Been back on midnights for the last six months. I’ve worked evenings or nights nearly my whole adult life. But working 7pm-5am now.

I actually love working it. No brass, nobody looking over my shoulder. Entire 65 square mile (and busiest) division all mine all night. It’s really exhilarating.

Except for any time I have to re-adjust my life schedule during days off or even work night-days. Kids are out for summer, doing good to get 6 hours a day of sleep.

Required training? Oh, how about 9am?

Subpoena for a homicide trial? Don’t worry, we’ll only call you if we need you to testify, you can keep working.

Whoops. Here’s another subpoena. How’s 9:30am in the middle of your work week sound?

Here’s your 5 8am start days we need you to come teach at the academy this month, BTW.


Tomorrow my son wants to go to a comic convention. He’s excited as hell, 4th or 5th year going. Only he wants to get there when it opens. Which means getting up at 9. Which means daddy ain’t even gonna try to go to sleep. Which means daddy will need to sleep all afternoon. Which means daddy doesn’t get to actually spend time with the family. And sleeping all afternoon will mean I can’t fall asleep right after getting off work, which will make a noon wake up on Sunday for Father’s Day a freaking joy

I’m just glad I can do fun stuff with the kids. But holy shit I enjoy a solid 8 hours of sleep when I can get it.

I don't know you but do thank you for all your sacrifices.
I have heard first hand from my son on this stuff.

I did it for many years. The biggest drawbacks were, as you say, court, meetings and training. Then there was the relief shift-Thu/Fri 4p to 12a, Sat 8a to 4p, Sun/Mon 4p to 12a. Yeah, 8 hours off between shifts. And you often had to stay late with a case. And the suits loved abusing us. Once Captain had me on relief for 18 months...bu that's another story.

Yeah, there's some bad with good. What's your rotation? My department has one of the best, 4 on 3 off (steady RDO's), but we deal with the same court/training nonsense.

Hopefully you get OT for court; we only do if we are notified less than 1 week out. Otherwise, adjusted day for court; but, if staffing permits, we can adjust the day before/after if requested.

Often times, training will be scheduled on day 1 or 4 of our swing so it's a little more convenient.

Any way you slice it, a change in or additional hours messes with life and sleep! But, for me, well worth the freedom of not having the bosses around!

Anything over 6 hours of sleep is reserved for the weekend, and I do pretty good as long as I take a 3-4 hour nap after my last shift (and a couple of hours before my first).

Stay safe out there!

23-07 the last eight years. You can do anything you want on nights as long as you're willing to be tired.

That's all I've got.

I’m right there with you. I’m not a cop but work midnights, 3 years in a row now I think. It is the BEST shift to work for the reasons you’ve stated but at the same time it sucks for the reasons you’ve stated.

The hardest day is the first one back to work after the weekend. I’m up at 0700 on Monday til 0830 on Tuesday. I try really hard not to be an A-hole when I’m sleep deprived and for the most part I succeed. It helps that my wife is supportive and realizes how much better is for our family than a rotating shift.

I’ve gotten used to being tired and still able to function as a reasonable human being.

My only real advice is appreciate the days it works out well for you and weigh that against the times it does not. Thank you for what you do Chongo.

26+ years, night shift or grave yard, half in uniform and half in CI. There were no real days off since I was still subject to call out 24/7. That meant no drinking. I frequently would get called out due to my assignments. You're lucky to have kids, my wife and I spent so much time apart we seldom had time to try.

No other squads filled in for us. Vacation, court, sick leave left us even shorter in manpower. I would work till 0200, then get called back out at 0400 and do followup all day. I didn't know what sleep was until I retired.

BT/DT.

Couldn’t do it again.
I’m sooo glad I stayed on afternoons when I got promoted.

One of the things I used to do to all that refused to figure out my hours and call me at 11:00am when I was sleeping (“It’s 11 in he morning, what are you doing sleeping!?!?”) was to call them at 1:00am and explain to them that their 1:00am was my 11:00am and what the hell are they doing in bed?!?

18 years on 11-7. 6 days on, 3 off. It worked out fine for me, since I am a night person. I would get up at 4P, get my kid from day care and do the family stuff until they got ready to go to bed. Court and training was a problem.
The best part of midnights was that I got to hunt bad guys without being pestered by chickenshit service calls.
Better quality of wrecks too.

I'm right there with ya....6p-6a. Last night was my first night back after 2.5 weeks on vacation, camping with the family and living the daytime life. It was a LOOOONG night, but thankfully we were pretty busy all night, so I stayed awake!

Don't get me wrong, I love working nights and wouldn't want to do this job during the day. But the family stuff is tough, and for the life of me I can't figure out why those daytime assholes in the training dpt. and the prosecutor's office have to schedule everything at 9:00am. 3 hours after I get off...pretty much blows away any chance whatsoever of getting any meaningful sleep before I have to be back in at 18:00. And we're a small, one-man-per shift dept, so it's not like I can just take off. If they'd just do stuff at 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, at least we'd get a chance to get some sleep, and they wouldn't have to adjust the dayshifter's schedules to accommodate.

But nobody gives a shit about night shift...which is both good and bad.

I would kill to sleep until 1600. Rarely sleep more than six hours. Sometimes get seven. Don't even have kids to deal with.

I'm back on night shift again myself. Was on days for 4 years but requested to move back in January. I love nights, as long as I can sleep in the daytime, and I finally figured out the trick.

But yeah, family stuff kind of either takes a back seat or you go without sleep. I don't have little kids, but we watch the grandkids some evenings and it works out well. Either the wife gets them or I do, and they enjoy it regardless.

1800-0600 at my first gig (12s suck), 2200-0700 at my last place for 2 years, just started a new agency working 3 days of 2330-0730 and 1 2115-0730 with 2 days off every rotation. It isn’t ideal, but it beats the brakes off day shift bullshit.

1900-0500 sounds rough. I would not like it because I would have to be gone for dinner every night (one benefit of working overnights) and you still get dicked on sleep. At least getting off at 0500, you can probably get to sleep while it’s still dark in the winter months.

I’ve got a wife that is really adaptive to my schedule. She lets me sleep as long as I need to. I try to help that out by being up by 1500 on weekends or days off together. During the week, I set zero alarms unless I have something I have to be up for. Sometimes I wake at 1500, sometimes it’s 1730 when the dogs stir because the wife is home.

You make do. I enjoy my nights off being up semi-late (0100-0200 or so) with the house to myself, free to watch what i went on TV, play video games, clean, or whatever else I feel like doing just because. I also have zero children to deal with, but I know a lot of late night guys that sleep 2-4 hours twice a day so they can do stuff with the kids. I salute them...that’s rough.

I’ll also add that or schedule is made a whole year in advance and you know your exact 4/2 through NYE, with exceptions for time trades and vacations and such. Our court is also almost always at 0900, and if you have stuff to do to justify the time, you could stay until 0830 doing paperwork, get 1.5 hours OT, and then go to court for half an hour and get your 2 hour minimum for court. We are well taken care of in the compensation department.

I worked overnights for a year and my biggest problem was I could not sleep during the day. I got 2 hours of sleep max every day, which was great because I didn’t spend my life sleeping. After a while it started to wear on me though.

Thank you for your sacrifice and everything you do though!

When I worked nights - I didn't have kids and really enjoyed it. Get up and enjoy a late afternoon outdoors. Go inside and watch prime time tv. Go to work. Go to sleep. repeat.

But I didn't have anyone causing me to rearrange my schedule AND I wasn't trying to interact much with family/kids.

Now - with kids and family responsibilities; I don't think I could make it work.

Always have a soft spot for grave shift. Did it for nearly 4 years as a computer operator while working my way through college. First year was hard. 3rd year it was normal.

In my 3rd year of nights, took a phycology class, where they had us track our body temperature at different points in the day. My numbers were all ass backwards from the other students.

Turns out my body had adjusted its circadian rhythm - so at night my body temp peaked and during the day it was at its lowest point. Proof my body adjusted physically to its new wake and sleep cycle.

I usually slept in the late afternoon, but for a few semesters I also took an evening class. In one instance because I was sleepy. the teacher thought I was on drugs. Told him I worked nights and he thought me nuts.

Took me about a year to adjust back fully - but did not track the body temps then -should have done this had I thought about it.

Still do the night shift in ham radio contests.

There are only a handful of cities in which night work is reasonable, unfortunately none of them are in North Carolina.

I worked nights before my wife and I had children. It was difficult then and I can't imagine it now.

Conversely the crazy hours and interrupted sleep made me an expert sleeper. I can sleep anywhere and anytime. I fall asleep quickly and easily.

I did 3rd shift for years and loved it too as I'm by nature a night owl and not a morning person. Leaving work at 7 am and seeing all the poor saps stuck in traffic going TO work while I headed home FROM work in no traffic was great.

This is how I survived working 11 pm to 7 am:

1. I rarely slept 7-8 hours like a normal person. I'd do two "sleeps" at like 3-4 hours at a time. One in the morning not too long after getting home, then one in the late afternoon.

2. Earplugs and dark shades: these were essential to shutting out the daytime world in order to sleep.

3. On days off I'd try to not switch to living in the daytime world as I found it would just screw me up.

I only had one real problem on midnights and this happened mostly on Monday AM, when all the out of policy shit I did over the weekend became visible in the naked light of day. Around 9:15 or so, either the Captain in charge of patrol or the Detective Captain would call me at home and our chat always went like this:
Brass: I have this report from you here and what the hell....Blah, blah,blah.
Me: You say the report is in your hands?
Brass: I just said so!
Me: Look carefully at the lower right hand corner of the face sheet and see if there is a block there marked "supervisor approval". Is that block there? And who, if anyone, put his initials in the block?
Brass: Your Sergeant did!
Me: He approved my report?
Brass: I guess he did!
Me:So... Anything else I can do for you?
Brass: No, smart ass! I am calling your Sergeant!
Me: Buh-bye!
And back to bed I went. Phone calls like this help to explain my meteoric rise through the ranks of the PD.