Expert: Jack Toomey - 9/12/2005

Question
Hey Mr. Toomey! My name is Lauren Scurlock and I was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me. I attend Lee's Summit West High School and I was assigned a research paper to do in my Language class. Here are some of the questions. How long have you been in the police force? What degrees do you need to be a policeman or something along those lines? Sometimes is it scary when you get someone that has a really bad attitude or threatens you? What department do you work for? How many hours a week do you work, such as on and off the clock or do you get to be home a lot? Does it get hard when you have a family? Do you ever get tired of your career? What things made you know you wanted to do this for a living? What do you like to do best at your job? Would you like to move up from your position and how long would it take? Thank you so much for your time.

lauren

Answer
Lauren,

    You contacted me on another website and I was just about to answer that question when this one popped up.  As you can probably appreciate I don't give out personal information about myself and that should be in my profile so I am afraid that I can't answer several of your questions.

   However I can tell you that my department requires 60 college credits before they would consider an apllicant.  A degree is not necessary but it is helpful.  The rest of your questions refer to what I do now and you might have noticed that I retired from the police department a few years ago but generally I can tell you that police work can be stressful on some people and on the other end does not affect some people at all.  It depends on the person just like being a student.  Some students are anxious and afraid before a big test while others take it in stride.  It's the same with polic work.

   All police departments are different as far as advancement and promotion.  If you are on a small rural department with a high turnover you might be promoted in a matter of a few years and yet if you were on a big city department with thousands of officers then advancement might be more difficult.  However you have to understand that all police officers start as uniformed officers despite what you see on television and the movies.  That is the biggest shock to students who believe what the see on shows like CSI, etc, which are total fiction.

   I hope that I have given you enough info for your project and also I am going to ignore your question from the other site since it is the same question.