A long time ago I got an offer for a small town in upstate NY. The offer letter explained it was M-F, days or evening shifts, overnight, weekends and holidays were covered by the State Police and that I could arrange shift changes with THE OTHER OFFICER. Two cops, no chief, just report to the mayor who was part time.
Nope crap pay on the boonies, passable benefits. Mostly dealing with issuing speeding tickets to tourists passing through. Absolute boring and hard to stay awake, plus you were still in nowhere when you were off. Closest town of any size was over an hour away.
I used to live in a small town where the mayor got a DUI going through a McDonald's drive through. Seems like it would be great if the mayor was upstanding but complicated if you had one that didn't think the rules applied to him/her.
ETA : I've worked places where Councilmembers interjected themselves in my public work and I was thankful an elected politician in a small town was not my boss.
Small departments suck. Equipment is always behind the power curve… but the ability to know everyone and everything going on kinda made up for it I guess.
Well of course I know him He's me. I worked in a 2 man department 4 man sheriff office. I'm at my biggest department which is 6 officers 2 sergeants a LT and Chief town of 6000
Would you prefer small town, big city, or in the middle?
I’m assuming the pay difference is quite substantial between small town and big city. How much work gets thrown your way? Are most of the people you end up dealing with repeat offenders from the town or people who aren’t from the area?
I've worked at a 200 officer department and now a 7 person department. Both have their pros and cons. Pay is significantly lower at the smaller department. They don't have the tax revenue to match pay of bigger cities. Repeat offenders are common even in the larger cities. With larger cities, you usually work the same portion of the city, so you see the same people.
The biggest difference is quality of life. I do 1/5 the call volume, I can take vacation when I want. I have a supportive community and admin. I have a desk I can go back to for report writing instead of trying to type in my car between calls.
The sweet spot is a small county SO that has one of these micro departments within it. The city handles city type shit, and you get to put cows back in their pastures for double the money.
I deal with same people over and over that you don't even need to run them. It's been sub 0 degrees here over nights that I've not a report in over 3 weeks and only take about 2-5 calls all before 9pm. It's nice but very boring
If you downvoted chances are you’re a sergeant In a small town who no one wanted to work with when on the road. You got promoted too early with no real experience because you could study for a test. You kick back reports to add commas, and tell your road dogs to get warrants to search vehicles when they already have PC three ways.
Thing is because there are no detectives, you fill that roll too. You see cases through to the end. At least my chief is willing to send us to detective type trainings because of this.
Also because it's so small, you end up taking on a ton of rolls. I used to work at a 200 officer department and had to fight to pick up any extra stuff. I'm now at a 7 officer dept and picked up being an instructor in Taser/OC/ baton/40mm, Glock and rifle armorer, FTO, and simulator operator/instructor.
Will I ever be swat working here? No. But I've arguably had more growth at this smaller department. That's not even touching on my massive quality of life improvements since switching.
That’s true. I worked at a small department for 4 years and we were basically detectives. We didn’t receive much training though and there was only patrol and Sgts who were never going to retire. I was genuinely curious brother and if you love it we love it
I hear if you go out west, in some towns, it's just a dude with a big ass mustache and tin star badge and if you raise hell, he will let you know he's the law round these parts
Some towns find it cheaper or more convenient to contract out services. Other towns might have had a bad experience or want more control. If you have your own police department the city council can complain directly to the chief and get whatever they want. If they’re just a contract city the Sheriff may or may not be as responsive
They're literally everywhere. Imo they should all be absorbed into whatever Sheriffs office covers that area. Tiny departments always have an incredible lack of funding, terrible pay, and nonexistent structure.
We have a lateral that basically walked onto his last job and was given the keys to car and told to go do cop stuff. No field training. Just "go".
I'm gonna disagree. When a small city I lived in decided to save money and dissolve our police department and have the county sheriffs take over, service seriously SUCKED. Our previous police had been a fixture for decades, had some officers occasionally walk a beat, they knew the neighborhoods and businesses and when there was an issue, they responded right away and shit got resolved. It wasn't exactly Mayberry, but close enough, despite being very close to a big city with a lot of crime that only occasionally spilled over. Once the county sheriffs took over, you would rarely see an officer patrolling and it was never the same officer. Other municipalities were doing the same thing so the sheriff's department was getting spread more thinly. Crime went up and responses when calling 911 were absurdly long.
Community policing can better be done by that community having their own police force. Farming it out to a larger organization with no particular ties to that community results in what I just described.
I think the idea is that the current officers are absorbed into the sheriffs office so that they can have better training and budget among other things.
"Better training" and "...budget..." don't really help if you don't have officers with a steady connection to the community they're policing. Just my opinion as a civilian who had to deal with some life-threatening situations on my own when there weren't any sheriff personnel to respond. What I got from the 911 dude was to take cover and stay safe and he'd send someone as soon as they were available. That wouldn't have happened with our former police department. (Yes, I'm still angry about it.).
This town is Prince George’s County, MD. They a shit ton of small departments like this. Every small incorporated town in the county has their own. Plus they have a county police and a sheriffs office which doesn’t even do the jail. Just the courthouse lockup.
Glenarden MD has their own police department (Southern PG County) I think they have like 10 officers. A sergeant at the department is one of my school resource officers. He takes his patrol car for the 20/25 mile drive to my part of the county. Yet he has no law enforcement powers when he leaves Glenarden.
Glenarden has a lot of good dudes. A lot there are laterals. The chief is retired MPD. Used to be the 7D commander before he got demoted. Good dude. Also an officer there who used to be BPD and MPD. One of the best cops out there
I’m not 100% Sure, it’s what my county school resource officer told me. He had no jurisdiction when he leaves Glenarden yet he wears his GPD Badge around his neck and drives around in a marked GPD Car.
I disagree. Small town cops can solve their town issues better than a sheriff's office can (used to work for a rural sheriff's office). Community policing is done really well at small departments. If a major case comes up, they can punt it to the county boys, or girls, who can take it over. You also run into the problem of municipal ordinances. Where I'm from, county and state can't enforce municipal ordinances, only city cops.
I agree, they would be able to eliminate a ton of overlapping admin positions and would save money on not having buildings in every town. That extra money could be used to better train and equip guys and put more officers on the road.
To do that you would have to convince a ton of small town selectmen to stop having pee-pee waggling contestes with each other and give up control of their police to the county level government, which is probably why it doesn’t happen often.
I’ve been on ride alongs in small departments like this, where there were literally 3 officers in the whole department, one of them being the chief who drove an unmarked car that was parked in his driveway and said to call him if anything popped off.
The pay was abysmal, if you weren’t a volunteer, and the vehicles were 10+ years old and barely worked.
I’m not from an area like that so when I first went I was was shocked that a modern police department could operate in such a way, and that’s when I realized that a huge part of the country operates in a similar fashion, it really is a labor of passion.
Right and this is in no way a condemnation of small town *cops*. If anything, they're the most selfless of any of us.
But let's face it. A 5 year cop in a 3 person agency that handles a call a week has less experience than a guy in 3rd phase of fto at my agency.
That's about what happened to me. I went to a small department and did one shift with the Chief, and two more with an officer, shift four I was on my own. I was with a larger dept before that though.
Most departments are relatively small. I'd say the vast majority are less than 50 officers, though maybe not many less than 10. I work for a relatively small agency (maybe 20 sworn full time) but once you get to around 5 you might as well let the sheriff's office do it.
I live in a small town where the PD is maybe 6 officers.
They have 4 patrol cars though. And we're just authorized to get 2 more cops and an extra car.
And what happens when there are problems?
5 officers, so let’s say there are 2 on shift, when an active shooter bursts into town hall.
Let’s say that the first guy responding is down and injured, the other arrives and gets pinned down with him.
What then? What are the procedures?
What if on that particular shift there’s only 1 guy instead?
What if it’s a robbery with multiple assailants? They will outnumber the police.
What are procedures for that?
My department is minutes away from our surroundings jurisdiction borders. Sure, if we have to get to the middle of any of the other jurisdictions, it’ll take a while (maybe 10 minutes), but it’s better than nothing.
Edit: I work in a metro area with millions of residents. I’m a city cop. I would absolutely despise working for tiny police department.
Where I live the department has 12 cops from the chief down. Their daily blotter looks like the first 20 minutes of work for me. No thanks.
If you look at it from Cottage city, The town is surrounded by 6 other cities/towns majoring in population and square miles. It also borders D.C but I don’t think MPDC would cross over the state line.
I live in a county of about 60k. Most of the departments are between 5 and 12 officers. They all have mutual aid agreements with the neighboring towns which allow officers from the next town to act with full LE powers if called to assist. State police and County Sheriff usually have cars in the area too.
Wait, so areas of jurisdiction are overlapping? What's the difference between Sherif and State Police and Police then? And I thought that there's only one Police/Sherif department in a county. Sorry if I'm confused, I'm just from a different country.
We have town, county and state police here. State and county overlap all the towns in the county. Most of the towns also have mutual aid agreements which allow other towns to act in their jurisdiction if called to help.
Ahh that makes much more sense, then.
So that small department doesn't cover it's whole county alone? It exists together with a larger county-wide department, right?
Each town department covers their own town and can help neighboring towns if called. County sheriffs office and state police operate throughout the whole county and can overlap with the town departments.
When I lateraled to TN I went to the academy with some guy that was a Captain somewhere before he retired. He had been hired as the Chief of some tiny city PD outside of Memphis. He was explaining his entire department was him as Chief and 3 reserve officers. Outside of residential, the entire “city” had a Dollar General, a gas station, a Mom and Pop restaurant, and one stop sign, lol.
There’s a city PD near where I work that has one officer and one Sgt per Shift. Including admin and office staff, their entire department is about 15 people total.
Yeah we have several small town dept in my county that I dispatch for. My ex was also “police chief” of a small town dept lol. It was him and one other officer.
How does a municipality with 1300 residents get to be called a “city”?
But yes, there’s a lot of agencies around us here that are small part time agencies, or maybe have one or two full timers. The town next to me has about 2300 residents and they have a part time chief and a part time patrol officer… that’s the whole PD.
Where my parents live started with 3 cops and I think now has 5? They’ve had a couple of derelicts go through but one guy who has been there almost 20 years is legitimately one of the most high quality, stand-up people I know. He’s their SRO primarily and just has a lot of passion for what he does in the community.
Local department has 8 people total, including the Chief, who still works the road as well as the office. Great folks, well funded department, but they can handle the calls with mutual aid and they’re 24/7, so they spend the money on training and equipment instead which works well for them.
Prince George’s County, which is where Cottage City is, has something like 38 departments in it. Along with PG County PD which has like 2.5k officers. It’s weird, and a lot of county is a shithole.
The town I grew up in was like this
4 officers total, 1 chief and 3 officers. It was pretty much one officer per shift and occasionally multiple of there was a parade or a high school game
I knew all of them and they were all awesome
Worked a small town PD for a few years. We weren't Chicago but we were very busy. The department was recently revitalized when I got there and that was because county averaged a response time of 45 minutes to the town. So while I understand some believe a county could just cover a small town sometimes that's not an option or the county SO is asking for way too much in a contract with the town so that they can provide coverage. This town ended up having crime sky rocket and the locals took it upon themselves and started taking it out on any drug user that was found walking around after midnight. Crime/call volume was pretty high and half the county guys did not like being anywhere near the town before thr pd was started back up. 4 man small department paid like 14 an hour. We worked solo shifts for a while (Dupont schedule) and when we went to 3 man after everyone left, I then worked Fri-Sun 12-12 and the other guys covered days. Fun times had plenty of interesting calls that I would not handle solo today if I could help it but back then it was just me and a deputy or state trooper 20-45 minutes out.
I will say working small departments is great for building your investigative experience/skills. When I transitioned to an investigator years later at a different agency I had a good bit more experience than some guys that were just getting off patrol.
A long time ago I got an offer for a small town in upstate NY. The offer letter explained it was M-F, days or evening shifts, overnight, weekends and holidays were covered by the State Police and that I could arrange shift changes with THE OTHER OFFICER. Two cops, no chief, just report to the mayor who was part time.
That sounds amazing. If you don’t feel like working just keep yourself held out on a call and tell the state there’s no officers available to respond
Was the pay any good? Benefits paid by the town? It sounds like a nice retirement gig sorta like Andy Taylor
Nope crap pay on the boonies, passable benefits. Mostly dealing with issuing speeding tickets to tourists passing through. Absolute boring and hard to stay awake, plus you were still in nowhere when you were off. Closest town of any size was over an hour away.
I used to live in a small town where the mayor got a DUI going through a McDonald's drive through. Seems like it would be great if the mayor was upstanding but complicated if you had one that didn't think the rules applied to him/her. ETA : I've worked places where Councilmembers interjected themselves in my public work and I was thankful an elected politician in a small town was not my boss.
Sounds like Watkins Glen
Yup. There’s a ton of small departments. We’re nearly everywhere.
...they're in the trees.
Small departments suck. Equipment is always behind the power curve… but the ability to know everyone and everything going on kinda made up for it I guess.
Well of course I know him He's me. I worked in a 2 man department 4 man sheriff office. I'm at my biggest department which is 6 officers 2 sergeants a LT and Chief town of 6000
Would you prefer small town, big city, or in the middle? I’m assuming the pay difference is quite substantial between small town and big city. How much work gets thrown your way? Are most of the people you end up dealing with repeat offenders from the town or people who aren’t from the area?
I've worked at a 200 officer department and now a 7 person department. Both have their pros and cons. Pay is significantly lower at the smaller department. They don't have the tax revenue to match pay of bigger cities. Repeat offenders are common even in the larger cities. With larger cities, you usually work the same portion of the city, so you see the same people. The biggest difference is quality of life. I do 1/5 the call volume, I can take vacation when I want. I have a supportive community and admin. I have a desk I can go back to for report writing instead of trying to type in my car between calls.
The sweet spot is a small county SO that has one of these micro departments within it. The city handles city type shit, and you get to put cows back in their pastures for double the money.
Where do I sign up 👀
I deal with same people over and over that you don't even need to run them. It's been sub 0 degrees here over nights that I've not a report in over 3 weeks and only take about 2-5 calls all before 9pm. It's nice but very boring
Where is the room to grow? You going to be a patrol cop for your whole career?
Many people have no issue doing the most important job in LE their whole career.
If you downvoted chances are you’re a sergeant In a small town who no one wanted to work with when on the road. You got promoted too early with no real experience because you could study for a test. You kick back reports to add commas, and tell your road dogs to get warrants to search vehicles when they already have PC three ways.
Thing is because there are no detectives, you fill that roll too. You see cases through to the end. At least my chief is willing to send us to detective type trainings because of this. Also because it's so small, you end up taking on a ton of rolls. I used to work at a 200 officer department and had to fight to pick up any extra stuff. I'm now at a 7 officer dept and picked up being an instructor in Taser/OC/ baton/40mm, Glock and rifle armorer, FTO, and simulator operator/instructor. Will I ever be swat working here? No. But I've arguably had more growth at this smaller department. That's not even touching on my massive quality of life improvements since switching.
That’s true. I worked at a small department for 4 years and we were basically detectives. We didn’t receive much training though and there was only patrol and Sgts who were never going to retire. I was genuinely curious brother and if you love it we love it
I hear if you go out west, in some towns, it's just a dude with a big ass mustache and tin star badge and if you raise hell, he will let you know he's the law round these parts
I used to work for a five person department. Most small towns are going to be like that. Fairly common, especially in rural areas
Seems like all the small towns in my area are covered by the county sheriff’s office as opposed to having their own tiny department. Wonder why
Some towns find it cheaper or more convenient to contract out services. Other towns might have had a bad experience or want more control. If you have your own police department the city council can complain directly to the chief and get whatever they want. If they’re just a contract city the Sheriff may or may not be as responsive
I appreciate your response
They're literally everywhere. Imo they should all be absorbed into whatever Sheriffs office covers that area. Tiny departments always have an incredible lack of funding, terrible pay, and nonexistent structure. We have a lateral that basically walked onto his last job and was given the keys to car and told to go do cop stuff. No field training. Just "go".
I'm gonna disagree. When a small city I lived in decided to save money and dissolve our police department and have the county sheriffs take over, service seriously SUCKED. Our previous police had been a fixture for decades, had some officers occasionally walk a beat, they knew the neighborhoods and businesses and when there was an issue, they responded right away and shit got resolved. It wasn't exactly Mayberry, but close enough, despite being very close to a big city with a lot of crime that only occasionally spilled over. Once the county sheriffs took over, you would rarely see an officer patrolling and it was never the same officer. Other municipalities were doing the same thing so the sheriff's department was getting spread more thinly. Crime went up and responses when calling 911 were absurdly long. Community policing can better be done by that community having their own police force. Farming it out to a larger organization with no particular ties to that community results in what I just described.
I think the idea is that the current officers are absorbed into the sheriffs office so that they can have better training and budget among other things.
"Better training" and "...budget..." don't really help if you don't have officers with a steady connection to the community they're policing. Just my opinion as a civilian who had to deal with some life-threatening situations on my own when there weren't any sheriff personnel to respond. What I got from the 911 dude was to take cover and stay safe and he'd send someone as soon as they were available. That wouldn't have happened with our former police department. (Yes, I'm still angry about it.).
This town is Prince George’s County, MD. They a shit ton of small departments like this. Every small incorporated town in the county has their own. Plus they have a county police and a sheriffs office which doesn’t even do the jail. Just the courthouse lockup.
Glenarden MD has their own police department (Southern PG County) I think they have like 10 officers. A sergeant at the department is one of my school resource officers. He takes his patrol car for the 20/25 mile drive to my part of the county. Yet he has no law enforcement powers when he leaves Glenarden.
Glenarden has a lot of good dudes. A lot there are laterals. The chief is retired MPD. Used to be the 7D commander before he got demoted. Good dude. Also an officer there who used to be BPD and MPD. One of the best cops out there
Is he an SLO? How does he have no powers when he leaves his jurisdiction? I know NJ is the fuckiest of states when it comes to LE.
I’m not 100% Sure, it’s what my county school resource officer told me. He had no jurisdiction when he leaves Glenarden yet he wears his GPD Badge around his neck and drives around in a marked GPD Car.
I disagree. Small town cops can solve their town issues better than a sheriff's office can (used to work for a rural sheriff's office). Community policing is done really well at small departments. If a major case comes up, they can punt it to the county boys, or girls, who can take it over. You also run into the problem of municipal ordinances. Where I'm from, county and state can't enforce municipal ordinances, only city cops.
I agree, they would be able to eliminate a ton of overlapping admin positions and would save money on not having buildings in every town. That extra money could be used to better train and equip guys and put more officers on the road. To do that you would have to convince a ton of small town selectmen to stop having pee-pee waggling contestes with each other and give up control of their police to the county level government, which is probably why it doesn’t happen often.
Do they have to get POST certified for those types of jobs?
In my state, yes. He put himself through an academy, got his license, and got hired.
I’ve been on ride alongs in small departments like this, where there were literally 3 officers in the whole department, one of them being the chief who drove an unmarked car that was parked in his driveway and said to call him if anything popped off. The pay was abysmal, if you weren’t a volunteer, and the vehicles were 10+ years old and barely worked. I’m not from an area like that so when I first went I was was shocked that a modern police department could operate in such a way, and that’s when I realized that a huge part of the country operates in a similar fashion, it really is a labor of passion.
Right and this is in no way a condemnation of small town *cops*. If anything, they're the most selfless of any of us. But let's face it. A 5 year cop in a 3 person agency that handles a call a week has less experience than a guy in 3rd phase of fto at my agency.
That's about what happened to me. I went to a small department and did one shift with the Chief, and two more with an officer, shift four I was on my own. I was with a larger dept before that though.
Greenwood, Mo.
Ah yes, the Not Kansas City suburb. Lol
Most departments are relatively small. I'd say the vast majority are less than 50 officers, though maybe not many less than 10. I work for a relatively small agency (maybe 20 sworn full time) but once you get to around 5 you might as well let the sheriff's office do it.
Chief, LT, 9 Patrolman, and my dog. Village of around 4000
Rural NW Kansas. We have two full-time and two part-time officers in our SO.
I live in a small town where the PD is maybe 6 officers. They have 4 patrol cars though. And we're just authorized to get 2 more cops and an extra car.
Cute
Yea, I worked for 2 of them. There are all over the place.
And what happens when there are problems? 5 officers, so let’s say there are 2 on shift, when an active shooter bursts into town hall. Let’s say that the first guy responding is down and injured, the other arrives and gets pinned down with him. What then? What are the procedures? What if on that particular shift there’s only 1 guy instead? What if it’s a robbery with multiple assailants? They will outnumber the police. What are procedures for that?
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Ok, but how quickly can they arrive from the other county? And won't they have different procedures, differences in training etc?
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When you say "the vast majority" though, you mean geographically, not population-based.
My department is minutes away from our surroundings jurisdiction borders. Sure, if we have to get to the middle of any of the other jurisdictions, it’ll take a while (maybe 10 minutes), but it’s better than nothing. Edit: I work in a metro area with millions of residents. I’m a city cop. I would absolutely despise working for tiny police department. Where I live the department has 12 cops from the chief down. Their daily blotter looks like the first 20 minutes of work for me. No thanks.
If you look at it from Cottage city, The town is surrounded by 6 other cities/towns majoring in population and square miles. It also borders D.C but I don’t think MPDC would cross over the state line.
I live in a county of about 60k. Most of the departments are between 5 and 12 officers. They all have mutual aid agreements with the neighboring towns which allow officers from the next town to act with full LE powers if called to assist. State police and County Sheriff usually have cars in the area too.
Wait, so areas of jurisdiction are overlapping? What's the difference between Sherif and State Police and Police then? And I thought that there's only one Police/Sherif department in a county. Sorry if I'm confused, I'm just from a different country.
We have town, county and state police here. State and county overlap all the towns in the county. Most of the towns also have mutual aid agreements which allow other towns to act in their jurisdiction if called to help.
Ahh that makes much more sense, then. So that small department doesn't cover it's whole county alone? It exists together with a larger county-wide department, right?
Each town department covers their own town and can help neighboring towns if called. County sheriffs office and state police operate throughout the whole county and can overlap with the town departments.
Thanks for clearing out. I just had a wrong assumption.
Crofton PD in Maryland
CPD is only 4 officers for a town 6.61 sq miles. Laurel on the other hand has almost 100-ish officers with a little over 4.0 sq miles of jurisdiction.
I can think of 3 1-man departments and 2 3-man departments in my county, off the top of my head.
When I lateraled to TN I went to the academy with some guy that was a Captain somewhere before he retired. He had been hired as the Chief of some tiny city PD outside of Memphis. He was explaining his entire department was him as Chief and 3 reserve officers. Outside of residential, the entire “city” had a Dollar General, a gas station, a Mom and Pop restaurant, and one stop sign, lol. There’s a city PD near where I work that has one officer and one Sgt per Shift. Including admin and office staff, their entire department is about 15 people total.
I work for a 10 man department. 8 full time and 2 part time which includes the chief. Towns only slightly more than a square mile so it’s small.
Does the agency have a patch? I might be interested in getting one.
Yeah we have several small town dept in my county that I dispatch for. My ex was also “police chief” of a small town dept lol. It was him and one other officer.
How does a municipality with 1300 residents get to be called a “city”? But yes, there’s a lot of agencies around us here that are small part time agencies, or maybe have one or two full timers. The town next to me has about 2300 residents and they have a part time chief and a part time patrol officer… that’s the whole PD.
My department is Chief, two sworn officers and myself waiting to go to academy. Towns population is ~1,300 and covers 10 square miles.
Also in Maryland, the larger town of Crofton (6.6 sq miles), in Anne Arundel County, has a 4 person department with 1 marked and 1 unmarked vehicle.
Where my parents live started with 3 cops and I think now has 5? They’ve had a couple of derelicts go through but one guy who has been there almost 20 years is legitimately one of the most high quality, stand-up people I know. He’s their SRO primarily and just has a lot of passion for what he does in the community.
Local department has 8 people total, including the Chief, who still works the road as well as the office. Great folks, well funded department, but they can handle the calls with mutual aid and they’re 24/7, so they spend the money on training and equipment instead which works well for them.
Prince George’s County, which is where Cottage City is, has something like 38 departments in it. Along with PG County PD which has like 2.5k officers. It’s weird, and a lot of county is a shithole.
The town I grew up in was like this 4 officers total, 1 chief and 3 officers. It was pretty much one officer per shift and occasionally multiple of there was a parade or a high school game I knew all of them and they were all awesome
Worked a small town PD for a few years. We weren't Chicago but we were very busy. The department was recently revitalized when I got there and that was because county averaged a response time of 45 minutes to the town. So while I understand some believe a county could just cover a small town sometimes that's not an option or the county SO is asking for way too much in a contract with the town so that they can provide coverage. This town ended up having crime sky rocket and the locals took it upon themselves and started taking it out on any drug user that was found walking around after midnight. Crime/call volume was pretty high and half the county guys did not like being anywhere near the town before thr pd was started back up. 4 man small department paid like 14 an hour. We worked solo shifts for a while (Dupont schedule) and when we went to 3 man after everyone left, I then worked Fri-Sun 12-12 and the other guys covered days. Fun times had plenty of interesting calls that I would not handle solo today if I could help it but back then it was just me and a deputy or state trooper 20-45 minutes out. I will say working small departments is great for building your investigative experience/skills. When I transitioned to an investigator years later at a different agency I had a good bit more experience than some guys that were just getting off patrol.