Locally the dive rescue squad is restricted to members of the city fire department and city or county law enforcement agencies. The team is basically a disgrace as while they are very competent fire fighters and police officers, most do not know beans about divng and are only OW or AOW certified. Most do very few dives and the existing training standards and requirement to do a minimum of 12 dives per year were eliminated last year.
So unless you are in a relativley large urban area and have a relatively large public safety pool from which to draw qualified divers as recruits, you will find it is far easier to take an experienced and capable diver who dives a lot in the local conditions and train them in the finer points of public safety diving than it is to take a non diving, tropical diving, or "only when they have to" diving police office or fireman and train them to be a public safety diver.
The arguments locally for using public safety personnel were response time and the fact that they were already insured and on the payroll. The problem in practice is that response time is still pretty slow givne the large geographic area covered and the number of team members is too few to ensure an andequate number are on duty at a given time. So all calls have ended up being recoveries rather than rescues anyway.
Once it becomes a recovery, you are far better off with experienced divers who are comfortable in the water and are able to devote their full mental abilities toward search pattern, evidence collection, recovery, etc.
The insurance issue can be handled like it is for any volunteer fire department or police reserve unit. And when you factor in the reduced training, in some cases reduced equipment costs, and the eliminationof the need to pay team members, often at OT rates, it ends up being a lot less expensive in the long run. Plus you get divers who ant to be on the team and who like to dive, rather than public safety divers who want cool training or another merit badge or resume stuffer.
A poorly trained and poorly motivated dive rescus squad can be more of a liability than an asset. We had a drowning locally in cold (40 degrees) deep water (100 ft plus ft) and in low visibility (10 ft.) Most of the divers on the DRS were at their limit just getting there and stirring silt to the point of zero visibility, running ineffective search patterns at best and at worst faking it led to an unsuccessful search, at least one diver injured and about $85,000 in expenses for subsequent sonar scans, etc. Eventually, recreational divers looking for the body located it very near the reported position where the victim drowned after deciding that it may not have been well covered in the initial DRS search. The DRS then came in and made a mess of the recovery. It was really poorly done.
So recruit divers with existing ability and spend the money on additional PSD training for them. A volunteer squad works well for recovery and you may be better served by using serving public safety officers for a separate swift water rescue squad or something similar where response time is really a key consideration.