I would like to become a law enforcement officer after the coast guards. I read somewhere that the BM's are slightly related to a police officer, is there truth to that matter?<!-- Edit -->

Last Edited : 8/6/2006 11:02:12 PM GMT

Well the BM is best suited for a cop is what the recruiter also told me. What is your msn zk101?

Thats waht i want to do law enforcment or drug busts and imigrants. let me know!

Yeah so do I.

As it hasn't been addressed:

Many fields in the CG will be "related" to LE. Pick whatever you find interesting. From there, you can request to be trained to be a boarding team member. Boarding teams will usually have BM, GM, MT, or, I believe OS's (my experience predates this rate), but AFAIK, any rate is eligible.

I agree that the BM rating gives the best background for being a police officer. That is becasue the BMs are the coxswains on the small boats. So in other words they are in charge of the patrol/SAR rescue vessel. A BM has to learn great boat handling skills as well as leadership skills to get his/her crew to complete a mission successfully, which means also safely.

When I was in, I was on the USCGC Midgett, a 378 ship out of San Francisco Bay area. We went to Alaska a couple times a year to patrol the Bering Sea fishing grounds. Most of the boardings up there were not law enforcement boardings looking for drugs and so on. They were fisheries boardings on large fishing vessels of other nations. Our job was to ensure that they were not taking prohibted species, such as seals, and also to ensure that they were keeping accurate account of the amount of fish they were taking in. The BM drove the CG boat that transported the boarding team from the CG ship to the ship we were to board, since such transfer of personel cannot be done routinely between ships at sea.
Instead of learning my rating of QM at school, I learned it by "striking" (basicly on-the-job-training) on board Midgett. The QM rating has since been combined with BM, and the OS rating which has been added.

(Now in my post-CG job as a civilian, I work with cops everyday. I know one thing that happens with some fresh police recruits is that some of them want to be police officers for the wrong reason, such as for the rough stuff and busting immigrants, etc. There is a big need for police officers who have additional skills, including languages, familiarity with other cultures, community work, and so on. So I hope you also are interested in the community and social service aspect of poplicing.)

I will post another message of my next duty after the Midgett, which was at Group Ketchikan, Alaska as a Operations Controller. One job of the Controller was to monitor operations of all CG Group Ketchikan units in the Gru Ketch operating area which was SE Alaska. That included maintaing communications with the BM on the small boats.

Cheers