While CIS has the right idea as far as community interaction goes, accomplishing the mission of carrying out these interaction often puts officers in situations that are less than ideal . Many properties that CIS officers work at are in rough areas. Officers are often assigned to walk these properties alone at night and initiate unsolicited interactions with the residents and guests of those properties with the sole purpose of passing out fliers and other materials to help build a positive image for the organization in that community. Unfortunately, most of these individuals are less-than-receptive to a person wearing a black tactical uniform and carrying a gun trying to hand them a pamphlet or shake hands and ask them if they have had any problems with their neighbors. CIS officers are often met with rudeness and downright hostility, which forces them to respond in kind, which creates a negative image, rather than the neutral one that would have existed if the interaction had not taken place to begin with.
While many officers and supervisors are wonderful teammates and very helpful individuals, others are the exact opposite. Like in any work environment, there are individuals who exist purely to better themselves and push others into a corner where they can be bullied and used as stepping stones to further the career of that first person. Those people exist within CIS and continue to advance. Like in many organizations, there are individuals who exist who do not care about anyone else's safety or wellbeing; this is perfectly acceptable in an office environment, but it is potentially the difference between life and death in a low-income apartment complex in south Orlando at three in the morning. The radio system that CIS uses is hardly reliable, with officers often unable to get radio reception or answers from dispatchers in a timely manner. This, while not a blatant disregard for the safety of its officers, is an oversight that could easily be corrected by using more radio towers and hiring more dispatchers so that all radio frequencies are monitored at all times. CIS assigns many officers to work alone in areas that the Orange County Sheriff's Office and/or Orlando Police Department won't send fully-trained law enforcement officers to alone. If the area is that dangerous for professional lawmen in cars with shotguns, rifles, and state-of-the-art radio systems to go into alone, it is much too dangerous for a security guard to be walking around alone. Many of these locations have dirty, unusable restroom and break facilities, if they have any at all, which is a huge health concern for the officers assigned to those areas, especially ones with shifts in excess of ten or twelve hours. Many locations do not have any sort of indoor area that officers can access, forcing officers to be outside (they are not allowed to sit in their cars) in the elements, which takes a toll on their bodies and their spirits.
CIS expects its officers to walk properties constantly for eight, ten, twelve, or even fourteen hours a night in central Florida, yet officers are only issued two sets of uniforms (tops and bottoms). This creates additional hardship on the officer because, especially in summer, uniforms must be washed multiple times a week. Many other security agencies issue four or five sets of uniforms for positions that do not involve sweating or getting dirty.
Schedules are irregular and often find officers working multiple ten, twelve, or fourteen hour shifts in a row with little time in between and very few, if any, days off. Everyone loves a little overtime pay here and there, but too much overtime work in the conditions that CIS officers work in is neither healthy nor productive for anyone. Officers will often work night shifts and day shifts in the same week and it is very rare for someone to get a schedule with regular days off. Schedules are published a day or two in advance of the start of the week, giving officers very little time to find childcare or plan other personal events around work schedules. While this might seem trivial, not knowing on Friday night whether or not you work on Sunday gets frustrating and downright maddening at times, especially if you are someone who has a second job or any sort of life outside of work.
The CIS dispatch program is decent, however it is not advanced enough to keep officers from being forced to perform redundant tasks. Report writing, for example, must be done in the computer (or on the officer's cell phone, if he was not issued a computer), but many reports are not able to be completed online, though the technology exists to allow such a streamlining to take place. Officers must write one report online, one report on paper, and often supplement that paper report with other paper reports. Supervisors must break away from whatever they were doing to come read and approve those paper reports, a process that many other organizations have converted to online-only, allowing supervisors instant access to every report entered by officers.
Like every security guard company, CIS is what you make of it. If you go in with dreams of being high speed and tactical, doing real protection work, and solving problems, you'll be disappointed. If you go in knowing that you're just a run-of-the-mill security guard with a dressed-up uniform, that you are in a dangerous area, and that your best plan of action is to keep your head on a swivel and not rely on your radio, bystanders, or other officers, you'll be okay. CIS tries to make it seem like a glamorous place to work, but it's often just long hours, unreliable schedules, and daily trips to the ghetto to try to interact with people who don't want you there to begin with.
