What does a Safety Director do?

What does a Safety Director do? Well, there are different types of safety directors.

One is a nice guy that I encountered after being tailgated on a Virginia interstate by the driver of a big rig out of Minnesota. I was able to get the name of the company, city of its home office, and the tractor and trailer unit numbers and later emailed the Safety Director. That got me a polite and prompt response and a promise of action to investigate the driver's operation of their truck.

There are other types of safety directors. Sometimes people are hired to conduct background checks. Sometimes law enforcement officers are hired. Now it might be because they have a nose for action and things out of place; they might have higher than normal sensitivity for "red flags" in an application for one position or another.

Let's say that a particular law enforcement officer lined up some part-time work as a Safety Director for an organization; let's say, perhaps a sports league for youth that needed a lot of coaches and other volunteers for league games. I would suppose that the league would provide the applicants' identity to the Safety Director and that he would start running backgrounds checks and develop files on men and women who had applied to be coaches or other volunteers.

To whom would the files and background checks belong? Wouldn't you think the League would maintain a list of work it asked the Safety Director to do and would require the return of all materials, if the business relationship ended?

And let's say that the Safety Director just happened to be with a major law enforcement agency in the County; say, for example, the McHenry County Sheriff's Department. Where would such an employee get the tools and equipment to access information with which to complete any background checks?

You can find out a lot about a person today using internet tools that are not too difficult or expensive. But what if such a Safety Director used Department equipment or access to more secure services to pry a little deeper? Would there be anything wrong with that?

It's important for organizations dealing with youth to have very careful background checks made on anyone who will come in contact with their under-age team members. Often a first-level search won't find the "dirt", if it's there. The investigator (or Safety Director) must dig deeper. If he happened to be specially trained in internet investigations, how would the marketplace respond?

Why would a Safety Director keep a large number of unprocessed background checks in his home, assuming that he used his home for his part-time business? That's a lot of personal information to be kept in an unsecure location.

And, if that law-enforcement officer is running a part-time business from his home, even if he is a volunteer or doesn't otherwise charge the association, would he have to get written permission from his employer? Would he have to disclose whether or not he intends to use taxpayer-supported equipment (computers, internet access, secure databases) when he runs the background checks?

Most departments do not allow unreported part-time work. Do they also control volunteer work that utilizes law-enforcement training or skills?