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Comment by iAMkenough | Hacker News Reader

I would expect law enforcement coworkers to understand the law, department procedure, and public requests for their data. That’s expecting too much from the academy, I guess.

Those that fail to meet standards should be fired to spare the taxpayers from the lawsuits coming from AI-assisted complainants.

It’s also too much for Flock’s YC-funded technology to implement a field filter that rejects “LMAO” as a valid request.

At the very least, your local staff’s nationwide stalking credentials being harvested by phishing and abused by others should carry criminal negligence penalties. Governments should pass that liability onto this YC-funded startup company.

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It’s a federally protected right to skip over law enforcement officers candidates because they rank too high on an aptitude or IQ test.

Reasonable people would expect what you expect. We are not reasonable people.

This meme will not die, and here you can see it blossoming into something even weirder.

There is one (1) case in the literature, back in the early 2000s, where a department rejected a candidate as overqualified based on a cognitive assessment; the rejected applicant took that department to court and lost.

That's it; that's all the evidence.

Against that: most police departments around the country administer written tests with general cognitive components for which there is a floor score and no ceiling (the POST, the NTN, &c). And virtually no departments --- none I'm aware of --- administer IQ tests.

From all this, we've now got "a federally protected right"?

Yes, that’s how court / legal precedent works - for better and for worse.

Feel free to consult an attorney.

Edit: I thought the case went further up - but, “persuasive precedent” for other jurisdictions now exists all the same.

Edit2: since I’m seeing the username of someone with a decent clue,

> and no ceiling

was there one on paper for the hiring standards of the dept in the case in question?

Does that matter?, if there’s no legal issue with using it as a disqualifying factor? - for any candidate - whether or not they even score well?

Literally the only thing you know here is that one department didn't like one candidate and came up with a reason to deny him based on cognitive overperformance. For all you know, they didn't like his hair color, and came up with an excuse. And that's it: out of over 15,000 police departments in the US, almost 1,000,000 sworn officers, and over 25 years, this is the evidence you have for the claim that there's an enshrined "right" to reject police officer candidates who are "too intelligent".

It's an Internet urban myth. I'm just stepping in to call it out as such.

That it’s legal precedent is not Internet urban myth lol - regardless of the side-story of how the precedent came to be.

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