Court rules that barring high IQs for cops is not unconstitutional (2000)

Surely you could use a random number generator to do this?

This is an excellent point. People with high IQ can become a liability as they understand better the situation and may refuse to obey orders that are counter to their values. Or they could raise in rank and interfere with how the whole force is being operated: they could change things from the inside

If you want people to do what the rules say you're not looking for more or less intelligence, you're looking for Compliance.

For example British mainline railways require Compliance as a (psychologically tested) trait of train drivers and the lack of such a requirement was cited as a contributing factor to a death on a light rail system in a report I read years ago.

Why? Because Compliance says: This speed restriction says 45mph, I personally think 60mph should be safe but there's a speed restriction so I shall limit to 45mph even though I don't understand why.

Whereas without that some drivers will say "In my judgement 60mph seems fine here so I'll disregard the 45mph limit" and when they kill somebody and investigators ask "Why were you going too fast to stop?" their answer is that they didn't realise that would happen.

Compliance is probably a completely reasonable thing to want from regular cops, maybe even all your cops. On a TV show breaking the rules is often portrayed as admirable, but those rules are usually there for a good reason. In particular rule-obedience is very important for a community's perception of police as members of that community subject to its rules, rather than as oppressors.

I don't think anyone is trying to cover that up. Many teams are responsible for boring and low-impact work, so they need to hire people who are easy to manage or the work won't get done.

> low IQ/experience is easier to "manage".

How would this be "a form of corruption?" Lots of stories get posted to HN about the brilliant asshole being a net negative, and hiring people who are all-around easier to work with seems reasonable.

That's probably the reason at least one interviewer in tech interviews covers HR-type questions. Yes, you want someone smart, but you also want someone who's not an asshole.

> PSA: I assume this is going to repeat this year, so any student reading this shouldn't be choosy when it comes to placements, getting a job should be the utmost priority if you/family are dependent on it.

You can even skip that last part. The first job really is the hardest, so if you find something that's in a location you want and there's a internal or external path to a role you'd rather have, that job's a winner. There's also a lot of value in trying different things in the space, even if you think something isn't for you.

One aspect of policing in America that your post doesn't capture is that a lot of police aren't paid well. Generally, police in large forces in large cities are paid well, but there's an indredibly wide variance that trends steadily downward the further you get from top-tier cities. Rural cops are often paid less than teachers; even in cities like Columbus, OH, or Milwaukee, WI, it's common to see police moonlighting as security guards.

Like teaching, there's always a lot of rhetoric around how police are valued, but pay scales frequently don't reflect it, and the result is a lot of poorly qualified police who fail the rest of your checklist

I don't think it needs to take all that long. The Camden, NJ police were disbanded and reorganized less than a decade ago and are now recognized as a model force. All that's necessary is the political will to use the tactics that can destroy toxic police officers' unions: establish a new law enforcement bureau under all-new leadership and slowly reassign duties away from the old police force. There's no need for armed police to enforce parking meters and bus fares, so start there. Do not permit, as a rule, lateral transfers from the old police department to the new one. Make everyone come in through the front door like any candidate. Require public disclosure of disciplinary record as a condition of hiring. Require local residency for the first ten years of service. Have a written and enforced use-of-force policy. Don't patrol city centers in cars.

These aren't deep mysteries; police reform advocates have written volumes on these topics for decades.

> Pays really well

How much do you think police are paid?

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be...

> Starting salary: $42,500

That's in New York City. Ouch.

> may potentially earn over $100,000 per year

And that's what they're advertising as an aspirational possibility! Even a first-year engineer will earn more than that.

You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.

This is a very rosy presentation of police work, it's hard to believe you've known many police who felt comfortable enough to open up about the pitfalls of their work.

>Pays well Not for the amount of danger and emotional baggage involved.

> Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges. > Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation

Which is why you will frequently be following established procedures relevant to the situation at hand and deviating from procedure will often be frowned upon without a defensible reason. Further, you'll often have to suppress your insight because of political reasons. Police frequently know in advance what places are gang hangouts and who's selling drugs or sex, but having the information and having it collected in a format you're allowed to act on are different matters (and that's before getting into whether you're even allowed to try and collect that information).

>Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes.

This is just a progressive way of saying "High tolerance for eating other peoples shit while staying focused on doing your job." There is almost never a real 'resolution' to a domestic dispute for example, there's you getting screamed at and threatened not only by an abuser but also by their victim who will probably lie on their behalf because it was a neighbor who made the call. Then, if nothing immediately actionable is happening, you get to leave for the third time in a week after making a few notes and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not doing anything again.

>Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive.

Being a cop earns you hero points with some groups but in the mainstream will get you villified or at least distrusted. Worse, you will often see people advocating procedural changes in that either increase your personal risk (as if they have a bottomless resevoir of disposable LEOs available) or which reduce your ability to police effectively (but they'll still criticize you for failing to clean up problem neighborhoods). This is a major factor behind why police and their unions almost always stand by each other even when it looks bad, because the public will often demand you fall on a sword or turn on you the instant your optics leave even a little room for doubt.

>On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force.

Rare exceptions aside, smart people realize the risk isn't worth the reward and emotionally intelligent people realize the job frequently destroys LEOs emotionally. Both groups likely believe that the job is important for a functional society if they're not blinded by cynicism but they'll also understand that the majority of their energy is going to be spent primarily on dealing with beuracracy, paperwork, and simply enduring the situations they'll be placed into. This is far from catnip for these people.

>It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population dominating the forces.

This is attitude is another reason people who can do the math decide not to be police or cease being police. Because people assume most cops ("the system") in the present are just meat heads. But if you try to introduce tech-centric solutions, like cameras, to cut down on the number of necessary meat heads in an area you get accused of trying to create a dystopian surveillance apparatus. If you try to explain why a proposed change is a bad idea you get accused of everything from being racist to being a sadist who just likes how easily you can abuse the current system. And if you implement new sensitivity policies the public forgets within five minutes anyway because a cop in a totally different part of the country did something bad. This isn't to say that no cop enjoys their work or finds it worth it, but the idea that there's a massive untapped market of uber cops being kept away because of the old guard is just wishful thinking that holds appeal because it makes the problem seem much simpler than it is.

90% of the job is dealing with drunk and disorderly people or descalating domestic disputes. That knocks a lot of High IQ/EQ people off the list.

My mother was a dispatcher for 15 years. I was in our local areas explorers program. It’s exactly what you see on Live PD. Traffic stops, drunk and disorderly people, drug busts, or domestic disputes. Cops do almost no detective work. Investigators do that.

Great one!

Remember, those were recentered in 1995.

I suspect one of the things that people with high IQ are bad at is listening to orders and issues with authority.

Their theory that people with high IQ will get bored is plausable until you think of them progressing to detective. This is a very strange thing. Never imagined there would be a job where you get rejected for having high IQ.

Independent thinking doesn't gel well with hierarchical, procedure based organizations.

If anything being a Cop these days seems more like herding cattle through a slaughterhouse. They just get people who will to turn the crank of the mincer.

EQ is bullshit.

> Some historical and scientific issues related to research on emotional intelligence

> In the past decade, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has emerged as a potential new construct for explaining behavioral variance not accounted for by traditional measures of general academic intelligence or personality. EI researchers credit E. L. Thorndike as the first to propose such a construct when he suggested that social intelligence is independent of abstract or academic intelligence. The current paper traces the historical roots of social intelligence and the current scientific status of emotional intelligence. It appears that emotional intelligence, as a concept related to occupational success, exists outside the typical scientific domain. Much of the data necessary for demonstrating the unique association between EI and work‐related behavior appears to reside in proprietary databases, preventing rigorous tests of the measurement devices or of their unique predictive value. For those reasons, any claims for the value of EI in the work setting cannot be made under the scientific mantle.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.317