Pros
The health insurance is very cheap and covers a lot. They still issue take-home vehicles. There are many specialty units you can join and learn a lot. If you don't get a specialty, you'll be stuck on the road writing tickets and answering calls forever.
Cons
VSP is now the lowest paid state agency in the ENTIRE COUNTRY. 2% raise every other year if you're lucky, but the health insurance premiums increase more than that so take home pay goes down every time. There are no step increases or anything. You get a $4,275 increase once you've been out of the academy for a year, and that's it. The hiring process is an absolute joke. It takes well over a year to get hired, and they claim they get better candidates that way. I've seen some of the people VSP hired, and I still wonder how they even made it past the first test. The best candidates get hired elsewhere long before the process is even close to done. For those that stay, many of them leave to other departments or federal agencies because the pay is so bad at VSP. If you're on Tactical Field Force, expect to be utilized like a military unit as far as going where they want when they want with no ifs ands or buts. Good supervisors are incredibly hard to find. There's a good chance they will either be micromanagers or be lazy and do absolutely nothing. You work almost every single holiday. Manpower is stretched so thin it's hard to take any time off. No matter what you turn in for DUIs, criminal arrests, etc., It's never enough. They expect more and more every year, but they give you more and more paperwork to do, which gives you less time on the road. Cars are falling apart with 150k+ miles on them, and they don't have the money or the capacity to replace them all, so they're replacing them when they can. You will end up borrowing cars a lot if yours breaks, which is a pain when you have all of your stuff. They go out of their way to buy the most uncomfortable footwear they can find, and you're not allowed to wear anything else. VSP is in the stone age when it comes to technology. It's 2015 and VSP can't even ping cell phones. The people who could make these changes have the mentality of "That's the way we've always done it, so that's the way we're going to continue doing it". If they didn't come up with it, it's not a good idea. If they did come up with it, it can't possibly be improved because it's already the best thing ever. If you try to offer improvements, you're against the system and get labeled as a problem. They don't understand technology, so they refuse to embrace it.
