Law enforcement means many different things. I've been bouncing around law enforcement for the best (longest?) part of my adult life The uniformed police function (street cops) is mostly about order maintenance. That said, the police function even when talking about street uniformed enforcement is pretty variable; the life of a beat cop in New York City is a lot different than that of a Sheriff's Deputy in Catron County, New Mexico, with about 6,000 square miles and around that many people. I've worked a few cases with railroad police and many of the comments are, in my opinion, largely correct. Federal law enforcement is different yet again. State and local law enforcement, as a general rule, tends to be more episodic in nature; did Farmer "A" steal Farmer "B"'s cow, did "C" drive drunk on "Y" date, that sort of thing. The quintessential federal case is more focused on enterprises, organizations, and conspiracy. That said, of course, once again, there are differences. The life of a Special Agent (SA) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assigned to Indian Country offenses in Montana or New Mexico is a lot more like that of a big city homicide and violent crime detective; the FBI SA assigned to foreign counterintelligence work has a different life; and the SA doing a large insurance fraud case yet a different life altogether. Each federal agency has their own culture, just life each state police agency and each city agency does. It used to be the FBI wanted SA applicants to have at least three years work experience beyond their Bachelors degree, but that can be waived in some ways (having a law degree, fluency in a critical language, etc.). The Bureau of Diplomatic Security (State Department) does law enforcement work (passport fraud etc.) when they are stateside, but spend a lot of their careers overseas; and for every assignment in Paris you are going to spend a couple of tours in Lower Yucksville; man they travel a lot. Similarly, Secret Service travels a lot, very hard on families. Good luck.