The rules and the limits

The limits that exist almost everywhere

Departments differ on the detail and agree on the shape. The recurring restrictions are these.

• A cap on hours. Most agencies limit how much off-duty work can be worked in a day or a week, and many count it together with overtime rather than separately.
• Rest before a shift. A gap is normally required between finishing a detail and starting your regular tour.
• Not on sick leave. Working a detail while booked off sick is treated seriously more or less everywhere.
• Uniform and equipment. Whether you work in uniform, what you carry, and whether a marked vehicle can be used are all specified, and often differ between detail types.
• Jurisdiction. Where you can work, and what your authority is when you are outside your own area.

The fatigue rule is the one people argue with

Hour caps are unpopular and they are not arbitrary. An officer who works a full tour, a detail, and then comes back for another tour is the officer everyone remembers for the wrong reasons. The rule exists because someone else already found the edge of it.

The practical difficulty is that the caps are easy to breach by accident. A detail booked three weeks ago, a held-over shift, a court appearance, and suddenly a week that looked fine is not. That is an arithmetic problem, and arithmetic problems are solved by having the month written down rather than remembered.

What you are, while you are working it

This is the question officers ask least and should ask most: while you are working a detail, are you acting as an officer of your agency, or as an employee of the business?

It affects who is responsible if something happens, what coverage applies if you are hurt, and what authority you are exercising when you intervene. Departments answer it differently, and some answer it differently depending on the type of detail.

We are not going to tell you what the answer is for your agency, because we cannot know it and getting it wrong would be worse than useless. Ask your department, in writing, before you need to know. It is a reasonable question and they will have an answer.

Where the rules actually live

Three documents, and they do not always agree with each other:

• Your department's policy on off-duty employment
• Your collective agreement, if you have one
• Whatever the agency has agreed with the customer for that particular detail

Where they conflict, that is a conversation for your association rather than a website. What this page can do is tell you the three exist and that reading them once is cheaper than finding out the hard way.