Be wary of departments with fast hiring processes. That can mean lots of things. One of them being a high turnover rate.
I know one place where it isn’t unusual for some people to be hired in one week after submitting an application. Almost half of the employees have less than two years on the job. Not two years or less. Less than two years experience. Another place has almost an identical experience issue, but they do take longer to process applications.
In this day of social media almost every single LE agency in the country has a FB page. Read through every page of any department you’re interested in. If they have large groups of new hires every couple of weeks and they only have a few hundred people, that might be a problem. If it’s a huge place then it might not be the same kind of problem.
There has already been quite a bit written about retirement in this thread. I wish I had paid more attention to our retirement system when I started. I would have been making maximum contributions to an optional 401K or sought out another place to work very quickly if I had it to do over. Our retirement improved some a couple of years ago when we started a bridge program. I can retire at 55 years of age as long as I have 25 years on the job. I will be closer to 30 years at age 55 though. Mandatory retirement happens at age 62.