Cheating death and fighting communism: that is how a fellow officer once described our job. It was meant to be funny, but as time went on it seemed all too true.
I spent more than ten years in law enforcement, all of it on the street in uniform patrol. I've been a patrol officer, instructor, sergeant and lieutenant.
Do not report crimes here. Nothing here should be considered legal advice. All opinions are my own.
I cover this information further up the page. Good luck.
Call your local police department and ask for their assistance. They will know what to do.
I value them all. If you are asking me to arbitrarily rank them in order of importance, I cannot. What duty is the officer trying to perform? Every task is different and requires varying degrees of each of the above. Also time in grade does not equate to experience. Also, experiences vary widely. Are the experiences in roles as a trainer, investigator, narcotics officer, or what? A highly educated homicide investigator with ten years of violent crime investigations may get his butt kicked the first night he rotates back to patrol and goes to a bar disturbance, while the two-year officer with nothing more than a high school diploma saves him. There is no neat way of quantifying police officers.
You can probably still enter an academy, but it will be difficult to get a department to hire you. Three speeding citations and an at-fault accident is a fairly significant indicator of poor driving. Few agencies would want to put an officer into a patrol car for 40+ hours a week and expose themselves to the potential liability of his or her foreseeable bad driving.
As time passes, the citations become less of a problem for getting hired. For example, two years since the last citation looks like you have improved your driving. Five years looks even better. Different departments will have different guidelines based on the agency's risk tolerance.
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You should contact the local police department. I am not an active officer, nor is this a law enforcement agency. Dial 911 if there is a true emergency.
It depends on the agency. Some departments require no college, while others might require a two or four year degree. Read through the prior posts and you can get additional information on college and hiring.
When I did the job for 8-12 hours a day, I had no interest in watching more of it on the tv.
Besides, the way the editors cut the reality shows like Cops up to make them fit between commercials is not realistic. You only see a fraction of a case, say 10 minutes of something that took the officers hourse to resolve. It might be exciting, but it builds a very unrealistic expecation in the public.
Oh, and about 95% of what you see in CSI is b.s. I can't tell you how many times I had someone tell me to do something impossible that they saw in that show.
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