As an ex regular LEO it obviously wouldn’t apply to you as such but what was the attitude of the regulars about the part timers?
Did they think that they were enthusiastic say but lacked street cred,or thought they did a good job/not very good job or that they were extra useful maybe because of their indepth knowledge of their neighborhood community and that their neighbours were more likely/less likely to give them off the record information then they would "Normal "officers?
Also what sort of backgrounds do the majority of volunteers come from?(U.K. police can chip in with this if they like)
Are any proffessions more heavily represented then others,do most people come from the middle classes or are the working/upper classes involved as well?
I honstly find the mind set of these people unusual though I respect and admire them for what they do which is why I am so curious.
I worked as a volunteer/auxilary police officer about 20 years ago.
In my case, I attended the state Peace Officers Training Academy for training. Once that was completed I rode for a few nights with a full time officer, then was sent out on my own.
We wore the same uniforms and carried the same equipment as the full time officers. I had my own patrol vehicle and rode alone. Essentially we were indistinguisable from the full time folks.
I didn’t get paid anything, though somewhere on the township books it probably said I got paid $1 per year (for insurance liability purposes).
I think the full time officers treated the volunteers very well. They were anxious to train us cause, after all, we were often their only back up at a given call/dispatch. In fact, I once had a full time guy say he’d rather have me as a back-up than anyone else on the force.
Oh, and it’s nice to be back at the SDMB. They went to the pay system shortly after I joined and so I never really got a chance to interact with y’all.
Over the past 25+ years I’ve worked for several departments on a part-time basis, even when I was also working in law enforcement full time. It’s cheaper for some departments to hire off duty cops from other departments for part-time gigs than to pay their full timers overtime. Many of the part-time jobs I worked were lake patrol positions during the summer months, snowmobile patrol in the winter. These were temporary, seasonal positions. But they were actual law enforcement positions (sworn, armed, full arrest powers, etc…) I also worked for a small village part-time on a regular patrol job. When my shift at my full time job changed I had to quit. In the late 80’s/early 90’s, for 4 years (two terms X 2) I was elected as constable for a small township. Full arrest powers, sworn, armed, etc… on that too. But with only 2 exceptions all of my arrests (actually just tickets) were for burning garbage or leaves without a permit. The two exceptions were for cattle at large (that’s a real charge, I’m not shitting you) and a drunk driving accident the county sheriff department was too busy to handle. I was not provided with a squad car for that position and had to use a personal vehicle equipped with magnetic red and blue lights that plugged into the cigarette lighter and sat on the roof of my car.
As far as my old department, my current one, or any of the other ones I worked for part-time, I never ran into a problem or saw any problem between the full timers and part-timers. Even the department I eventually retired from had some part-timers. Part-timers usually have no chance for advancement to higher rank, but are ahead of the curve if a full time position becomes available.
The State of Texas has a military auxiliary called the State Guard. Most of the personnel there are trained as Military Police (hence, kinda relevant to the OP), Medical staff, or communications specialists. I think they only pay you for it if you get called up for duty, and State Guard members can not be called up by the Federal Government since they are not members of the actual US Military. Generally they are for situations like a natural disaster in a major Texas city or rioting or something like that. I’m not aware if they’ve ever been used for anything or not.
Not volunteer police, but at Texas A&M, the paramedics are all unpaid student workers. They get the training free of charge, and they are supervised by an experienced professional paramedic, but the guys in the ambulance and the dispatcher are all full-time students required to maintain a passing GPA and work 12 hour shifts (when someone has a class, usually they park the ambulance outside the building he has class in, and he just attends in his uniform. They radio if they need him to run out of class and back into the ambulance.
In the town of Pattaya, which is Sin City here in Thailand, the Tourist Police have bizarrely recruited some farang (Western) “volunteer Tourist Police.” Theoretically, they are auxiliaries who can be called upon to mediate in disputes between bars and customers, report if they see any underage prostitutes, that sort of thing. In reality, they’ve gotten a bad reputation as police wannabes strutting around in their special T-shirts and bossing drunks. I’ve heard of at least at least a couple getting a thimping as a result.
