Cop7847

Not to mention the really fun stuff: Giving press conferences and setting budgets (I know, hard to believe the excitement!)
Police ranks (and army ranks, and really just about any rank system) aren't a matter of "you're good, so we're going to give you a higher rank and keep you on the same job." Paygrades can work like that, but not ranks. Increasing rank means you're turning into more and more of a supervisor, and less and less of a front-line worker. At the high end, a police chief's job in a big department is more similar to the job of the director of the city parks department than it is to the job of a patrolman. A police chief (and those a couple levels down from the very top of the hierarchy) is a bureaucrat, whose main connection to policing is that he was a cop and he supervises cops, and that he still considers cops to be his colleagues. It's kind of like the difference between a four-star general and an infantryman, except the general still wears a uniform.