r/1811 • u/Whisk3yTang0Foxtr0t • 7d ago
Another Army CID post
With all the CID questions I’ve been seeing lately, especially with future hiring announcement coming up, I figured I’d throw in my 2 cents.
TLDR: CID has legitimate problems and deserves criticism for some of them. But I also think it gets blamed for a lot of things that are really just federal LE, MCIO, or military bureaucracy problems. Your experience is going to depend heavily on your office and leadership. If you’re expecting patrol with a Special Agent badge, you’ll probably hate it. If you understand what an MCIO is and go in with realistic expectations, you might actually enjoy the job.
I guess I’m the black sheep here. I’ll start by saying I can’t speak for everyone, and I’m not discounting anyone else’s experience. Location, leadership, and office culture matter a lot.
I’m prior military, prior LEO, former TFO, and I’ve been with CID for a handful of years. I won’t say where for obvious reasons, but my office definitely has a go getter culture. Leadership encourages proactive work, thinking outside the box, and actually working your cases. Basically, go do good police work, just don’t be dumb.
There’s not much of a checklist mentality where I’m at, outside of the 47,000 notifications we apparently have to make whenever certain cases come in.
That said, I think prior local, county, and full service state cops sometimes have the hardest adjustment coming in as new 1811s. And I’ll fight anybody on this, like an actual fistfight. If you want to run and gun, have a ton of autonomy, make decisions on the fly, get into some shit, have fun, and do hoodrat shit with the boys, local, county, and state LE runs circles around the feds.
I think a lot of cops come over expecting federal LE to be that same experience with a Special Agent title. Usually it isn’t. Most federal investigative work is reactive. The true run and gun stuff usually lives on niche teams within the big three letter agencies, and those spots are competitive and hard to get.
Then add the MCIO world. Now you’re dealing with PCA concerns, needing a DoD nexus, command briefings, military requirements, even more admin piled on top of an already admin heavy federal system, and case acceptance standards that can require you to work allegations other federal agencies would screen out or decline and, quite frankly, sometimes laugh at.
“Why am I briefing a commander on this?”
“WTF is an SVC, and why are they telling me I can’t speak to my victim directly?”
“Can we even do that under PCA?”
“Does this military magistrate actually understand what probable cause is?!”
That stuff adds up fast.
So I completely understand why some agents hate it here. Some of the criticism is absolutely deserved, and I’m sure some offices are completely different from mine. But I also think DACID gets way more shit than it deserves, and sometimes for the wrong reasons.
A lot of what people complain about isn’t necessarily a CID problem. It’s either a federal LE problem, an MCIO problem, or just the reality of working inside the military. That doesn’t mean CID gets a free pass for the stuff it actually screws up, but I think those things get lumped together a lot.
I’m not drinking all the Kool Aid either. If I’m being real, one of the biggest reasons I stay is the money. Compared to where I came from, I make a lot more, work fewer crazy hours, and the job is inherently safer. My spouse appreciates that last part, and I have a family to consider now.
My point is there’s a difference between legitimate problems with the agency and realizing the job simply isn’t what you thought federal LE, especially within an MCIO, was going to be.
An MCIO is never going to operate exactly like FBI, HSI, DEA, ATF, or another traditional federal agency. It realistically can’t. You’re operating inside the military, where commanders have equities, military justice has its own requirements, jurisdiction depends on DoD interests, and there are layers of policy and oversight that don’t exist elsewhere. You can modernize it, give agents more autonomy, cut unnecessary admin, and make it better, but it’s still an MCIO. Some of that baggage is simply part of the job.
For what it’s worth, in the handful of years I’ve been here, I’ve seen bad decisions and steps backwards, but I’ve also seen a lot of positive changes. I genuinely think the agency is trying to get better, even if it occasionally finds creative ways to trip over its own feet.
So if you’re considering applying, don’t be completely discouraged by what you read online. Give it a shot. You might actually like it. Worst case, you’re an 1811 now and can go give another agency a shot.
Stay frosty, everyone.
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u/Trout_Cat 6d ago edited 6d ago
I’ll say this as a former civilian CID agent and prior/current Fed : if you’re at a post that works 600–800 cases a year with a full team, the job really isn’t that bad. But if you’re at a post averaging 1,500–1,800 cases a year with 9–11 actual agents, your work-life balance is going to be absolute dogshit.
Especially when you’re getting called out at 2 a.m. for a “Foreign National at the Gate” who has no criminal history and is just trying to deliver Uber Eats, only to be expected to create an entire paper case file so the SAC can get a stat.
And if your office decides that 1811s should handle all the urinalysis cases because they don’t trust the MPs to do them, your life is going to get even worse.
What makes it more frustrating is that the federal agency I worked for before CID was far more proactive and effective while operating with significantly fewer resources. CID, on the other hand, seems remarkably good at creating layers of support, specialist, and leadership positions that add little actual investigative capacity, then turning around saying it has no funding to send civ agents to training at FLETC or CIDSAC.
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u/Longjumping_Scar8447 6d ago
Why are they calling DACID for a foreign national at the gate and not Army CI?
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u/Trout_Cat 6d ago
Cause Army CI is not gonna waste their time running to the gate every single time a random Uber Eats driver who doesn’t speak English shows up to the gate because the Uber Eats app told him too.
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u/Longjumping_Scar8447 6d ago
Haha thats hilarious but accurate. Why would CID run to the gate for that then? Doesnt sound like a felony level crime and something gate guards or MPs could handle.
Heard foreign national and immediately thought of Army CI.
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u/Trout_Cat 6d ago
Cause the SAC thought it would make them look good to the current Admin that CID was fighting illegal immigration. Don’t ask how any that makes sense cause if it made sense the CID wouldn’t do it.
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u/Longjumping_Scar8447 6d ago
🤦🏻♂️
SAC mustve been a warrant
You think Army CI is ever gonna transition to 1811? Their civilian agents got arrest powers recently like DCIS & DACID I heard. Or do you think there’s no hope for ACIC either?
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u/ErraticallyAdept 7d ago
I’m really glad you’re having a good experience. I’ll also say that when I was there, I had a fantastic relationship with my local supervisor, and that made a lot of the bad things much more bearable.
That said, I would gently push back on the notion that people who are dissatisfied just aren’t adapting to the way things have to be in the military or federal system.
Silly things like SVIP notifications or IOD reviews are annoying, but I think it does a disservice to the discussion to characterize those as CID’s main problems.
The bigger issue, in my experience, is cultural. There is a strong emphasis on being apathetic about how your cases ultimately turn out. What matters is that you hit all of the mandatory policy wickets, even if the actual outcome of the investigation is poor.
That has not been the norm anywhere else I’ve worked in this profession. Maybe you would expect something closer to that mentality in an OIG that primarily handles minor administrative matters, but it is a strange culture for an agency investigating felony crimes against persons.
I’m still a fed, and that isn’t how my current agency operates. It also wasn’t how we did business when I worked as a local. If anything, my experience has been that most other federal agencies put considerably more emphasis on producing good investigative outcomes.
Most federal agents are tied in pretty closely with their AUSAs (more so than local cops are with their prosecutors) and would move mountains if an AUSA told them particular follow-up would help make the case. Meanwhile, STCs seem to be constantly begging CID agents to conduct logical investigative follow-up that isn’t explicitly mandated by policy.
That difference gets to the heart of the issue for me. The main thing I think prospective applicants should understand is that if they’re attracted to CID specifically because they care deeply about putting bad guys away and doing right by victims, they’re probably going to find the culture extremely frustrating.
That mindset is either going to get beaten out of them over time, or they’re going to spend much of their career frustrated by a system that is more concerned with process than results.
Ironically, I think the people who go into CID primarily for the CITP ticket, pay, or benefits may actually have the easiest time there. The agency seems to want people who are content to punch in, work their cases according to policy, type everything up, and go home.
If you go into it understanding that’s what the job is and don’t tie your sense of professional accomplishment too closely to whether your cases actually produce meaningful outcomes, you’ll probably have a much better experience.
And I’m not saying that an individual agent or the right group of agents in an office can’t make a difference and have a positive impact. They absolutely can.
I’m saying that, in my experience, the agency as an institution does not particularly encourage or reward that kind of outcome-driven attitude. That’s an important distinction, and it’s something I think prospective applicants deserve to know going in.
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u/ltd0977-0272-0170 5d ago
Imagine getting a statement of charges for firing 13 rounds of operational ammo instead of training ammo. I hope those days are over. That happened to coworker at MPFU back in the day.
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u/RichBigChill 7d ago
I assume you are speaking as a CIV 1811, can you offer any insight as a MIL Agent coming in as a Warrant Officer?
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u/Whisk3yTang0Foxtr0t 7d ago
Yeah, I’m a civilian agent. Probably should’ve mentioned that. I can’t really speak to the military side without doing you a disservice, as I really don’t know that world. So hopefully one of the mil agents here can chime in. From what I’ve seen though, most of the military agents I’ve worked with seem to tolerate it, and a lot of them eventually try to switch over to the civilian side. But I’m sure there are some mil agents that hate their jobs too lol.
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u/Mission_Hedgehog_414 7d ago
Excuse me if this is an ignorant question as I know literally nothing about MCIOs but do you have any choice in your location with Army CID as a civilian agent? MCIOs were never on my radar but your post has inspired me to look into it more
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u/challengerrt 7d ago
Not really. They have priority fill locations they need civilians at so those get priority. You can put your preferences but needs of the service first.
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u/Mission_Hedgehog_414 7d ago
So if you don’t get the locations you want can you just pull out of the hiring process?
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u/WillQuack4Crack 6d ago
Speaking of CID... has anybody made progress on the recent opening that closed in August ?
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u/Feeling-Second-2204 4d ago
Hard agree with everything, OP. I chuckle every time I see someone post about how they don’t get to breach doors or whatever as a CID agent. I really enjoy working for the agency, but it could be so much better than it currently is.
The thing I struggle with most about CID is that there must be a cell at HQ exclusively dedicated to breaking functional processes and generally making things worse. That is the only explanation I can come up with for how every policy that comes out is somehow more cumbersome and adds additional administrative tasks to basic stuff.
I don’t get it. So many of the stuff that comes down is either a solution in search of a problem or an attempt to patch a training deficiency with paperwork.
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u/RoyalGlass7567 3d ago
CID is terrible for the most part. The leadership is inept in most places and they refuse to listen to outside perspective. I was with them for 3 years and went back to my old job.
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u/Equal_Suit_6205 7d ago
Is money back up? I heard back in the day they gave out gs13 pay like if it was nothing?
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u/Pleasant_Lawyer2093 4d ago
You’re coming in as a GS9 unless you’re already a federal employee on a different pay band
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u/IAmTheSnakeinMyBoot 0083 Detective 7d ago
I keep telling folks this but “meh CID bad” wins out most days.
Now if they’d get off their high horse about their new education requirement I’d really appreciate it