Police Officer Exam Tutorial [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Police Officer Exam Tutorial [pdf]

www1.nyc.gov

122 pointsipnon147 comments

"The officers observe a bald headed man, about 50 years old lying face up in his living room. The man is lying in a pool of blood. The officers tape off the crime scene, make all necessary notifications, and begin to interview five neighbors to find out if they saw or heard anything related to the death of Mr. Cain."

Stay awhile and listen, for this is how Cain dies in Diablo 3.

Didn't check for a pulse. Didn't administer CPR until medics or someone else arrived to relieve him.

Maybe he was able to conclusively determine that he was gone. Not enough information is given I suppose. I didn't know beat cops in NYC were coroners or medics...

It is pretty common for police to have first responder training, as they are often literally the first to respond to medical emergencies by dint of already being in the area.

OTOH, if you are responding to a scene where someone's head is bashed in, there's really not much point in attempting CPR...

I don't know the situation in NYC, but in many places, any medical intervention can be contraindicated by certain signs of death (injury incompatible with life, rigor, hypostasis, etc).

It's actually like a badly written logic/IQ problem; it starts off with a man who isn't named and then suddenly three sentences in he has a name.

I am guessing that at least partially, it is designed to replicate what is likely a common scenario with police officers in which they are questioning someone who has either just been a victim or is potentially being deceptive/closed off/whatever. I wouldn't be surprised if very often when questioning someone after, say, a mugging, the actual details and faces to names doesn't happen until a few sentences in.

"My brother was standing next to me and the guy came up and stole my backpack."

"Ok, and you were standing over there? Over by the stop sign?"

"Yeah, and he was on the right side of me."

"Jose." "Ok, and that's your brother's name?"

Just for one example off the top of my head

That's basically what it is.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

Anybody else read the first passage way too carefully like you're taking SAT II English and bracing for trick questions?

Yep, scrolled down to the answer key looking for a twist.

Unless its some kind of trick question, shouldn't the first question be asking which is the most detailed, not the must accurate? If all of them are completely in accordance with the given true information, then they are all equally and perfectly accurate, even if one just says "the sky was blue."

>> shouldn't the first question be asking which is the most detailed, not the must accurate?

The first question askes which witness is the LEAST accurate.

One statement is at odds with others in many ways, ergo:

* that statement is least accurate, OR

* the victim and two witnesses are colluding on a false narrative to cover the actual events because ... ??? ( poss. known assailant, fear of retailation, witnesses are part of gang pressuring victim, etc. )

Yeah I was a bit confused by it. The only way you can judge accuracy here is either from the base source, Jose, or the between inter-witness congruity. But accuracy is bad terminology for this. Given another prompt:

Officers Joe Schmoe and Tits McGee arrive at the scene where Josb has a bloody face and says that the sky suddenly turned red and there are dolphins flying around. There are three witnesses. Witness 1 says there are pink and green dolphins flying around and attacked the man. Witness 2 says the sky turned green and two green dolphins attacked the man. Witness 3 says the sky turned pink and two pink dolphins attacked the man. No witness mentions the bag of mushrooms on the ground. Which account is the least accurate.

According to the information above, what is Josb's brother's name?

This reminds me of the DMV test when I moved to Oregon. The question was "You see a motorcycle coming towards you and its left blinker is on. Should you assume a) it is turning left, b) it is turning right, c) it is not turning, or d) none of the above." The correct answer was c with the explanation that motorcycle turn signals frequently don't automatically turn off. Despite this being literally the most dangerous answer.

If a vehicle is approaching you head on, isn’t it much safer to assume they aren’t turning? You’ll usually be wrong, but if you are right it could avoid a head on collision

It its coming towards you in the other lane, which is the most likely circumstances for it to be moving towards you … Ignoring a turn signal sounds like a great way to have a head on collision.

I read it as, it's coming towards you in the other lane and has to cross your lane to turn left. If you "assume" it's not turning, you can just keep your speed rather than maybe slowing down just in case he doesn't see you coming.

> just in case he doesn't see you coming.

Which results in a dead motorcyclist.

It is presumably in the other lane. But let's look at modes of failure.

- Assuming the light is properly indicated but in this failure mode the motorcyclist turns. You collide and the motorcyclist faces serious injuries or dies.

- Assuming the light isn't properly indicating intention, you slow down, and cars behind you might also slow down. No one injured.

There is clearly one option that is significantly safer, even if the probability is low.

Witness 2 gives detailed information, but it's completely unlike the information given by both the victim and the other 2 witnesses. The victim, Witness 1 and 3 present the same story, although Witness 3's is very sparse on details (ie least detailed, according to your metric).

You may also scroll down to the end of the PDF to check the answer. Witness 2 is the least accurate.

I get it. But without knowing what actually happened it's impossible to know who was the least accurate, there's nothing stopping Jose, W1, and W3 being mistaken.

I feel it really should say "likely to be the least accurate".

“To a cop, the explanation is never that complicated. It's always simple. There's no mystery on the street, no arch-criminal behind it all. If you got a dead guy and you think his brother did it, you're going to find out you're right.”

You're the type of person it's trying to weed out - you're too smart.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

Analysis paralysis is not an indication of smart.

Pointing out "the question is wrong/invalid/badly worded" isn't analysis paralysis

Could be, of course, that they want to test how you deal with that... But I have a feeling that's beyond the point here

Analysis paralysis is evidence of somebody either completely missing the point or people who wish to think they are smarter than they can actually perform (Dunning-Kruger). Either way it is a performance failure, and failing to perform against a baseline, even if flawed, is not an indication of smart.

Good thing it wasn't analysis paralysis. The conclusion of the analysis was "the question is badly worded" and from the way he worded his original reply it seems like he understood what they were aiming for

That is an (small) indication of smart

Sounds to me like just an oversight. If what experience I have with public institutions is worth anything, it just didn't occur to the people who designed the question that the wording was shit and that to arrive at the intended answer you have to be loose with the meaning of words. That does not reflect well on American po-pos

why do you keep posting this over and over again in this thread? The department applied this rule to attempt to reduce turnover, not because they literally want dumb cops.

I never said they want dumb cops, just that the person posting is not who they want because they're too smart. The way they limit turnover is by selecting for normal IQs so they don't get bored and leave.

Seems like the smart thing to do would be to give the "too smart" people training to tackle more interesting and important problems - like white collar crime, tax loopholes, internal corruption, etc.

I'll give you three guesses why that's never even floated as an option...

To be fair, the white collar crime is mostly tackled by other organizations who have investigators but aren't typical police. Like the FBI (accountants comprise a large percentage of agents), SEC, IRS, etc.

No, Witness 2 has known details wrong. We can assume the officers are standing on West Street with the victim. Unless Witness 2 says that the victim moved from West street to Canal St, Witness 2 is the least accurate. Accuracy has nothing to do with the description of the assailant, as that can't be held to any level of accuracy.

Writing good tests hard. Really hard. Unfortunately most people think "Bill knows about XYZ, he can write the test."

The results are frequently not good.

> 5. Police Officer Darious arrives to the scene of a suspected overdose where the victim is not responding. He administers Naloxone from his department provided kit. The victim is still not responding, but has a pulse. How long should Officer Darious wait to administer another dose of Naloxone if the victim does not respond after CPR?

> (A) Three to five minutes

> (B) Six to eight minutes

> (C) Three to five seconds

> (D) Ten to fifteen minutes

If the victim has a pulse, why is Officer Darious giving them CPR? He needs to follow directions better.

Based on my understanding of how questions are written and nothing else, I will guess the correct answer is A.

Yep that's clearly the answer they're looking for, but it's still a shit question.

> If the victim has a pulse, why is Officer Darious giving them CPR?

If the victim has a pulse but is not breathing, CPR is indicated.

As I understand it, rescue breathing is indicated.

Yeah that’s the P in CPR.

Guidelines were changed for laypeople a while back because it turned out continuous chest compressions moved enough air and was more impactful in the first few minutes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484593/

Yup.

The reasoning I heard was that more people are comfortable giving chest compressions than rescue breaths, and we wanted to encourage people to help even if they weren't comfortable with rescue breaths

That's part of it.

> Available evidence strongly support the superiority of bystander compression-only CPR. Reasons for the best efficacy of chest compression-only CPR include a better willingness to start CPR by bystanders, the low quality of mouth-to-mouth ventilation and a detrimental effect of too long interruptions of chest compressions during ventilation.

People don't want to make out with a stranger, they don't do it very well, and pausing chest compressions detracts from it.

Is the real exam more involved than this exam? This is too simple. This seems like a test most middle schoolers should be able to pass without studying for.

US police departments are not exactly known for trying to hire rocket surgeons.

Which police departments around the world have hiring criteria equivalent to "rocket surgeons"?

You should look at the UPSC exam sample questions from India.

These police? https://thewire.in/government/why-police-brutality-and-tortu...

Yes, that police. Are you surprised that education is not a solution for everything?

It always depends on what kind of education. Education as such does not necessarily make police more civil of course

For anyone else who is curious, the past exam papers are available here: https://www.upsc.gov.in/examinations/previous-question-paper...

In Finland, becoming a police officer requires getting a bachelor from the police university college. For commanding positions, a master from the same is necessary. Polamk has an admission rate of about 7%.

NYPD also requires a bachelors.

Not really.

“You must have earned 60 college credits with a minimum 2.0 GPA from an accredited institution or 2 years of active military service in the U.S. Armed Forces in order to be appointed to the title of Police Officer. ”

In the UK you have to have at least a Desmond and a couple of A-levels/Highers in a subject unrelated to your degree.

> you have to have at least a Desmond

What is a Desmond?

A miscorrect of “degree” (or a mistyping thereof), something along those lines?

Especially since the rest of the phrase talks about qualification in addition to a degree.

Edit: apparently not, til

Another name for 'Lower Second Class honours' (50%+ in assessments*).

97% of people who completed their degree got a 2:2 or higher in 2019/20[1], but the UK's seen significant grade inflation over the last 20 years. You'd be looking at around 80% in the 1990s

Nowadays, you will lose out on some graduate jobs if you get a Desmond.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...

[1] https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/27-01-2021/sb258-higher-educatio...

* 50% is acceptable in the British system

> Getting a mark over 50% means that you are beginning to understand the difficult work of your degree. Getting over 60% is excellent because it means you have demonstrated a deep knowledge of your subject to the marker.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/students/success-guide/ug/assessm...

Desmond Tutu. A lower second class degree is a 2.2.

In fact, they reject people who are too smart.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

It’s not a matter of passing or failing. More people apply to become cops than they have slots in the academy. The role of the exam is basically to sort the list of applicants to the police academy (along with veteran status, residency status, language abilities and anything else mandated by the civil service law.)

Yes, the test is easy. Scoring a 70% will leave you eligible for the academy (assuming all other requirements to be a cop are met.) But the point is to try to give some kind of reasonable score that allows them to objectively sort applicants.

Is this really true today? It seems many departments are struggling to find recruits.

Fair enough - it might not be true currently, I believe it was 5 years ago.

The NYPD offers a decent package with respect to pay and benefits and you can retire after 20 years in.

I think being too smart is the easiest way to fail any police exams. They want people who follow orders, they don’t want people who are smart enough to think it is bullshit.

Similar thing with leetcode style interviews really. Memorize a bunch of solutions to contrived problems to prove you are a good little coder, don't question the hiring manager about where you'll be using this on the job. Then get hired and move that header two pixels to the right, over and over again, forever.

Question 33 is strange? Square feet? That question/answer should not be in square feet..

Certainly the wall must have a non-zero thickness, but the question should have said 'length' instead.

I guess all walls are 1ft high in that diagram.

You're right though, pretty sure it's a typo.

At least two typos, or one complete lack of understanding of dimensions.

What's crazier is that A is also a possible answer, if the wall is 2' tall. But C and D aren't possible unless the wall is {4,5} + 16/21' tall. The fraction is 9.143" in case anyone is wondering. But the answer is completely ambiguous. What balcony wall is 1-2' tall?! That's a safety violation!

The length of the bottom wall is 20 feet and the sum of the lengths of the top walls is 17.5 feet, meaning there is an additional 2.5 feet of wall width across the two walls of the balcony. Assuming the wall is uniform thickness, that gives us dimensions of 1.25 x 10.5 feet, or 13.125 square feet.

Sadly, not one of the allowed options.

That's the question they use to weed people out who are too smart for the job. If you bring the deliberate typo to their attention, they disqualify you.

Remove your "/s". That's literally how it works.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

Ironic, because those with a high enough IQ would see past all incongruences and just answer the questions.

We’re making fun of you for spamming this link a billion times in the thread.

Question eight baffles me. Are there characters not used in license plates or something?

Guessing it’s the one that has the most people agreeing what the particular characters are.

So the answer is D: 351JRZ?

There is an answer sheet at the end.

The four answers are the four responses from the witnesses. Using best-out-of-4 logic for each character the answer is probably (D)

I mean, it seems like the real answer is "take 30 seconds to run all four plate numbers", and then ask the witnesses what color and type of car they saw.

This really puts the training in perspective.

Which plate do you run first?

Doesn't matter. Might be two coincidentally having the same color and model, so it's important to quickly run all of them before the follow-up.

I was thinking the same thing, and imagine there’s many standardizations for license plates that the public is probably unaware of.

Nyc taxi's always start with a T and end with a C, for example.

>On January 1st, 2018 at 8:00 P.M., John Daly reported a hit and run to the police. Four witnesses were interviewed by the police. They all gave different accounts of the license plate of the vehicle involved in the hit and run. Which of the following plate numbers is most likely to be correct? (A) 381JRZ (B) 358JRZ (C) 351JTZ (D) 351JRZ

I think for a lot of these questions of "four witnesses gave varying accounts" questions, you're supposed to assume that the person who's correct has details most consistent with the majority.

So if you go character by character, everyone agrees the plate started with a 3, 75% agree the second character is 5, etc.

D is the answer that's always consistent with the majority opinion of each character.

This is reasonable, but the question is then wrong. It should state that the options given all represent plate numbers that were testified to

That’s not how it works for police, they don’t operate under the same standards as a jury for good reason.

Also, It’s generally not illegal to lie to a police officer. You can, and will, be prosecuted for lying to a federal agent.

Alternatively the police could look up all 4 plates to see which are actually registered, which are on cars that reasonably match other details from the witnesses and forensic evidence from the scene, and talk to the owners of any of the cars that haven't been elimanted. If that fails they could expand the search to other logic permutations of plates. They could even call this process "police work".

You said the bad word, "work". Sounds like effort... Better to just guess, that's faster and doesn't make your head hurt that much.

This valid for everything, not just police work.

This question isn't designed to test how well applicants can master the real world skill of researching license plates. It's designed to see if applicants realize that generally speaking, witness recollections are faulty, but that fact can be mitigated by piecing together a composite based on multiple recollections.

Also, uniformed officers disproportionately come from uniformed officer families. One way they can give their kin a structural advantage is to design the tests to have certain recurring types of logical problems which can be relentlessly practiced. So, year after year, you'll see the same kinds of exam questions, with the details switched around. That license question or a close logical variant may have been on the test for generations.

Right, but looking at those answers there is one plate you'd try first.

I don't know how plates work in the US but in the UK quite often you'll find similar cars with similar plates because they were registered at the dealer in a block. A great example is how about 14 years ago nearly all the police cars in Scotland were silver Ford Focuses with plates that started "SF58" and then had more-or-less sequential runs of three letters. "SF" means it was registered in Edinburgh, "58" means September 2008, and the three letter group is serially assigned. Of course, this applied to all their *unmarked* cars, too...

Plates work very differently on older cars in the US because a car gets a new plate whenever it changes owners or the owner moves from one state to another.

I think its testing to see if someone can piece together some information based on a majority's reporting, in this case in the individual characters of the license plate. l'm pretty sure the correct choice is D.

I think the idea here is that each of the four witnesses gave one of the numbers in the question.

They all agree that it is 3*J*Z.

3 witnesses (all except A) agree that the second digit was 5.

3 witnesses (all except B) agree that the third digit was 1.

3 witnesses (all except C) agree that the second letter was an R.

Every letter/number that D gives is corroborated by two other witnesses (though a different two each time), so D is most likely to be correct.

I think you're right about the intention. However, I think a fairer deduction to draw from this is it proves any individual is quite likely to be wrong so you can't derive anything meaningful.

Also, standard issue plates go in allowed sets, eg A123BCD is possible but A1Z3BC0 wouldn't exist.

351JRZ. Look at the frequency columnwise.

400*20%, come on... We should have a higher bar than this...

Do you want municipalities to be able to hire cops? This is already a tall order for a lot of people.

No? I want municipalities to hire competent and ethical cops (at market salaries), rather than giving firearms to train warm bodies and attempting to teach them to enforce the law.

Do you want angry people with room temperature IQs armed and in charge?

One benefit of global warming is that angry people with room temperature IQs are getting smarter.

No. I want fewer police, and more mental health, parks, and educational services.

And even if I did, the standard for getting a gun should be higher than this.

No I do not lol

We did.

Civil Service exams are intended to assess merit and fitness for a job. This has been subject to litigation since the 90s by various parties who felt that minorities and others were underrepresented.

In New York, the courts found in the 90s that many exams were partially IQ tests, which put the plaintiffs at a disadvantage. So they dumbed down civil service exams to be a combination of grammar, random factoids, and basic math.

It's bunkels to use IQ tests for merit

Makes sense for general intelligence though.

Define intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#General_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

It's highly correlated with success in many facets of life, including professional success and educational attainment.

They weren’t IQ tests, but results tended to be correlated with IQ.

When you are testing for reasoning, analysis, etc those are exercising the the same parts of the brain as an IQ test.

When you make a test such that you can just memorize grammar rules and know facts, you’re assessing the willingness of the candidate to study, or have access to study materials.

Depending on the job, it may not matter at all. Your IQ over a moderate threshold is irrelevant to many occupations.

(This comment refers to the text questions, not the picture one where it clearly gives instructions to memorize)

Are we to assume that the real test doesn't allow the taker to go back to the passage? Many passage-based questions are directly answered in the text, so is this test administered in a timed way where passages are shown then removed, to test recollection of detail?

Or is it really testing just ability to extract the detail from the passage based on the question, with full "open book" access to the passage?

(Edit: corrected typo, added clarification)

Maybe it's to rule out those who can't read, because that would show with the "obvious" questions.

NYPD police academy must look like SNL Celebrity Jeopardy if it's an open book exam.

#4 solve for X came out of left field

You if they get that right, you disqualify them…

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

Very interesting - so could the modus operandi be: make a few mistakes but not too many, get recruited, now you are the 1% IQ-wise, take more exams and rise through the ranks to get off the street asap and retire with great benefits?

You only know what the lawsuit says. My guess is there was some other issues with personality evaluated.

Think of a pilot. A pilot needs to be in command, exert control and assess situations in the fly. Yet a pilot also must be disposed to understand and follow complex rules and procedures precisely. The military does a lot of screening to identify that personality, and if you’ve known pilots, you can spot one.

I would presume to guess there are criteria for a police officer that an exam would try to identify, if allowed to do so.

Can you explain what a New London, CT hiring practice has to do with a question on the NYPD exam?

Gotta know your order of operations on the beat.

Implicit multiplication too.

It's under "Burglary", so I'm guessing victims of burglary like to give estimates of their property using algebra.

Especially when there's no "solving" involved.

Reminds me of the questions we got when we were going into 5th grade and had to get placed.

Makes me think of The Strokes song New York City Cops.

Anecdotally, we're selecting the wrong people in society to be police officers. I have seen three people from my high school who bullied me or others relentlessly (homophobia, racism, etc.) who are now in the police profession. It horrifies me.

You don’t get to choose the police officers, where you got that from? They are selected by the government to serve and protect them. Government pays them, gives them power status and protection. The second objective may be to appear helpful to the general population so they can justify their existence as ‘helping the community’. While they may help the community when idle to support their second objective, they will always protect the government first. Just pray you don't end up on the other end.

In democracies it's common to suggest that "we the people" control the Government (via voting) so if there is a problem with the Government then we are able to fix it by voting. Voting for a candidate proposing police reform is a good example, there's just an extra layer of indirection.

You may also “control” the emperor by having your grandfather “vote” him in. And you mentioned democracy? Tell me where that place exists? I don’t see any country where majority of its population can decide laws, restrictions and other decisions?

This is a good place to start:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

> And you mentioned democracy? Tell me where that place exists? I don’t see any country where majority of its population can decide laws, restrictions and other decisions?

At least in English, this kind of performative misunderstanding of the term "democracy" as if it's pedantically incorrect in the situation is itself incorrect. It does not make you look smarter. It makes it look like you've had zero exposure whatsoever to the fields of political science or political philosophy, where "democracy" is universally used as an umbrella term unless greater precision is required.

North Korea is also democracy if I used anybody's interpretation of blend words.

Question 19...

... Burst through the window/28, enter 16a isn't an answer :(

Just skim read - interesting, thanks for sharing!

After reading this I think we're a long ways off from Robocop.

The bar for this exam is so absurdly low, i passed it and i have no clue of police things. Compare this with police officer exams in other countries like germany where it’s a real college education.

You have to be careful not to score too high, or you might get rejected.

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/robert-jordan-too-smart-...

“A judge agreed that there was a reasonable expectation that cops not be too intelligent.”

Well, it explains a few things..

Only now do I realize that in every cop show where they are pointing out some officer who 'aced' the academy exam they are actually making a sly joke.

Come to seattle and make 400k as a police officer. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/374-seatt...

And they still can't get enough applicants, despite sky high pay.

Isn't this just the entry exam to be educated. Not the final exam?

My 9 years old son passed it very easily, with no prior knowledge of police things, although he watched the first season of Paw Patrol.

> The man was walking northbound on West Street when an Asian guy who was about 6’10”, wearing a black shirt, green hat, and blue jeans, came up to him and punched him in the mouth.

I am calling BS on that, right there.

Yao Ming could've been having a bad year and gotten desperate.

They must have been filming the sequel to Fletch.

The typeface on that page changes multiple times, looks like they may have done some editing.

Sorry, what is the goal here? This doesn't seem interesting but I'm keen to understand the OPs mentality and motivation for submitting.

It's a peek at required training, mildly interesting to me from that angle.

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