A Day In The Life Of A Police Officer At UCLA Police Department

There really is no typical day in the life. Every day is new, and you never know what is going to happen. That's one of the things I love about this job.

To lay out how our schedule works, everyone works 12-hour shifts. You either work A watch or B watch. A watch is 6:30 AM to 6:30 PM, and B watch is 6:30 PM to 6:30 AM.

For the first two years of my career, I worked B watch. It's a completely different animal than days. I'm now on days, but working nights is night and day. There's a huge difference between working day watch and night watch.

Our days always start out in briefing. Our sergeant fills us in on the details of the previous shift's activities, the kinds of arrests they made, the calls they responded to, and any major incidents. We might be told about someone who is wanted, and they'll pass around a flyer for us to become familiar with that person.

After briefing, we get our vehicles ready for the day. We make sure all the lights and equipment are functioning. You don't want to try to pull someone over and your siren isn't working.

Once your car is ready, you go out on patrol. Typically, I go around campus to make sure there's nothing out of the ordinary before heading down to my assigned area. Lead officers usually do a general check of the main campus area and then spend the majority of the day in their particular areas.

Generally on day watch, things are fairly slow in terms of incoming calls. In the afternoon, once students are awake and realize their car was broken into or their bike was stolen, we start getting calls for service. These are often in-progress calls, where things are happening at the moment, as well as "cold reports" for things that have already happened.

Throughout the day, we'll often have some downtime. We try to fill this with follow-up investigations. Perhaps we took an investigative call the previous day and there were more people to talk to or video footage to obtain. If we have time, we'll do a bit of investigative work. This is a benefit of working for UCLA PD; we have time for more investigative work than, for example, LAPD, which is so overrun with calls.

As a lead officer, I also have a lot of meetings, usually Zoom meetings. I have many meetings with community leaders in my area throughout the day.

To wrap up my day, I finish any outstanding reports and answer emails. Inevitably, and we always joke about it, around 5:45 PM, 45 minutes before our shift is supposed to end, we'll get a major cluster of calls that will take us into the next hour. It's a joke we have.

It sounds maybe a little boring the way I explain it, but there really is no typical day. The types of calls make the day interesting, and I learn so much from every day. Every day is new.