There are various reasons for visiting another law enforcement agency. There are the occasional short visits that occur when agents respond to pick up or deliver a prisoner or some physical evidence. Such visits are brief, and usually consist of seeing a limited portion of the agency and the personnel, but that doesn't mean the trip will not be informative. Other visits to sister agencies may last for several weeks, and are dependent upon the objective of the visit.

The Short or Casual Tour

Law enforcement officers are usually inquisitive by nature, and routinely ask questions and poke and prod in all sorts of places. Therefore, it would be unusual for them not to be curious about a new law enforcement facility. They compare the furniture in the offices, the floor plan of the facility, the amount of equipment readily available for use by officers; they even check out the uniforms of their counterparts. They especially look at the equipment used by the other agency, curious to see if it is better or worse than their own, because the best equipment winds up being purchased by other agencies.

Even a station tour of an agency can help give an officer a sense of how business is conducted outside the limited scope of her own department. Seeing how others work, observing the condition of another facility, and witnessing the level and type of equipment available can tell much about a community in general. Often, the most affluent city or town will have the shabbiest of police stations. In communities where people are struggling to make ends meet, many still maintain a strong and vibrant police facility.

On occasion, law enforcement officers will also simply drop in to say hello.

The most common form of this kind of tour occurs not in the police station, but out on the road at the boundary of town. You will often see two local police cruisers from two different towns meeting somewhere close to the town line. Officers meet to exchange paperworkor to convey police intelligence to each other. At these meetings, each officer is assessing the other. They talk of personnel within their agency, of protocols that they like and dislike, or they exchange viewpoints on the firearm that one department is now using. These conversations between colleagues offer a lot of opportunities to glean information about the other person's agency.

Longer Visits

Lengthy stays with another agency are rare. Usually they involve some kind of training, or there is a specific reason for combining forces. A joint task force is sometimes formed by assigning agents from two or more agencies to work together to solve a problem. Sometimes, these task forces are made up of officers from neighboring police departments; other times it involves multijurisdictional agencies that are in the same geographic region, such as the city police, the sheriff's office, and a federal agency. This kind of visit is not just an outing to another agency or some social interaction—they are designed to overcome a major problem with the combined strength and resources of multiple organizations.

Prolonged visits for training purposes are more common. Agencies throughout the country offer in-service training courses that are usually open to agents from other departments. These seminars are usually geared to specific needs, and almost always require some kind of specialty skill or assignment in order to attend. If it involves dog handling, then chances are that officers handling dogs will be the most likely candidates to attend. Among the most famous of the in-service training schools is the FBI National Academy at Quantico, Virginia. This is a ten-week program that is designed for senior law enforcement officers and agents to attend, and it provides a much broader view of the law enforcement world.