For the better part of the last decade, nearly every waking hour of San Francisco Deputy Sheriff Barry Bloom’s life was spent on the clock.
Bloom, a public safety monitor at San Francisco City Hall, was on duty an average of 95 hours a week since 2016, and more than 100 hours a week over the last two fiscal years, according to city data. His workload of late leaves roughly 10 hours a day remaining for sleeping, eating and just about anything else not tied to his job as a sheriff’s deputy.
I’m not OP, but from what I’ve heard, they stay and sleep at the firehouse on duty. If there’s an emergency, they wake up and are out the door very quickly, so they’re getting paid the whole time they are there. It’s one of the perks of the gig, except for probably being woken up at all times of the night with no guarantee for sleep.
I work with first responders of all kinds, and I can’t think of a single one who would call that a “perk of the gig”. Having one 24 hour shift with constantly interrupted sleep is taxing at best, and once you hit middle age it gets progressively harder as you get older. Throw in having to work multiple 24s in a row and the very real possibility that once you finally do get off, you don’t get to go home and rest, you have to go to your second (or third) job - usually one you own yourself, or one owned by a fellow firefighter/paramedic because it’s the only way to accommodate the crazy schedules - and play catch-up there. It screws with you mentally and physically, but given the piss-poor pay a good chunk of them make, it’s what’s got to be done.
Also, I don’t know any cops that sleep on OT (I don’t have much exposure to that scenario), but a lot of the ones around here sleep on their regular 12s. If I see two cop cars parked together in a median or pull-off, and they are parked facing opposite directions such that their drivers windows are next to each other so it looks like they can chat easily, one cop is almost certainly asleep while the other is standing watch. They don’t adjust to the mandatory day/night shift rotations well.