For those of you who are considering a career in law enforcement, you may be surfing the web for local and state law enforcement agencies. I am recently retired after 32 years in law enforcement, the last 16 with the state of Florida. I worked for 14 years with the State Fire Marshal's office. To anyone considering this agency as a career, it is my goal to make your life and decision about choosing an agency a great deal less stressfull.
This agency is the absolute worst agency I have ever had the displeasure to be employed with. Please, I can already hear the groans of sour grapes but what I will tell you is the way it is and if you can live with that than by all means, apply and give it a try.
First of all, this agency is divided up into I believe it's nine regions now (I could be wrong on the number). Each and every region is an entity unto itself. What I mean by that is if you work in say the southeast region and you want to transfer to the northwest region you will find a vast difference in the way things are done.
You will be expected to be on call 24/7 for fires. Now each region does their on call differently but for the most part, you may work on call for a week out of each month. That's not counting the holiday weekends where you will be expected to work on call from Friday to the end of the holiday at 8 AM. Believe it or not, this is all free time. You will work a monthly cycle of 160 hours. That is normal duty hours, however; any on call hours would obviously take you over that 160 hours if you were able to save your "over time" until the end of the month. Most supervisors insist if you should work 20 extra hours on a given weekend that you take that time off asap. If you were to save that time until the end of the month it would go into a special comp bank and you could save that time as vacation time should you choose but you have to have any of that time taken off before the end of June and before the end of December. If you don't then they must pay you over time and trust me, that is something you will hear about and you will not do it again.
So you have worked 20 extra hours on an on call weekend, lets say. On Monday you probably have maybe two or three fires with all the paper work, photos, evidence etc. that go along with the fires, not to mention the report. Right away your supervisor is on you to see when you can take the time off. You may have follow-up to do and if one or more of the fires were a major fire, you will have bu cu follow-up to do and it may take you several weeks but in the mean time, you are still catching fire investigations day and night. Say the on call investigator is on a fire scene and another fire is called into dispatch. Your supervisor has a choice. First he/she is going to call you and ask how much longer you will be on the current fire. If you are near finishing he will tell you to call the agency and let them know when you will be there. You may have an hour or two of driving time to get to this next fire so you have a crew of pissed off firefighters awaiting your arrival. Your supervisor could say, don't worry, I'll go catch this second fire but not bloody likely. He/she could also decide to call another detective who is not on call and ask that person to respond to the second fire. This is not an uncommon occurrance because if you are smart (unlike I was) you will tell him you are going to be busy at the first fire for a few hours. Trust me, I had this done to me on many occasions. If your supervisor calls you when you are not on call and asks you if you can take a fire for the on call detective, you best do it or your subject to be labled "not a team player." It doesn't matter if you simply do not want to get up or if you are busy with your family, they DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU!
As you go about your daily routine, making phone calls to various agencies, etc. you say, this is detective dousch bag from the state fire marshal's office and the other person on the line says, "you are with state farm insurance?" If it's a police agency, they are more likely than not to tell you you can not get their police report because you are not a law enforcement agency (at least many agencies are not aware you really are a law enforcement agency) so you have to deal with that. In fact, this agency investigates fires and even though the detectives have arrest powers as any deputy in the state, you are not allowed to intervene in a criminal situation, even if something is going on in front of you - unless, according to sop - there is a possible life threatening situation. That's what sop says, however; let me tell you a story: On my way to conduct an interview with someone I had been trying to find for some time I was driving through a high crime area of Daytona Beach and saw what I thought was a kidnapping in progress. The suspect in front of me (two black males) appeared to have pulled another subject into their vehicle. Realizing I was behind them, the driver speeds off and makes an erratic turn nearly causing a multi vehicle crash. I speed up, trying to get my hand held radio with a weak battery working to call our dispatch so they could notify DBPD. The driver made another turn and I tried to keep him in site - unable to raise dispatch I hit my emergency equipment and the driver pulled off the road. When I caught up, he was stuffing a gun down the front of his pants as he bailed from the vehicle and ran through a neighborhood area. With two people left in the car, I drew down and held them using my nextel to call my dispatch.
As it turned out, the guy who I thought was pulled in the car actually jumped in the car when he saw my police crown vic because he was trying to buy drugs from this runner. After requesting and getting back up from DBPD, I conducted the investigation and learned the junkie had no money but the runner had pleanty of dope and a firearm. DBPD did nothing to assist me, even though this was their bad guy. The only possible arrest would have been the junkie because he admitted he had a crack pipe in his undies. Not my thing so I notified the DBPD sgt who arrived. I told him I had no way to test the residue and if he didn't want to collect it, the guy could throw the pipe in the woods across the street. He decided to collect the pipe but let the guy go. My agency wrote me up for five violations and a year long internal inestigation ensued. Just before Christmas my chief called and told me he would be down to my area to render my punishment. Nice Christmas presant - something he did intentionally because he was an ass.
Even though every violation was proven false through testimony and other evidence, the agency wanted to give me a 20 day suspension. Unheard of by my union for the first time IA. They reluctantly dropped the punishment down to 10 days, still extremely excessive. If I refused the 10 days and requested a year or more long wait for a hearing I would be subject to the 20 day punishment. This for a detective who had 32 years worth of excellent evaluations, three officer of the year awards and an excellent record. This agency will suck the life out of you. more later
