I wonder if it's coincidence or the start of a trend back to sanity about job qualifications. Ironically, by becoming almost ubiquitous, university education also becomes irrelevant.
If having a four year degree becomes just a checkbox, there will be easier and easier ways of getting that checkbox. There will be rent-seeking entities that will facilitate this like degree mills and dubious online programs. It no longer becomes a qualification that the person has gained any skills, but only that they were able to finance paying tens of thousands of dollars to participate in a few discussion threads.
It was only a matter of time for people to realise that requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need them is just cargo-culting.
Applicants are trying to go big or go home (and learn online instead)
Knowledge of DNA and computer forensic methods and necessities, though, would probably improve their chances of getting promoted, as would legal training. However, those skills could easily be learned at two-year community college progams.
All in all, I think this kind of focus would lead to a more professional police force.
Part of that is education. Part of that is hiring officers who understand the system and want to improve and protect rather than a jobs system for those who want to exercise power over others.
Nope. The American justice system does not control itself. It is bound by laws and codes of practice dictated to it by outsiders, those good-idea people who's entire understanding of law comes from a highschool history or civics class they barely remember. It is as bad as it is because the general public honestly want it that way. Rough and violent justice is baked into American culture as much as guns and alcohol.
>>Part of that is education.
I agree, but it isn't the people in the system that need an education. It is the voting public outside who need the better understanding.
Who are you referring to?
Have you been to these? I have, in states red and blue. It's rarely a rah rah. Instead, people have complaints about specific categories of crimes, usually ones relevant to the community. The question is less locking people up than catching them. Policing. Sentencing is a separate system from policing.
Again, not in reality. Absent unlimited resources, street-level police determine which crimes are "policed" based on the severity of associated punishments. Change the punishment for drug dealing from a prison sentence to a minor fine and police will all but stop hunting drug dealers. Start sentencing jaywalkers to prison time and you will see cops at every pedestrian crossing. Sentencing is the guide by which police determine which laws the public most wants to see enforced.
Policing has gone in this direction in the UK, and now you have mothers being arrested in front of their children after “misgendering” someone online: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/i-stand-with-kate-scotto...
> St Albans Magistrates’ Court found her guilty, under the Communications Act (2003), of using a public communications network to “cause annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety”.
Fortunately, she eventually won on appeal and her conviction was overturned, but the process itself was the punishment.
Police need less power, not more sociology degrees.
There’s also the entire issue of “non-criminal bias incidents”:
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/opinion/columnists/5238...
But if it's your job to go out into the ocean and interact with sharks face-to-face, those encounters are way more dangerous than the general statistics would have us believe. Same goes for police when they have to deal with an active shooter situation. That's what I mean by "extremely dangerous". Compared to Canada or most of Europe, the US has vastly more active shooter situations, and at least some of that can be attributed to the availability of firearms.
Compared to 2.5 years of the same in Germany.
College may not be the right answer, but the current system of very little training isn't working.
For this reason, more people in Germany will put up with strict credential requirements and low pay than in US. To make police force more professional in the US, we first need to stop most crime, and for that, we need to hire a lot of police (to bring the crimes-per-cop ratio closer to low crime countries), and massively increase incarceration of repeat offenders, who are responsible for the bulk of the crime. It will be extremely hard to both hire more police and also to make standards higher: you’ll end up with highly professional cops who are too busy to help you unless you’re being actively murdered.
When comparing things to Germany simply don’t see a 1:1 fit for what’s a US law enforcement officer.
We had city-burning protests for months for a career criminal high on illegal drugs committing crime. In a few days after, there were worldwide protests and political statements (GF portraits on the Berlin Wall?!?). Those that support this obvious push towards more chaos and police oversight have deep pockets and international reach.
Real change in the US comes from tragedy and money.
You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. This has all sorts of negative repercussions. It helps escalate crime because cops are now more dangerous and less predictable, so people will go to greater lengths to avoid arrest or interaction with police. It also makes the cops' jobs more difficult as the community becomes less likely to cooperate in stopping or preventing crime. Hiring more cops can make matters worse because it can necessitate lowering the bar to find enough people to hire leading to even less professional behavior. It also creates more interactions between police and the community which as I mentioned, is often an adversarial interaction due to this unprofessional behavior.
Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.
The Police are armed and dangerous.
Not much has changed.
Yes, we are not incarcerating enough people, as clearly evidenced by the fact that we have a lot of repeat criminals, who commit a lot more crime than Germans.
> You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. (…)
This is a problem, but it’s not what’s causing criminals to rob stores, carjack random people, or do drive by shootings. If we made US cops as professional as German cops, we’d still have huge crime problem. In fact, having grown up in Poland (which is very low crime society), my experience tells me that prosecuting and jailing criminals is significantly more important than professionalism of police force, as Polish cops are significantly less professional than American ones.
> Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.
I strongly disagree. We did start mass incarceration around early-to-mid 1990, and it did, in fact, solve a lot of crime problems. As the percentage of population in prison steadily went up, the crime rate steadily went down. As we started reducing incarceration rates in early 2010s, the crime rate started going back up again, and this greatly accelerated starting from 2020, with the growth of anti-policing and anti-prosecution movements.
Just to emphasize this: the incarceration rate is down a lot from its peak in ~2010 or so. It’s down by more than a third. We no longer just throw people in jail, we do quite the opposite in fact, and the situation is getting worse than when we just jailed criminals.
There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate. Not to mention the fallibility of the justice system, and the ramifications harsher sentences has on people who were falsley imprisoned.
As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.
I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.
It's not, compared to the costs of the crime. Tangible costs of crime are big enough, and the intangible costs are bigger still. Cost of imprisonment is really nothing compared to the economic and social damage done by repeat offenders.
There is also big heterogeneity in the cost of imprisonment. Places with high prison costs could just send their prisoners to places with low costs. The reason it is not happening is, I suspect, precisely to argue for reduction of imprisonment, based on its high cost.
> that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes. There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate.
This is very much false, and in fact, it is honestly quite insulting to tens of millions of desperately poor Americans who'd never turn to crime, or, for that matter, to billions of people in foreign countries, who are much poorer than pretty much everyone in US.
Nobody in US is actually so desperately poor that they have no choice but to steal basics. Supermarkets here don't put bread behind locks, they put alcohol and Tide, because it's easy to pawn off on black market. Carjackers are not desperate for transportation. Urban shooters are not desperate for places to practice target shooting. Assholes setting sawzall against your catalytic converters are not starving contractors unable to land a job.
It boggles my mind to see people suggesting that crime in US committed out of desperation. This might be believable if we talked about crime in the slums of Lagos or Sao Paulo, but not about the types of crime and its perpetrators as it actually takes place in US. I grew in a place that was (and continues to be) much poorer than the American crime hot spots (or, really, almost entirety of the country), and crime was basically nonexistent.
> As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.
If the strategy effectively and persistently reduces crime, how is it not solving the problem?
> I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.
With this attitude you'll keep searching forever, and always remain mystified as to what makes teenagers in some of the wealthiest and most full of opportunity places in the world so desperate that they are forced to steal cars at a gunpoint, only to joyride for a few hours and then abandon in a ditch. Is it hunger? Lack of shelter? We might never know.
Sorry, I don’t buy that. There has to be something else at play.
What happens when bigots get that curriculum changed to suit their agenda?
What happens in countries where the current social norm is "gay people don't exist" ?
Something related that's often discussed in law enforcement and military is the idea of being able to hire directly into some upper specialist positions without the person having to rise through the ranks. This is sort of the opposite, admitting that some senior positions do not need an arbitrary field experience requirement. In both cases, it's about better matching the requirements and subsequent training and career progression to what's actually needed for the job. This kind of rationalization is the upside of a tight labor market.
that is the only way to eliminate the systemic discrimination that the university system and degree requirements propagate.
almost all serious jobs already have objective skills tests and licensing requirements for employment: doctors, lawyers, financial services, heavy equipment operators, etc, etc, etc.
adding degree requirements on top of those licensing requirements cannot possibly add any additional benefit but it is obviously discriminatory against many marginalized groups.
*because it really feels as if some companies translate leetcode skills to actual skills
Well, anyhow, you already do require skills-based assessment if you are seeing licensed physicians in the US. They don't let ppl practice with only book learning.
For doctors, I'm perfectly comfortable requiring both and do not accept the replacement of a degree with a skills-based test.
medicine is way out of my field, so i don't have personal experience and can only go on what i have read, but i would guess that it is a lot like most other highly specialized fields: pre-med is a waste other than basic bio/chem, medical school is mostly information you will never use, residency is where you learn how to actually do the job, and then you get into a specialty and learn that specialty, and what you learn for your specialty is the only thing you really use.
I know I'm being snarky, but c'mon man! It wasn't that long ago the same could be said (and was said) for education past the 3rd grade, then the discussion moved to education past the 8th grade, and now it's moved to education past the 12th grade. It's just a rehash of the same, tired argument justifying a poorly-educated populace which makes for a poorly-educated electorate, which tends to be more susceptible to populism.
The demand for higher education has outstripped the supply of students capable of making real use of it, and so standards have been lowered. The value of the education provided — and the value of the degree received — has dropped precipitously.
Up until the 50s/60s, education past the 12 grade was the exception, not the rule. A degree was valuable because not everyone had the capacity to attain it.
I'm glad I got a broad-based education. It was definitely the right thing for me, but I think it's a hammer being applied to too many problems that aren't roughly nail-shaped.
Not only does a criminal justice degree already exist but we could even introduce a new BA degree in policing with the kind of training that would result in an improved police force
Have a second-rate college degree to fulfill arbitrary qualification requirement: No.
U.S. training requirements for police are state-level matters sometimes augmented by local requirements; none of the state requirements, as I recall, are comparable to the more stringent standards required in many western European nations.
>Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma
>Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says: "Some police forces in Europe have police university, where training lasts for three years - for me the standouts are Norway and Finland."
I also don't really understand how university education is "almost ubiquitous"; I see that the prevalence of Bachelor's degrees amongst adults is under 40%. Is the claim that the demographic of 21-32 would have a percentage like 70% or what?
One can dream though...
In any case the point here is that college degrees clearly don’t serve as great police training.
(edit: I don't want to litigate whether POTUS's preferences for better training would actually improve things, I only want to point out he's been talking about it).
I don't see that the FBI stats support that claim, and even if, the rate is still comparatively low, and skews very heavily towards the US South (which is only 38% of the population, but has very high gun ownership and gun violence rates):
Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking [0].
From the 2021 data ('FBI LEOKA') [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths reported by 7886 LE agencies:
• 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence))
- 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms
- 44 of those 73 were in the South
(If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.)
• Assaults: [3] 43,649 officers assaulted in 2021
- 28.6% (12,463) occurred while officers responded to [all] disturbance calls - 35% sustained injuries - 49.5% occurred in the South
And for 2022, FBI releases preliminary LEOKA statistics for 2022 to October [4].
The latest years for which I can easily find all the detailed LEOKA Tables are 1996..2019 [5] e.g. Table 24: "Circumstances encountered by victim officer upon arrival at the scene of the incident".
[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...
[1]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...
[2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/
[3]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight...
[4]: https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases...
[5]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniou...
The difference is that everyone who works on those jobs has roughly the same risk. A cop who has to respond to a disturbance in a bad area is fat more at risk than someone in the crime lab or the evidence room. If you look at the risk of injury to cops who are out on patrol all day, it's more dangerous.
I take your point about cities/areas/zipcodes/states. To me one pattern that keeps jumping out is that the South (LA, MS, GA, TN) has incredible levels of (gun) violence.
Ideally we could quote police officer injury and death rates, per-capita population, by region, by circumstances of incident.
No, sorry. But I don't know if the stats would fully capture what I think the difference is. Like, I remember a case of a cop who shot a teenager who was running away from him in an alley way at night. I think he had been armed but threw the gun away, not sure now. But the discussion about these incidents usually lead to the stats about how being a cop is not that dangerous in aggregate. That may be be true, but the distribution of danger is very peaky for cops and it's not just a question of whether they are patrol cops, but its also a question of the circumstances they're in in a given moment (which I didn't really mention in my previous post).
If you're called to investigate a group of armed young men in an alleyway at night, and you end up chasing one of them in the darkness, alone, you are in far more danger than the stats would imply.
From brief searching & skimming, I'm seeing that US police kill around 1000 people per year, while around 250 cops are shot. I deliberately compare shot to killed because police are usually far more accurate and effective at shooting than the average criminal. Needless to say this doesn't include all the time that police are shot at or attacked with other weapons that would justify shooting. So while yes they are not in as much danger generally as the people who attack them, it's certainly not a trivial amount of danger either.
In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you, they run to evade capture, etc. Even if the total risks of logging are higher I can imagine it is very hard to treat the risks in police work in the same dispassionate way the logger does. Tree leaning while cutting it vs suspect's hands maybe going towards their pocket. Even if the stats in those two situations are identical (I suspect they are not), I think very different emotions are going to be triggered, and without a lot of training those emotions are going to make situations go sideways either at the time or later (treating every person you meet as dangerous scum, etc). You don't hate the trees, you don't fear walking amongst them when not cutting them, you don't want to cut them a bit harder next time to teach them a lesson, and so on.
Anyway, I think all of that results in the 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.
>>> 2,744 officers were assaulted with firearms; 6.1% of these officers were injured. 1,180 officers were assaulted with knives or other cutting instruments; 9.7% of these officers were injured. The remaining 11,760 officers were assaulted with other types of dangerous weapons; 16.8% of these officers were injured.
That same year (2021) US police killed 1048 people - less then half the number of cops that were attacked with guns, and less than 1/10th of the number attacked with other dangerous weapons.
I wonder how this compares with European countries, i.e. the ratio of people killed by police to how often they police are attacked in a serious way.
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/dallas/news/pre...
Definitely, some people do. Some don't. Some are trying to commit suicide-by-cop. Some are unarmed and not even a threat. Your post makes it sound like anytime an officer decides force is necessary, that it necessarily must be. Let alone, lethal force. Sometimes police get that determination wrong, whether by accident or intent. Sometimes police abuse qualified immunity. This stuff almost never goes before a jury, and on the occasions it does, if there's no bodycam and no other narrative (i.e. the other person's dead), unlikely to result in a conviction.
Angelo Quinto [0] was an unarmed, non-violent, non-criminal, 30-yo mentally-ill Filipino-American veteran killed in his own home by Antioch PD, by kneeling on his neck, while handcuffed. His mother was the person who called 911, and noone asked for the police, she only asked for medical. He apparently wasn't even committing any crime, just having a psychiatric emergency. But the police killed him.
Antioch PD didn’t disclose Quinto’s death to the public for nearly a month, then only after public requests. And there's no bodycam of his death. None of them were fired or charged, and there's no public mention of disciplinary actions. In response Gov Newsom signed eight police reform bills.
The level and frequency of police use-of-force in the US is also too high. It needs to be reduced.
> 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.
Equally, ignoring all the above also leads to bad consequences too.
Sorry, but can we try to talk in facts?
In Canada, since 2000, there have been 704 police-involved deaths [0].
Let's take a conservative population of 30M for Canada (which will inflate this stat) - then we get: 704 / 22 / 30M => 1 in 1 million Canadians die at the hands of police per year
On the other hand, in the US, there were 1022 police shootings in 2022 alone [1].
1022 / 331M => 3 in 1 million Americans are SHOT by police per year.
There's already a >3x discrepancy while using only US police shootings vs all Canadian police-involved deaths, and I'm sure the police killed plenty of people with tasers, beatings, and negligence in the US in 2022 too.
So, in general, I disagree with your claim that university education hasn't done anything to make Canadian police better than US police, and it's unlikely you'll change that opinion unless you bring some statistics into this conversation.
[0]: https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-ca... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
What I'm saying is pretty obvious, but I'll spell it out for you.
1. Canadian and American cultures are extremely homogenous
2. Canadian and American police have few differences, but a critical one is the Canadian-only requirement of university degrees
3. With no other clearly-defined drivers of police culture differentiation across the border, we see that US police are probably 4-8x more lethal than Canadian police per capita
So, since the police is clearly not about to properly train their people, let's not dismiss the value of a university degree as a filter, since it appears from a high level view that a university degree could serve to make a police officer 1/5th as likely to kill a citizen compared to a diploma.
Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier, related to crime statistics or otherwise, or will you just continue to say "the police should train their people", not hold them to account for not training their people, and also excuse them for dropping educational requirements that served in lieu of that training?
Even if your premises were correct, it wouldn’t be worth trying to debate that further.
Hint: They aren’t. Do some research on what percentage of US police have college degrees, and what percentage of Canadian police have college degrees. It isn’t what you think.
Also, you might want to look at the demographics of who police shoot in the US, and inform yourself of the differences between Canadian gun culture and the US.
Canadian police are also quite racist, but if you're arguing that "less educated American cops are more racist", that tracks pretty nicely with "please don't accept less educated cops"
> you are actually claiming that the reason American police shoot more people than Canadian police is because Canadian police have college degrees and American police do not?
Do you have a different explanation?
> Do some research on what percentage of US police have college degrees
According to [0], the breakdown of US officer max education of no college/college diploma/undergrad/grad is:
* 49/20/25/5
> and what percentage of Canadian police have college degrees
And, according to [1], for Canadian officers, it's:
* 19/51/29/1.6
Quite a disparity. Especially when you consider sources like [2][3], which argue that:
> "Studies have found that a small proportion of police officers – about 5% – produce most citizen complaints, and officers with a two-year degree are about half as likely to be in the high-rate complaint group"
Overall, I believe there's lots of evidence suggesting more educated police are better police and citizens, and none suggesting the opposite - that less educated police are better.
Across the board, Canadian police are significantly better educated, with the exception of less Graduated degrees.
Across the board, Canadian police are less deadly to their citizens.
Not a coincidence - go ahead and say some more stupid shit though.
[0]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/law-enforcement-education [1]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2015001/article... [2]: https://theconversation.com/5-reasons-police-officers-should... Source of the quote [3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Source of the info behind the quote, paywalled
But in case it’s genuine, consider vast differences in gun ownership, homicide rate, and… honestly so many other things it’s just annoying to list them.
I did.
Gun ownership is about 32% of individuals in USA vs 25% of individuals in Canada.
Homicide rate is about 2.5x higher in the US, which means US cops are outperforming this statistic vs US civilians.
> so many other things
It's not just annoying to list them, it's ridiculous; these countries are the exact same place. Across the board, everything you can think of has a lot of statistical homogeneity between these places. But Canadian cops are way better educated, and kill way less.
Around the world, cops that are better educated kill way less.
So why exactly are people excusing reductions in education requirements for police? It makes no sense. There's no supporting evidence that that's a good choice, and literal mountains showing that it's a bad one.
This thread is bizarro world.
I still don't see how you deny that more educated officers are less violent when I've made multiple links supporting that argument
You get an F for intro to stats. And an F- for being confidently wrong.
There is no “excusing” reductions in education. You have not demonstrated a relationship between these two things as important.
Guns. 1.2 per American, 0.35 per Canadian [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own... [1]: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-d...
If you want to really look into this, legitimately, the best thing to do would be to compare use police to each other based on education. This is likely hard to do. However, state-level requirements and deaths could be compared between states with similar crime/murder rates.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/police-kill...
I found [0], which in Appendix F has a state-by-state breakdown for only some states. Cross referencing it with your data source is useless, all the top states for per-capita police killings have their data omitted from that table.
[0]: https://www.policinginstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10...