-: After completing the Police Academy,
which was about 21 to 22 weeks,
you go in to a 12 week field training program,
so you have somebody who's been,
you know, at the department for awhile,
and you ride around with them for about 12 weeks
to kind of grasp what the day to day job is like,
and you know, to learn all of the code sections,
all that stuff, all that really fun stuff.
Then after that, you're on your own for awhile,
and you kinda can slowly start working your way up,
you know, after Patrol Officer, you can go to Corporal,
then that goes to Sergeant, then Lieutenant,
and then we have a Chief Major, and our Chief.
So the first few weeks of the Police Academy,
you do a lot of in-class stuff,
it kind of feels a little redundant,
'cause you're just sitting in class for, you know,
all day, you know, from seven to five, or seven to six,
and they do, you know, a lot of, like criminal code,
and then we start going in to our practical stuff,
which is hands-on stuff, you know, larcenies,
burglaries, robberies, sexual assaults, stuff like that.
So you'll learn about those, you know, throughout the week,
and then at the end of the week you'll have a practical,
and you get graded on how well you do during the practical.
You know, the last week is you implement everything.
It's, you know, everything you've learned
throughout the week, and you know,
you go in to like a shoot house,
you gotta take down the bad guys, you got sim rounds,
so like a fake gun with sim rounds,
and you know you pass all that,
and you graduate the next week, and it's crazy.
It feels like it takes forever, but at the end,
you don't even know where your time went
'cause it happened so fast.
You can major in, I don't know if it's Criminal Justice
or Criminology, so that is huge,
and if you do major in that,
you can actually become an intern with our department,
so you can hang out with the cops.
Our interns, they're with us quite a bit,
and so they get a lot of experience.
You can also do ride-alongs with the Police Department,
you don't have to be involved in a Criminology,
you don't have to be a Criminology major.
Yeah, a lot of opportunities.
We hold a student Police Academy at Virginia Tech
at our department, so you know, that's a few weeks
of you know just basic stuff.
We'll actually do (mumbles) demonstration,
and you'll get to drive around in our police cars
in a like, closed-coned course.
We'll take 'em to the range, all that good stuff.
So that's like a great, like first experience.
If you really wanted to get hands-on
and see what the academy was like,
that's a very good basic,
you get a basic understanding of it.