Training
Considering the cool things you get to do, and how much money the government spends to train a new Special Agent, there are Agents we know who will say that this is the best part about being a federal agent. After all, what other jobs in America will spend nearly a hundred thousand dollars -- on top of a salary -- to let you shoot thousands of rounds with a sub-machine gun, conduct surveillance with night-vision, drive 110 mph on a racetrack, and learn to smash cars out of your way?
There are two major locations in the U.S. where federal agents are trained: the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia.
The FBI Academy
Because of the sheer number of FBI agents in the world (almost 13,000) and DEA (more than 5,000), the Department of Justice, the parent bureau, created the FBI Academy in the early 1970s to handle all aspects of new agents' training. It is a 385 acre wooded campus not unlike a rural university, including three dorms, a dining hall, a mile of driving track, 1000-seat auditorium, gym, shooting ranges, classrooms, and the famous Hogan's Alley simulated shooting city. The campus also has one of the leading forensic research facilities in the world, the Forensic Science Research and Training Center.
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
The vast majority of Special Agents in the U.S. undergo their initial training here, at the FLETC (pronounced FLETC-sea), a multi-agency training grounds supported by 82 federal agencies and FLETC's parent bureau, the Department of Homeland Security. The primary training site for most Agents is the Glynco campus in Brunswick, Georgia, located just south of Savannah, Georgia and shy of the Florida border.
FLETC is the 500-lb gorilla of law enforcement, and the premiere law enforcement academy in the world. It has trained almost a quarter-million Federal Agents since its founding by the Dept. of the Treasury in 1970, and has spawned satellite campuses in Artesia, New Mexico and Charleston, South Carolina to handle the demands of a few larger agencies. In 2005, the latest year for which we have numbers, FLETC trained nearly 50,000 agents. In terms of sheer numbers of students, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) and Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) make up the vast majority, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) a distant fourth.
FLETC trains all manners of federal law enforcement, uniformed division officers and plainclothes Agents alike. Students are assigned by their parent agencies to one of the dozens of curricula offered by FLETC, geared to the nature of work that a new hire is expected to perform. Some, for example, enroll in the Land Management Training Program (LMTP) or the Federal Air Marshal Training Program (FAMTP). But for 1811 Special Agents -- it's just one: the famous Criminal Investigator Training Program, or CITP.
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