1. National if your meaning Australia wide
  2. Well thats fairly ovious. I meant jursidictional boundry wise (my spelling is bad). Just looked it up, and I can say it seems to be arranged along the same lines as it is here.

  3. Depends on the department. Small departments might have, one detective, one or two officers assigned to a regional dive team, or SWAT type unit, and essentially every one else will be patrol although there will be higher ranking officers as shift supervisors. In larger departments, there are usually many specialized units, that usually any member of the department can get in after a certain amount of time (usually 2-5 years) in patrol. For instance, the Michigan State Police has a bomb squad, a dive unit, canine unit, EST (a SWAT type unit), aviation section, capital security, and most likely several units that I cant think of at this time. Some are part time units, meaning the members assigned to them also do regular patrol duties, while others are full time, meaning that's all they do.
  4. Cool stuff,
    although its annoying when there are part time units.
    I find that annoying in any business especially with service or communication,
    but I guess it is the way it has to be,
    we cant all work 24/7 to be flawless
  5. Well with police work its cost. Something like a SWAT team is expensive to train and equip, and just having them sit around waiting for a high risk warrant, or a barricaded gunman, is not cost effective, so in most departments they tend to do regular patrol, or detective duty's till they are needed.
  6. Makes sense, does'nt it?
    Besides Government has to be able to put some money in their own pockets.
  7. Don't know how it is in your country, but here in the states, public safety is one of the few functions of the gov both conservatives, and liberals will agree on, yet whenever budgets get cut, police, and fire protection tend to be the first thing to go regardless of who is in office at the time. Personally I'd say it should be the last thing.
  8. No here we are opposite which is good I must say,
    they scrape money together for an even bigger force atm
    because of mainly protest squads/gate crashed parties/city brawls here there and everywhere.
    Its got really bad here, always a stabbing, bashing, knifing or glassing in the face at popular venues and not just once but a few cases, aside from car chases
  9. Crime in the states depends on where you live. Up here in the north country, most crime is either booze, or casual drug related. Usually domestic assaults, or criminal sexual conduct. Gotta alert though. There not common by any means, but there are high speed chases, and shootings up here.
  10. Shootings is pretty scary, like stabbings over here.