New Podcast Alert!
Tune in to Training's Lt. Demetrius Taylor and Sgt. Nick Davison (also Emergency Response Team members) on the brand-new First Responders Podcast hosted by retired Virginia Beach Sheriff's Office (VBSO) Deputy Brian Miller.
For his first episode, Brian introduces himself and the impetus behind the podcast. For the second one, both released on July 4, Lt. Taylor and Sgt. Davison share insightful stories and discuss what it's truly like working at the VBSO, the vital training involved and why it's such a great place to build a career in public service. You'll hear about their experiences, the camaraderie and so much more!
Whether you're a first responder, considering a career in law enforcement or just interested in hearing real stories from our community heroes, this episode is for you.
You can find it on most podcast providers, including Spotify and Apple. Thank you, Brian, for making us your first guests!
Listen now at brianmiller1963.podbean.com. Don't forget to like, share and follow the podcast for more episodes!
Episode transcript:
“Welcome to The First Responder's Podcast. The podcast for first responders, made by first responders. Now, for your host, Brian Miller, a retired first responder with over 25 years of experience.
Brian Miller: Okay, we're alive. You're back with the first responders podcast. I am in Virginia Beach, Virginia, at the Law Enforcement Training Academy with some of my old coworkers.
I've got Lt. Taylor and Sgt. Davison.
Lt. Taylor: Hi, I'm Lt. Taylor. I've been with Virginia Beach Sheriff's Office for going on 12 years now. I'm currently over the Training Division.
I'm also a lieutenant of the Emergency Response Team, along with two other lieutenants that are also on the team. So, yeah, here I am. Thank you for having me.
Brian Miller: Thank you, sir. I appreciate you doing this for me. Sgt. Davison.
Nick Davison: Good morning. My name is Sgt. Nick Davison. I've been with the Sheriff's Office for 19 years, going on 20.
I'm currently a sergeant in the Training Division, a sergeant in the Emergency Response Team as well. And I work directly here with Lt. Taylor.
Brian Miller: Awesome. Thanks, guys. And again, I appreciate y'all doing this.
Lt. Taylor: Absolutely.
Brian Miller: This was the first place I thought about because I worked here for 15 years. Just for transparency, everybody knows I was a deputy sheriff. I retired from this department almost three years ago.
All right, so we're going to get into this. LT, tell me a little bit about the city of Virginia Beach and the department that serves it.
Lt. Taylor: Sure. I can go on all day about the city of Virginia Beach. I grew up in this city, went to Kellam High School, graduated from Kellam High School.
So this city is definitely a beautiful city. Obviously, the Oceanfront is the main attraction of the city.
We have a huge selection of hotels, concert venues, restaurants, anything that you would like to do on vacation, Virginia Beach can definitely offer. We're also a military town.
A lot of military personnel here. That's how I ended up here. My dad was in the Navy.
And also, Virginia Beach is the safest city of the city its size in the US. So that's a huge nod to the law enforcement that patrols the city.
Brian Miller: And you guys play a big part in that, because you're down at the Oceanfront this time of year, right?
Lt. Taylor: Yes, sir.
Brian Miller: Yes, sir. How about the department? Tell me a little bit about the Sheriff's Office.
Lt. Taylor: What you mean as far as the size of the department?
Brian Miller: Yeah. yeah.
Lt. Taylor: So we currently have roughly 450 positions, sworn positions, and there are 500 positions total, roughly. And right now, we are sitting at about 50 vacancies. So anybody interested in coming to the Virginia Beach Sheriff's Office, we are always hiring.
Brian Miller: And this is, I know, at one time, we were the biggest department in the state. Is that correct?
Lt. Taylor: I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that.
Brian Miller: But it was always either us or one of those counties up north, Fairfax or somebody like that.
Lt. Taylor: Fairfax sounds about right.
Brian Miller: Yeah, they would always bounce back and forth. Tell me about the different divisions that you guys have in this department.
Lt. Taylor: Sure. So the bread and butter of the Virginia Beach Sheriff's Office is obviously Corrections, Courts and Civil Process. But then we also do have a lot of specialty divisions, a lot of divisions that make a big difference in the community, such as the Criminal Intelligence Unit.
Also, our Workforce Division. So if anybody has ever driven down main streets in Virginia Beach, if they see inmates cutting grass, picking up trash, things like that, that's a great program that the Virginia Beach Sheriff's Office offers to keep the community clean. We also have the Training Division that I mentioned earlier that I'm over.
And then we also have Classification, which that division, when inmates come into our facility, they do an assessment on them, they interview them, and they determine where they're going to be within our facility. And then lastly, we have the Emergency Response Team, which is a specialized division that's kind of equivalent to what you would know as the SWAT team. So we do a lot of things within the facility.
We do things out in the city. So we handle disturbances within the facility and also in the city.
Brian Miller: So tell me a little bit about that, most of that's in the jail. Tell me a little bit about the Civil Process, folks.
Lt. Taylor: Yeah, so Civil Process, they're like, they're under the umbrella of our Courts Division. So they're like an extension of the courts. So if a judge makes a ruling of whatever, then those documents pertaining to that ruling will be served to the general public.
Brian Miller: Very good, very good. And then of course, courtroom security is the other thing that you all do.
Lt. Taylor: Yes, sir.
Brian Miller: All right, I appreciate that. Thank you. Tell me a little bit about the recruiting and the hiring process.
Sgt. Davison: All right, so I'll take that one. As Lt. Taylor just stated, we are 50 vacancies short. So we are always hiring, always recruiting and looking to get our numbers up.
It is a lengthy process, but that's for a reason. The typical time from application date to hire date is around three months, a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, depending on your case. But again, for a lengthy, it's lengthy for a reason.
Brian Miller: Yeah, I've heard, I know in my time, if you catch it right, like when I first started, right? I put my application in because I hit it all at the right time. I went from application to work in a month and a half.
Sgt. Davison: Wow. Wow.
Brian Miller: Because I caught it at the right time. But you talk to people and people will say, yeah, it took me six months to get this job or it took me three months.' So a lot of it is if you hit it at the right time.
Sgt. Davison: Right. Exactly. And the reason it is so long, because obviously being a law enforcement officer requires a lot of background checking, extensive involvement of physicals, psychological testing, all that stuff.
And we want to ensure that if we're going to be giving someone the responsibility of a job as a law enforcement officer with such great responsibility that it is that we are checking all the boxes for the person. So I'll tell you a little bit about the hiring process. So if you're interested, the best thing to do is go to online to vbso.net . Once you're there, you'll see a link for the VBSO Recruit Academy Interest Form. Go ahead and click that. You can fill that out.
Once you've filled that out, you'll be contacted by our Human Resources Division to come out for a written test and a physical test, which is both done in the same day. They'll give you information on that. If you want some more information on what is on the physical test, which I'm going to go over in a little bit, you can watch a video on YouTube .
Just type in 'VBSO Physical Agility Test.' And there'll be a very detailed video that goes through, one, how to prepare for it and what the things test for. But I'll go over those right now.
So our physical fitness test, it's consistent of four different exercises, all measuring different groups. It's going to be pushups with a max pushups of 60 seconds. How many pushups you can do in 60 seconds. That measures your upper body strength and your cardiovascular endurance. The minimum requirement for that is 11 pushups.
The next test is going to be a 300-meter run or sprint. That measures your cardiovascular endurance, and that is in a minimum of 112 seconds.
Another test we have is a trunk pull, where you're just going to pull on this device and it measures your torso strength. The minimum of that is 72 pounds of pressure.
And then we also have a sit and reach test, where you sit down with your legs straight and extended in front of you, and you lean forward and reach your hands. This measures your lower back and your hamstring flexibility, and that is required a minimum of 5.33 centimeters.
Once you've passed the written test and the physical test, you'll be contacted by our Human Resources Division. Well, then that starts that extensive process of a city physical, a psychological background check, or psychological exam, a background check. And once you've completed all of those, you'll be given a panel interview.
And then after the panel interview, you'll be reached out for a hire date. And then once you get your hire date, you'll start and start preparing for the academy.
Brian Miller: Now, you said a written test. It's just general knowledge.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, just general knowledge. Nothing extremely complicated. Just your basic high school general knowledge.
Brian Miller: Yeah, I just don't want people thinking that they have to have an associate's or a bachelors in criminal justice.
Sgt. Davison: Of course not. No, it is general knowledge. Anything that would be GED-based or high school diploma-based.
Brian Miller: And you said get you ready for the academy. Tell me a little bit about the academy.
Sgt. Davison: OK, so the academy, so I'll kind of rewind here. When you get hired, we're going to go through an indoctrination process, which is a four-day process, which kind of is a very, very basic introduction to the Sheriff's Office. And then depending on where you are in your hiring process, just like kind of how you said, you got hired on in a month and a half, and then you probably went and worked, we call it the floors, worked in the jail for a little bit and then went to the academy.
Sgt. Davison: We kind of do things a little bit differently now. We have a set amount of academies per year. Right now we're running, was it two, two, two per year?
Lt. Taylor: Roughly, yeah.
Sgt. Davison: Around two. So like right now we're in the middle of one. That one's going to graduate in August. And then we're going to start another one a couple of weeks right after that.
Brian Miller: How long is the Academy?
Sgt. Davison: Right now, our academy is...
Lt. Taylor: About 18 weeks.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, I was trying to think month-wise, but yeah, 18 weeks. And it's consistent of all kinds of things. You're going to go through anywhere from learning constitutional law, to use of force, to courtroom testimony, courtroom security, and then go into some defensive tactics, which, you know, learning self-defense and how to control combative individuals, all the way up to firearms training.
You get extensive firearms training. We spend a lot of time out there being very proficient in learning how to manipulate and use a firearm if that's ever needed. We have something called EVOC, which is defensive driving.
We do crisis intervention training, which is mental health awareness training, CPR, first aid, combat medic. You're going to be sprayed with OC spray.
Brian Miller: Yeah, that's the fun stuff right here.
Sgt. Davison: A lot of people said that is the most fun of the academy for a lot of the guys. And it is. And I always tell the recruits in the academy, I said, you know, you're getting paid to work out every day and learn how to do a lot of fun stuff.
I said, enjoy this, you know. And it is a military-structured academy, but you do get to go home at the end of each day, which makes it different than boot camp. You don't stay here on-site.
And it's regular banker hours, you know, 7-3, 8-4 kind of thing for the academy.
The Virginia Beach Sheriff's Office workforce no longer provides grass-cutting service in the city. They continue to assist with picking up litter along the main roads. Thank you.
Brian Miller: So go through, let's talk about, lets go back and talk about specialized units. What do they look for? You talked about ERT. So can I come out of the academy and go right to ERT? Or can I go right to Civil Process? I would imagine each one of those has its own requirements for time in the department, training, stuff like that, correct?
Lt. Taylor: Yeah, so typically there's a, there's a wait period between when you graduate the academy to, well, until when you can go to a specialty division.
Brian Miller: OK.
Lt. Taylor: But there's no special requirements to go into those specialty divisions except ERT. ERT, you do have to go through a week long ERT school and you have to pass certain, certain objectives to be considered for the team. But for all other divisions, just come in, be a hard worker, do things the right way and show yourself capable.
And yeah, the sky's the limit.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, I think I'll take that a little bit further. So when you first graduate the Academy, you are assigned to again, what we refer to as[…]”
“Yeah, I think I'll take that a little bit further. So when you first graduate the academy, you are assigned to again, what we refer to as the floors, which is the jail, the correctional facility. It's a great, I love it.
The schedule there is awesome. You work 15 days a month. So not many other jobs where you work 15 days a month and still get a full salary.
Brian Miller: Go a little deeper into that schedule.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, so that schedule is going to work five days one week and two days the next. So I'll kind of give a breakdown of it. Let's say it is your long week. Long week meaning you work Monday and Tuesday, 12 hour shifts. You have off Wednesday and Thursday. And then you work Friday and Saturday and Sunday, 12 hour shifts.
That's the long week. Now your next week is your short week. That's the week everyone looks forward to.
Brian Miller: Yeah.
Sgt. Davison: You're off Monday, Tuesday. You work Wednesday, Thursday. And then you're off Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Again, the good part about that, if you take your short week, and you take your two days of leave on Wednesday and Thursday, you get a whole week off for taking two days off.
Brian Miller: Yes, sir.
Sgt. Davison: And that is something, us in training here, we miss a lot about that schedule, right?
Brian Miller: Well, I'll tell you, I did 20 years, and I had five years with the D.A.R.E. unit, the Monday through Friday. And I would have preferred, I wouldn't have had a problem staying in the jail at 20 years, because that schedule, when you're on that jail schedule, that rotating shift, the Monday through Friday sounds good. But then when you go to that Monday through Friday, and you're like ...
Sgt. Davison: You miss those days off.
Brian Miller: I've gotta take a day's leave to go to a doctor's appointment. So there's a lot to be said for that rotating shift.
Sgt. Davison: Now, can I say a little bit more about that?
Brian Miller: Yeah, go ahead.
Sgt. Davison: A lot of our Monday through Friday positions now are also, we do four 10s.
Brian Miller: Oh, really?
Sgt. Davison: Like us in Training, a lot of the guys down here, they do four 10 hour shifts, where they have a regular day off in the week as well.
Brian Miller: That would have been nice.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, that's nice as well. And I'll give one caveat to that jail schedule, is every two months, you do rotate from days to nights.
Brian Miller: That was my next question.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, but it's interesting, because you get to see the different aspects of the jail, and it kind of breaks that monotony of, because the jail has a set schedule, and I like the rotation from days to nights.
Brian Miller: I was different from everybody else, because I loved working days, because I like my days to go.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, busy.
Brian Miller: Yeah, those nights, man. Once 11 o'clock comes and they lock the facility down, those couple of hours are brutal.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah.
Brian Miller: Absolutely brutal.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, they are. They are. But again, at the same time, that's what I really like about switching, you know, that every two months is you don't get in that, hat lull. And we accumulate a lot of leave time off here. And the good thing about, again, the Sheriff's Office, as I know a lot of other places to work, is you have to use your leave by the end of the year.
Brian Miller: Yeah.
Sgt. Davison: The Sheriff's Office is not like that. You can build it up and build it up and build it up. And before you know it, before a few years, you have enough leave to take off a month if you want to.
Brian Miller: Yes, sir. So tell me, I'm a brand new recruit. I've done the application process. I've been through the academy. So what's my typical first week gonna be?
Sgt. Davison: OK. So that's actually changed a little bit since you've been here. So what we do now is right after graduation of the academy, the recruits are gonna go over to an MTO phase in the Courts and Civil Process Division, where they spend, I think it's two weeks, Lt. Taylor, right? Two weeks?
Lt. Taylor: Yes.
Sgt. Davison: Two weeks getting certified in Courts and Civil Process and all of those things. After that, they're gonna assign to a watch team. We have four watch teams, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta, because obviously the jail never shuts down.
We always gotta have a team on. Once they get to the team, the team consists of a lieutenant that runs the team, is the watch commander. The team has a couple of sergeants.
I think our average sergeants on the teams now are five, six, some have seven. The sergeants are kind of the second line supervisors of the team. They run some squads on the team.
And then the team has anywhere between 30 to 40 deputies. They'll be assigned a field training officer on the team. And that field training officer will be by their side for their first couple of weeks, maybe even a couple of months.
And they will be assigned to what we call floors on the jail. Our jails have different floors. All the floors have different reasonings behind them of what's on their floor. They're broken into Alpha, Bravo and Charlie wings of the jail. And they'll be assigned to a floor and they'll start to learn their job.
Brian Miller: And there are, and you touched on it just briefly, there are specialized areas in the jail. I know there's a mental health ...
Sgt. Davison: Correct.
Brian Miller: ... mental health box.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, mental health has been, especially in the past couple of years, a huge, huge, huge thing that we focus on in the jail because a lot of our individuals in the jail suffer from mental illness. And it's just something, it's not just a Virginia Beach thing, it's a nationwide, worldwide crisis of the amount of people that are suffering from mental illness and the lack of resources. So the individuals with mental illness aren't getting the treatment that they need.
They end up in some sort of trouble. And we call it, you know, where it's, it's some sort of crime that's being committed based off of their mental health problems. They come to our facility. So our deputies get extensive training in mental health awareness. And we actually have a lot of areas of the jail designated just to individuals that suffer from mental health illnesses, where they are looked at and treated based off of, you know, what they got going on.
Brian Miller: Yeah, that was some, I did that for a little while. And it was actually one of the most interesting things that I did in my career.
Sgt. Davison: It is. It is.
Brian Miller: When you start delving in to the different aspects of mental health, there's a lot more to it than you think about.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, I had no idea. I have a degree in psychology, and then I started working in the Sheriff's Office. And I realized there's a lot more you learn in a jail than you do in a book.
Brian Miller: Oh, yeah.
Sgt. Davison: And man, that is something that we focus on heavily in the academy here. It's not just learning how to run, drive, shoot, fight. It's also learning how to help out individuals that are suffering from mental health, and that's a big part of our job.
Brian Miller: Got you, got you. All right, I'm going to give you guys one shot to promote this department. This is your recruitment, your recruitment time.
Tell me the one thing that sets this department apart from any of the other people that I'm going to talk to.
Lt. Taylor: Well, there's certainly more than one thing that sets this department apart. There are several things. So I would say, first of all, we are a hybrid agency.
So a lot of times people hear the term Sheriff's Office and automatically think jail and jail only. But that's not the case with us. As I mentioned earlier, we have the jail, we have courts, we have Civil Process, we have ERT, we have the Criminal Intelligence Unit, you name it.
And then we're also heavily involved in the community, patrolling, doing certain patrol duties in the streets, things like that. We work alongside the Virginia Beach Police Department many times. That partnership continues to grow.
And then we're also heavily involved in the community as far as putting on different clinics, different classes. Sgt. Davison and I, we teach CRASE, which is Civilian Response to Actor Shooter Events. We've taught at many, many churches that class there. Sgt. Davison, he spearheads the Senior Safety Class, which is, we just teach safety techniques. Help me out, like ...
Sgt. Davison: Situational awareness.
Lt. Taylor: Situational awareness for the elderly and the community. And then also, we have a LawFit, we have a LawFit incentive program, which not a lot of...
Brian Miller: So they're still doing that?
Lt. Taylor: Oh yeah, we still do that.
Brian Miller: Good, okay.
Lt. Taylor: So that gives you an opportunity to earn an additional, up to an additional $1,000 a year. All you do is pick two days out of the year, and you come, you do a workout, and depending on how you perform, you can get up to $500 each session.
Brian Miller: And this is the only department that I've ever heard of that does that.
Lt. Taylor: Same here. I don't think any other, to my knowledge, I haven't heard of anybody else doing that. And then lastly, Sgt. Davison touched on it earlier. We work 15 days out of the month, which equates to half the year. So, if you extrapolate that throughout the course of a year, you're only working half of the year, which is a very beautiful thing.
Brian Miller: Yeah, it is.
Lt Taylor: If you think about it, and then you throw in, as mentioned before, you throw in leave that you take. If you take leave on a short week, you have an entire week off and you've only used two days' worth of leave. So, yeah, I could go on about that, but I'll leave the rest for Sgt. Davison to try to sell the Sheriff's Office.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah, I'm going to even take that a little bit further. And this is one of those jobs where, again, you pretty much get to choose your schedule based on where you want to go, right? If you want a Monday through Friday job, you apply for a Monday through Friday job.
If you want that 15 days a month, you go to the jail and you get that 15 days a month. And what's even better about that to go further off what Lt. Taylor was saying is if you want to make extra money, it's always there. We have a lot of part-time.
So let's say it's your short week. You're working Wednesday, Thursday, and you're saying, you know what? I want to go on a trip. You can go work that Friday, Saturday and Sunday for time and a half, make some good money, whenever you want to do it. It's not required. You can do it whenever you want. It's always available. We have an application called Officer Track. You just log on there. It's a little bit different than when you were doing part-time with us. It's it's it's we have an actual application for it.
We look at all the jobs listed. Boom, lock in. And then if I want to say, hey, you know what? I want to make a couple extra couple hundred bucks, a couple extra hundred bucks this weekend. Get on there, go work, make some extra money. And how many jobs where you can just get to choose over time when you want like that.
Brian Miller: And I understand y'all are getting a lot more than that 16 bucks an hour I used to get.
Sgt. Davison: Yeah. Yeah. I remember when you and I first started, right? Because I started back in '06. Yeah. I remember we used to work for the hotels for 15 bucks an hour.
Brian Miller: $15-$16 dollars an hour.
Sgt. Davison: It's a little bit more than that now. Your average part-time gig here is paying 60 and above. $60 and above an hour.
Brian Miller: And I'm going to promote the Sheriff's Office, too, because one of the things that brought me over here was the mobility. Because I found out here there was more places that you could go. You still had the D.A.R.E. program when I came over.
And that's what I came over here to do, was the D.A.R.E. program. And that was the only thing that brought me out of the jail. Because I loved that rotating shift.
I was not a Monday through Friday guy. But the D.A.R.E. program and that job is why I came over here.
Sgt. Davison: You know, we've actually brought that back.
Brian Miller: Yeah, I saw that. And I hope the city will step up ...
Sgt. Davison: I hope so, too.
Brian Miller: ... and pay for it, because it's an outstanding program.
Sgt. Davison: It is. It is absolutely.
Brian Miller: All right, guys. Any last words, or I'm going to wrap it up here?
Sgt. Davison: Well, like I said, the Sheriff's Office, when I first started here in '06, I thought it was just going to be, you know what, this is going to be a stepping stone. I'm going to use this to go to somewhere else, and, you know, maybe get a year or two here, right?
I'm not going to lie to you. I was fresh out of college, fresh out of the military. After two years here, I said, this is what I want to do the rest of my career.
We're a family here. I've met some of the best friends I have for life here. I've had some of the best experience I've had in the Sheriff's Office.
I stay busy, but I like staying busy. So if you like staying busy and you like making money, the Sheriff's Office is the place for you.
Lt. Taylor: Yeah, I would say this is a great place to grow, to learn. And like Sgt. Davison said, not many people grow up dreaming of working in a jail, but it's far more multifaceted than that.
Brian Miller: Yeah.
Lt. Taylor: And this job is definitely what you make it. So if you come and you're hungry, you're ambitious, you're eager to serve, this place is the best. And one thing we failed to mention earlier, we talked about the overtime, but just the base salary itself has gone up exponentially since I've started, since you two have started.
So when I started, it was at $38,000. Now, the starting salary for a deputy is around $57,000. Yeah, so it's, as I mentioned before, the opportunities to make money are endless, but just more than the money, the opportunities to serve, the opportunities to help out the community, things like that, to make a difference in the community is definitely rewarding.
Brian Miller: Now, are they still hiring 18-year-olds?
Lt. Taylor: Yes.
Brian Miller: OK.
Lt. Taylor: Yes, we are.
Brian Miller: That was the one thing. And that's only been within the last, I think they started that about three years ago.
Lt. Taylor: Yeah, two, three years ago.
Brian Miller: Yeah, right before I retired. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that does it for us from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Thanks, LT. Thanks, Sarge.
Sgt. Davison: Thanks, Brian.
Brian Miller: All right, guys, take care of yourselves. Watch your six and be safe.
Sgt. Davison: Appreciate it.
Lt. Taylor: All right. Thank you.
You have been listening to The First Responder's Podcast with your host Brian Miller. Please tune in for future episodes of this podcast. Our podcast is dedicated to the men and women who serve the public as first responders.
Thank you.