A Day in the Life of a Federal Agent on the Job
Well, my day usually starts around 7:00a.m.
As federal agents, the government actually pays for you to work out three hours a week. So….I usually head off to the gym for a quick work out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. While it might sound great to work out on the clock…it certainly comes at a cost.
As a federal agent, you will be expected to take an annual physical fitness test and pass a yearly physical. Don’t pass your yearly physical? Say “bye bye” to your job.
How you spend the rest of your day depends on what type of case you’re working. Fraud case? You are likely to spend your day requesting and serving subpoenas to banks, phone companies, Internet service providers, meeting regularly with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and combing over vast amounts of data to determine whether a criminal violation occurred and, if so, prove that the subject of your investigation committed said violation.
Maybe you have established enough probable cause to convince a judge to give you a search warrant to uncover more “fruits of the crime.” This is where you get to be all “tac’d out”; in other words, you get to wear body armor, drop holsters, those cool Oakley sunglasses, etc…
Although the initial entry is usually exciting, accompanied by tactical movements around corners yelling really cool phrases like “clear, all clear,” the vast majority of search warrant executions involve an incredibly tedious number of administrative duties. Things like photographing the scene before and after, sketching the scene, photographing where evidence was recovered from, recording what time evidence was recovered and where it was recovered from, keeping track of who is at the scene and what they did, providing a list to the owner of the property all of the items that were seized, etc. Once you wrap this up, you head back to your office and start the process of logging all of the items into the evidence locker and spend the rest of the day writing the report.
All those activities add up to at least a 15 hour day.
Overtime you ask?
Ha, good one.
Federal agents very rarely, if ever, receive overtime. Federal agents are actually exempt from the provisions of the Fair Labor and Standards Act that require federal agencies to pay employees overtime in the event they work more than eight hours. Instead, federal agents receive what’s called Law Enforcement Availability Pay, or LEAP. This is an extra 25% added onto your base pay in return working an average of 10 hours a day. Anything past 10 hours and you just donated your personal time to the government.
Unless the “overtime” was scheduled in advance of the “administrative work week,” which essentially means it was scheduled before the Sunday of the upcoming week and means that the agency has the legal authority to pay you, it can still decline.
At it often does.
When Do I Get to Arrest Someone?
Ahh…the fun part.
Yes, this part of the job is actually like what you see on TV. The same “tac’d out” look applies to arrest warrants as it does search warrants, accompanied by battering rams, Tazers, and cool flashlights mounted on your M-4. While any aspect of your day could bring you face to face with someone trying to kill you, you are more likely to experience a confrontation with those whose freedom you are trying to take away.
While these operations are certainly not without danger, you can rest assured that as a Fed, you will have ample support. If the subject is high-risk (i.e. significant criminal history with a propensity for violence and an affinity for firearms), you are likely to deploy the S.W.A.T team prior to your squad making entry. Even then you will probably have 15 other agents with you and every contingency will be thought of.
You Have Him in Custody, Now What?
This is the really frustrating part. Depending on what part of the country you are in, federal judges have strict time-frames where they will see prisoners for an “initial appearance”. If you get to the courthouse too late, you must then transport the arrested individual to the federal detention center, which could be a considerable distance from the court house. Then, the following morning you must go back to the federal detention center and wait, and wait, and wait some more behind a long line of other federal agents who were also too slow in getting their arrested individual to the judge the day before.
Sometimes you wait so long that you miss the deadline (again) and have to come back (again) the following day. Once you actually get the arrested subject in front of the judge, your interaction with the Federal Detention Center and the U.S. Marshals is over.
Now the lengthy wheels of justice begin to move, and they move really slow.
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