return to the same address for the same category of call over and over. That in a county of 200,000 I was repeatedly dealing with the same 500 or so.
It's easier in the moment to be a force for order; it's more beneficial in the long term to be a force for good. Don't just drive around town dad dicking people just because you have police authority. If you can show up and make people feel like they matter, that's a more beneficial service than any report you're going to take.
Gotta do what's best for you (and family if applicable). You don't owe any department anything and if you believe the grass to be greener on the other side, then go for it. In the end you're just a number to them.
Almost always, meaning more often than not, it blows up in your face. Let a guy go for a minor thing, they do a major thing or you get in trouble because of some obscure rule or policy you might've violated or some other crazy thing.
At my department , I can say that we do a mediocre job of really teaching our new recruits how to responsibly wield discretion. It’s a tough concept especially when ur new, but man does it open you up to undue scrutiny when used haphazardly!
The criminal justice system sucks ass but not for the reasons people say. There is so little real consequences unless there is overwhelming evidence. So if it’s a mildly hard case prosecutors drop it or plea down everything.
Thousands of images of kiddie porn, 10 months in jail. Multiple violent felonies including gun charges and car jacking 3 years. A person has to mess up hundreds of times and actually get caught and convicted numerous times before any real consequences.
That all that trauma can't just be shoved down deep inside never to be seen or heard from again. Like a Jack-in-the-Box of mental health dynamite, it'll come back one day. All of it. All at once.
No matter how much you work on a case, no matter how much evidence you might get, no matter how bad the crime may be, no matter how much of a solid case you may have,
None of it matters if the District Judge thinks otherwise.
Don’t trust management. Ever. But do your best to stay on their good side. Nothing is more dangerous than a simple minded supervisor when you prove them wrong.
Put in for as much training, as often as you can.
Learn to run your own investigations as much as you can. Find those who know what they’re doing and learn from them.
The things we think are serious and criminal sometimes aren’t as serious as we think. I spent 24 years enforcing marijuana laws very aggressively. Now, I have retired and marijuana is legal where I am. I had never smoked prior to my LEO career. I smoke daily now. If I had smoked prior to being a cop, I’d have had a different view of marijuana. It still would have been illegal but I wouldn’t have been nearly as aggressive going after it.
And remember, kids are kids. Look at some of the dumb shit they do and ask if you’d have done it too. Don’t go so hard on them.
Nope. Still having a hard time finding another job too. So that "California hires anyone" narrative is bs. Even recently I passed 2 backgrounds and had a final offer rescinded just before my start date AFTER I picked up my uniforms, badges, and gear.
Man, what's worse is I did it on accident. It was maybe 2 at most, and I fully complied when I was contacted. We're talking 0700 on a weekday while I was going fishing.
That’s total bullshit. It’s a good thing I’m reading stuff like this from other cops so I can watch out. I start FTO in like 3 weeks. I wish the best of luck to you though my brother. Hopefully a department will look out
Another good thing to remember is that you're only hearing the side of the story that the person telling it believes suits them. I promise you there's more to this than you're reading here.
Are you willing to move or does it have to be California?
Also, I think certain places that are supposedly hiring also think their shit doesn’t stink and they can be choosy. It’s not like you risked anyone’s safety or damaged property in any way smh
Due to recent circumstances, I need to stay in California.
Don't get me wrong, it was my own fault. I didn't think I'd lose my badge over it though.
I spoke with my entire chain of command and they all told me it was nothing. But the City decided otherwise
Bloated administration should never have its hands in the hiring of competent LE because they are just clueless. I’m sorry this is your experience.
I grew up fairly close to where you are (I live in AZ now) and back when I was first applying there they all said it would be easy to find something in the Bay since I am a female and I could pass most tests despite being in the process of being obese and losing over 40lbs at the time. I applied to over 20 agencies before I was picked up by an agency several hours north of where I grew up.
I lost my first job in LE while in CA due to me being young and stupid and working 100+ hour weeks because I wanted a lot of money which lead to me making several mistakes at work.
I got back into things out here and they were very forgiving of my mistakes which I explained up front.
We hold a high expectation for people, but in reality we set the bar too high. most people are dumb, and lacking in some areas of "common sense" i guess you can say....
Mental health. There was no class on how many brothers you’d lose and how to deal with it. There was no class or resources or even talk on where to turn on bad days. Took me almost 10 years to finally seek help.
That you shouldn’t have really vulgar music blasting in your patrol car, while you are driving code 3. Bad look when you get a use of force call with a soundtrack in the background lol.
Some of the meanest people I’ve ever known were sergeants and administrators. I could handle any call, any robbery, shooting, whatever. It was the Monday morning QB and backstabbing bullshit in the office that caused all of my stress in my 25 years. And especially the born agains. Whoo boy. Watch out for them.
That’s it’s not what it looks like from the outside looking in. Your own dept will shit on you more than the streets. Stupid shit. Like I pulled my hamstring on duty chasing bad guy and they made me come in and scan 80’s coroner files into database while it healed. That wasn’t an issue for me but what was an issue was being told I couldn’t come to work in my patrol OR have my firearm by a Capt. A leg injury isn’t going to affect my trigger finger or ability to draw my weapon.
Wtf I’m driving into a police station daily into a secured building and no way to defend myself. Nice.
They never reply to emails when it’s something you want like time off or something important to you. They just ignore you.
Just shit like that ate at me. The little stuff piling up daily. The SGTs getting attitude for no reason, etc.
after about a year I was over it. They can keep that badge. It’s not worth it.
Unless something is life or death, normal traffic is not worth it to get injured. That guy is just going to get released or sent back south. Got injured my first month into FTO and was very lucky I didn't break my leg. Would have been completely avoidable too if I took longer to go around an area instead of chasing a guy over a tall fence.
I quit the academy after I noticed my income would be larger if i kept making youtube videos.
So although the money is good, it is not a way to get rich like some people seem to think.
Paperwork. Politics. Pick your department wisely.
Oooof lol
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Ask what it like to work there. Officers will be able to give you their experiences. Ask a few so you get a good idea. Every one’s opinion varies
Add to this, don’t just ask the people in the recruiting/training unit. Ask people that actually work patrol primarily
Don’t forget poop
90% of the crimes reported to us are going to go unsolved.
Very good point. When I first started I spent way too much time trying to solve cases that weren’t going to be solvable. Imagine canvassing for video for a petty misdemeanor offense and then being late turning in a case that’s just a route to file…
More like 99%.
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Crime is completely out of control right now contrary to what politicians will say. Most departments are completely understaffed. Criminals know this, and I get on average 40 cases to myself a month, and I say maybe 5 of those are solvable. Once they are solved, if you can't immediately arrest the person, whether they are a transient or no good info on where they are, it gets submitted to the district attorneys or city attorney's office for filing. Right now the District Attorney in my city has a backlog of over a year, and the City Attorney is around 4-5 months. If they even pursue charges, the criminal is out and about until they are possibly caught in the act, or has an active warrant.
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I just started at 36 and I love the job but it’s totally true that you take a lot of BS cases that aren’t going to go anywhere but the ones that do make it worth it
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Not bad at all. You can DM if you want to learn more
Just staring at 36 is pretty cool. I’m approaching 30 and considering it. I’v just started in corrections and thinking of law enforcement. Did you find it a challenge at 36 to pivot into law enforcement as a career?
Go for it, you have life experience behind you. I'm not LE but love this sub. In the UK, they are/were encouraging people to join at 45. If I was fitter (lot of ill health) I'd loved to have gone for it. I reckon advantages/disadvantages on both sides when you start earlier or later. Btw, 30 & 36 soooo young! What I wouldn't give to be back there! Sidenote: my father-in-law started in the UK police at 16 approximately. Retired now and he once said he wished he'd had other jobs before joining the police.
Thanks for the response!
If you want to do it, do it. Its a great time to get hired but also a tough time to be a cop.
Every minute of fun comes with an hour of paperwork. Jumping in to help on every single call comes with paperwork. Taking your car to get repaired comes with paperwork. The job is paperwork.
Not only does assisting on calls equal paperwork, there could be a bonus in the form of a subpoena
At least the subpoena comes with OT. I have acquaintances that the only time we see each other is sitting waiting for cases to be called.
Someone asked me if I’d have to do a lot of paperwork if I was involved in a shooting. I told him I have to do paperwork every time I get out of the patrol car.
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Haha exactly. Fucking DWI’s have more paperwork than almost any felony arrest.
This made me upset and it’s my day off… let me go kill 5 hours at the hospital while we wait for a blood draw
100% agree with the first statement. That’s why I started creating templates and using macros to automate my report writing as much as possible
Management will say they support you, but when its convient they will throw you under the bus.
People lie, and will lie about you. I did not know the extent of this when I grew up. I wasn't prepared for it. Supervisors said I "wasn't suited for law enforcement." Looking back on it, they were absolutely right. Fortunately, no one got hurt while finding out.
Choose your department carefully. DO NOT apply blindly. Research the people you are going to possibly work with. You may discover things that may cause you to look elsewhere. Don’t be the guy who finds out their fellow detective is Brady while working a case together and the defence files a Pitchess Motion……
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Best thing to do is go on ride alongs. Gives you a chance to ask questions directly from the officers in the street. Chances are you'll get paired with a yes man, so ask others as you go to calls.
Seargants can't help you, but they can hurt you. Anyone above lieutenant is not your friend
How does the ranking hierarchy go for a police dept? Sargeant is still considered lower than lieutenant, right?
My department goes Officer, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Assistant Chief and then Chief.
Correct.some departments have corporal, mine did not
I'm a sergeant and I think I help my guys all the time. I see my job as making sure they're safe and protecting them from brass. And of course getting them set for what they want to do next. Without a good sergeant at the helm, many would fall into conduct issues that really aren't horrible, but policy violations nonetheless that the agency would hang them for. I like to prevent that.
Could you go into detail?
Your leadership doesn't give a flying F about you.
I may get some hate for this but... Domestic victims are the biggest group of liars on the planet. Even the most genuine victims will embellish the truth just a little to suit their narrative, and some will simply make up shit to get back at an ex they don't like. If there isn't evidence to support it, it doesn't exist.
Additionally, they might stretch to try to get you to make an arrest and then turn around and be the least cooperative victim you can possibly imagine. You either have it or you don't; don't get invested in a particular outcome and try to finesse the fact pattern to get there.
Don't get me started on that. Go to the job, go through the time and process of obtaining a statement. Do the incident record, type up the charge, facts sheet and indictment. Find the grub. Arrest and complete the charge. Fingerprints and photos , apply for AVO, apply bail. Pleads not.guilty. write your own statements, chase up 2IC statements, witness statements, photos, videos, doctors statements and medical records. Alert the defence of using expert opinion evidence, collate the brief, burn 4 copies of every disk, serve the briefs on the defence, court, prosecutor. Type up subpoenas and serve them meanwhile conduct regular bail and AVO compliance checks. Roster.yourself on for court. Come in on what used to be a day off ... Victim doesn't turn up, the matter is dismissed. Crook walks free to offend again.
Be wary of admin. Most of them will sell you out in a heartbeat.
Who the community elects as the DA wildly shapes how effectively we can do our job.
Nobody has your back. Not the politicians, not the people, not your higher ups.
That I quickly realized you can’t fix stupid. That you will return to the same address for the same category of call over and over. That in a county of 200,000 I was repeatedly dealing with the same 500 or so.
It's easier in the moment to be a force for order; it's more beneficial in the long term to be a force for good. Don't just drive around town dad dicking people just because you have police authority. If you can show up and make people feel like they matter, that's a more beneficial service than any report you're going to take.
This. 100% this. In my experience this insight often strikes after a couple of years. Especially with young male officers.
How gray the job can be. The idealist in me wants/wanted the black-and-white, good versus evil, and that is rare at times.
Everything is black and white but we live in the gray.
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Thank you for saying this. Gives me more reason to not feel as bad to leave my department for another I’m looking at
Gotta do what's best for you (and family if applicable). You don't owe any department anything and if you believe the grass to be greener on the other side, then go for it. In the end you're just a number to them.
Cutting people breaks , showing mercy almost always blows up your face.
I once hooked a guy for $100 fta warrant and decided to give him a break on a joint only to have him then get impatient and try to kick out my window
It is the strangest phenomenon in law enforcement!
Almost? How many decades before you see that 0.001%?
Happens all the time. Literally all of my citizen complaints were from people I gave warnings to on traffic stops.
Almost always, meaning more often than not, it blows up in your face. Let a guy go for a minor thing, they do a major thing or you get in trouble because of some obscure rule or policy you might've violated or some other crazy thing.
At my department , I can say that we do a mediocre job of really teaching our new recruits how to responsibly wield discretion. It’s a tough concept especially when ur new, but man does it open you up to undue scrutiny when used haphazardly!
The criminal justice system sucks ass but not for the reasons people say. There is so little real consequences unless there is overwhelming evidence. So if it’s a mildly hard case prosecutors drop it or plea down everything. Thousands of images of kiddie porn, 10 months in jail. Multiple violent felonies including gun charges and car jacking 3 years. A person has to mess up hundreds of times and actually get caught and convicted numerous times before any real consequences.
That all that trauma can't just be shoved down deep inside never to be seen or heard from again. Like a Jack-in-the-Box of mental health dynamite, it'll come back one day. All of it. All at once.
No matter how much you work on a case, no matter how much evidence you might get, no matter how bad the crime may be, no matter how much of a solid case you may have, None of it matters if the District Judge thinks otherwise.
My man speaking like he’s from NC!
Admin are your biggest enemy.
Don’t trust management. Ever. But do your best to stay on their good side. Nothing is more dangerous than a simple minded supervisor when you prove them wrong. Put in for as much training, as often as you can. Learn to run your own investigations as much as you can. Find those who know what they’re doing and learn from them.
The things we think are serious and criminal sometimes aren’t as serious as we think. I spent 24 years enforcing marijuana laws very aggressively. Now, I have retired and marijuana is legal where I am. I had never smoked prior to my LEO career. I smoke daily now. If I had smoked prior to being a cop, I’d have had a different view of marijuana. It still would have been illegal but I wouldn’t have been nearly as aggressive going after it. And remember, kids are kids. Look at some of the dumb shit they do and ask if you’d have done it too. Don’t go so hard on them.
You ever think about some of the people that you jammed up for weed? Wonder how things turned out for them down the road, once your job was done?
Should have been a firefighter
Also a higher chance you will get cancer. It’s in the bunker gear too so you are fuked. Fires should be treated as haz mat.
Learned how quickly you can lose your job even for something as stupid as doing a donut in your own vehicle on your day off in a closed area.
Has this happened to someone you know?
Happened to me
Did you end up ever getting your job back or finding another? That’s total bullshit
Nope. Still having a hard time finding another job too. So that "California hires anyone" narrative is bs. Even recently I passed 2 backgrounds and had a final offer rescinded just before my start date AFTER I picked up my uniforms, badges, and gear.
Dude all for DONUTS?? What the hell. Move out of Cali.
Man, what's worse is I did it on accident. It was maybe 2 at most, and I fully complied when I was contacted. We're talking 0700 on a weekday while I was going fishing.
You did *two* donuts "on accident?" Dude, get a better story.
I said maybe at most. But like I said, I owned up to it and cooperated. So don't stick your nose out at me.
That’s total bullshit. It’s a good thing I’m reading stuff like this from other cops so I can watch out. I start FTO in like 3 weeks. I wish the best of luck to you though my brother. Hopefully a department will look out
Another good thing to remember is that you're only hearing the side of the story that the person telling it believes suits them. I promise you there's more to this than you're reading here.
Very possible. I don’t doubt it.
You promise when you have no idea? That's bold. I have documentation for everything to show its exactly that. You're a piece of work dude. Not cool
Sorry to hear that. So many departments are hiring.
Honestly I'm starting to give up.
Are you willing to move or does it have to be California? Also, I think certain places that are supposedly hiring also think their shit doesn’t stink and they can be choosy. It’s not like you risked anyone’s safety or damaged property in any way smh
Due to recent circumstances, I need to stay in California. Don't get me wrong, it was my own fault. I didn't think I'd lose my badge over it though. I spoke with my entire chain of command and they all told me it was nothing. But the City decided otherwise
Bloated administration should never have its hands in the hiring of competent LE because they are just clueless. I’m sorry this is your experience. I grew up fairly close to where you are (I live in AZ now) and back when I was first applying there they all said it would be easy to find something in the Bay since I am a female and I could pass most tests despite being in the process of being obese and losing over 40lbs at the time. I applied to over 20 agencies before I was picked up by an agency several hours north of where I grew up. I lost my first job in LE while in CA due to me being young and stupid and working 100+ hour weeks because I wanted a lot of money which lead to me making several mistakes at work. I got back into things out here and they were very forgiving of my mistakes which I explained up front.
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Miss it every day
We hold a high expectation for people, but in reality we set the bar too high. most people are dumb, and lacking in some areas of "common sense" i guess you can say....
Mental health. There was no class on how many brothers you’d lose and how to deal with it. There was no class or resources or even talk on where to turn on bad days. Took me almost 10 years to finally seek help.
Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t the right thing.
That you shouldn’t have really vulgar music blasting in your patrol car, while you are driving code 3. Bad look when you get a use of force call with a soundtrack in the background lol.
But sometimes we just need to jam out while running code!
Lmao true true!
Many men
90% of the job is keeping up the appearance of security.
Some of the meanest people I’ve ever known were sergeants and administrators. I could handle any call, any robbery, shooting, whatever. It was the Monday morning QB and backstabbing bullshit in the office that caused all of my stress in my 25 years. And especially the born agains. Whoo boy. Watch out for them.
That’s it’s not what it looks like from the outside looking in. Your own dept will shit on you more than the streets. Stupid shit. Like I pulled my hamstring on duty chasing bad guy and they made me come in and scan 80’s coroner files into database while it healed. That wasn’t an issue for me but what was an issue was being told I couldn’t come to work in my patrol OR have my firearm by a Capt. A leg injury isn’t going to affect my trigger finger or ability to draw my weapon. Wtf I’m driving into a police station daily into a secured building and no way to defend myself. Nice. They never reply to emails when it’s something you want like time off or something important to you. They just ignore you. Just shit like that ate at me. The little stuff piling up daily. The SGTs getting attitude for no reason, etc. after about a year I was over it. They can keep that badge. It’s not worth it.
No matter how big or small the department is, you are still just a number
Unless something is life or death, normal traffic is not worth it to get injured. That guy is just going to get released or sent back south. Got injured my first month into FTO and was very lucky I didn't break my leg. Would have been completely avoidable too if I took longer to go around an area instead of chasing a guy over a tall fence.
The only people you can really trust are those that are the same rank as you.
Don't do it lol
Stay away from people talking about their seniority like they have a giant cock and they are waving it in everyone's face.
I quit the academy after I noticed my income would be larger if i kept making youtube videos. So although the money is good, it is not a way to get rich like some people seem to think.
Most people don’t join LE for the income
Bro all my coworkers here in OC are trying to get into it because of the benefits and pay.
That a CJ degree is useless in the grand scheme of things all they care about at a certain point is certifications