Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop? | Hacker News Reader

Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop?

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43 pointsjordanpg54 comments

"However, the courts sided with the lower police department. In its ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the city did not discriminate against Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test. In other words, no one who was deemed “too smart” for the job after taking the intelligence test was hired."

You can apply that logic to race too: "We tested ALL applicants for blackness, not ONLY the black applicants".

You are still sorting people out for something they cannot control...

High intelligence isn't what's called a "protected class," meaning smart people have not historically been discriminated against. That's the difference.

True, but there are specific attributes that constitute classes legally protected against discrimination. Race is one of them. Intelligence is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

I am not a lawyer, but it sounds like Jordan attempted to argue that intelligence should be considered an additional protected class, like race or religion, but the courts disagreed. Since intelligence isn't a protected class, and since the discrimination was applied equally across all applicants, Jordan didn't have any cause for compensation from the police department.

Your hypothetical situation, screening for blackness, would absolutely not fly since color is a protected class.

This is the standard applied to treating people differently on characteristics not part of a protected class:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review

There is also (though on a skim it might well not be relevant here) the notion that something else might be used as an excuse while someone is actually not being hired because they are part of a protected class. That is where "but we do this consistently" often enters in...

I definitely had a friend once who was told she had received too high a score for the police job she had applied for. I thought I remember at the time some mention of the rationale being that the police force didn't want people who were too independent-thinking to simply follow orders. Maybe that was just my friend's interpretation though!

A common argument is that they think intelligent people will become bored with the job and eventually leave it.

It is certainly possible to be "overqualified" for many sorts of jobs for exactly this reason, but the police are the only ones that I have ever heard of that actually test candidates to weed out those "easily bored" smart people. Other companies, for some reason, get by just by excluding people with impressive resumes.

I've heard that from others and got a similar impression after I did well on the ASVAB (US military aptitude test) and was speaking with a recruiter. It's possibly true, but it's also possible (and a less malicious explanation) that they just know you won't be happy in the position yourself and may not perform well as a result. In hindsight, the career path I was interested in in the military would have made me very unhappy, and although I thought the program they were steering me toward was quota driven, I suspect I actually would have done better in that program and been more interested.

I had a similar experience, wherein a National Guard recruiter actually talked me out of joining the army for that reason.

I also flirted with the Navy nuke program as I was finishing up my EE degree, but decided to abort the process mid-stream. At my first job after graduating my cubemate was a former Navy electrican, stationed on a carrier. What he told me about the nukes made me happy I chose to abort.

as someone thinking about navy nukes, may i ask what was unpalatable about it?

I served in a non-nuke role on a nuclear submarine for 4 years in the late 90's. My two cents:

If you already have a college degree or are close to finishing, it's best to stay away from the military completely unless you seriously plan on making a career of it. As a civilian you'll have lots more opportunities for adventure and for making a positive impact in the world. Also avoid the trap of letting the military pay for your degreee in exchange for X years of service.

If you're thinking of joining the military prior to college as an enlisted sailor, go for it. You'll meet lots of very interesting people that you otherwise wouldn't, and you may develop some good habits that will help you later. Your personal definition of what is "hard" will probably change considerably.

But DO NOT join for more than 4 years. Any less and you'll be stuck scrubbing bilges the entire time. Any more and you'll go crazy from the lack of freedom, and your math/science knowledge will have seriously atrophied by the time you get out and continue your studies.

This brings us to the nuke program. Unless things have changed since I was in, nuclear power school requires a 6 year commitment. It's definitely not worth it. The skills aren't really that transferable and, judging from the many nuclear-trained sailors I knew, the work really can't be that difficult. Trust me, if you can get through beginning algebra, you can get through nuclear power school. Recruiters will try to flatter your ego and make you feel like a genius when you get a qualifying ASVAB score. I was told I got a perfect score on the ASVAB, and I'm more proud of the hippo I managed to color with a crayon when I was 5 years old. Quick, as fast as you can: What's 4/2? 2*3? 5-1? Next question: If a gear turns clockwise, what direction does the gear touching it turn? Congratulations! You qualify for nuclear power school!

Finally, in the likely chance that you end up serving on a nuclear carrier, you'll be working with some of the biggest dirtbags this side of humanity. Imagine sleeping in a dorm full of people who only joined the navy because they couldn't make it on the outside as drug dealers.

Could just be the same logic that gets used in any job search quite often of "they're overqualified for this role and so will quickly get bored and move on [and I don't have anything more suited to them]", which wouldn't be specific to the police at all.

meaning that at least according to the test, it requires more intelligence to sell insurance than to solve crimes.)

Police do not solve crimes. Police enforce laws. Detectives solve crimes. I would expect that detectives and police officers would be held to different standards.

The pool of detectives is typically pulled from line police, isn't it? By restricting the IQ of those enforcing the laws, you're creating a poor candidate pool for detectives.

In France, detectives and police officers have to go the university to study the law and other subjects. I thought it was the same in most countries, isn't it?

Not always. In the US, more common is a sort of police academy. Actual higher education is not really required.

In the U.S., different organizations have different standards. There are 2- and 4-year criminal justice university programs, but many police departments only require a high school diploma. A criminal justice degree or other related degree is usually a plus even if it's not required. As an example, the Minnesota State Patrol requires the applicants either have a 2- or 4-year degree in any subject or be a licensed peace officer (which could have happened through a criminal justice degree or through a police academy).

Most large cities have their own police academy or there's a regional academy that several cities use. Police academy is usually three or four months of intensive training that new recruits go through (a little like boot camp for the armed forces). After graduating from an academy, the officers are sometimes rotated through probationary assignments and then given a more permanent assignment.

Detectives and other specialists are generally promoted out of the ranks of police officers.

Uh, police detectives?

Exactly, police departments do want to hire smart people, just not too many and they have to be the right kind of smart.

My brother is a cop and an inspector (detective for you in the US). He's smart but not at all bookish. So he's got the right "cop" personality and the fact that he was smart was a good thing.

Now that he's hiring cops, he's careful to only hire "smart" cops if he has a sergeant position opening up in a few years or if he's ok with them moving on to a new department in 3-5 years.

My uncle was a "dumb" cop for 25 years. He was quite happy writing tickets and arresting people for the bulk of his career. He only took a sergeant's job when street work got to hard on him physically.

I think you are describing something similar to the US Military where there are to "paths" into it: officers and enlisted.

In the US, there is one for police: police academy and then work your way up the ranks to detective, etc.

That isn't even close to being true. SNCOs and WOs need to be pretty clever, and they start off as E-1s. It works for the military, but then they aren't taking the short sighted position of filtering out folks who are "too smart" to be an E-1.

That's the problem - in the USA, detective and police are not two different occupations. You can only become a detective by being promoted from the ranks of policemen.

i.e. if the maximum IQ for a beat cop is 110, naturally the maximum IQ for a detective will also be 110.

The police union is mostly responsible for this, because they don't want people coming in from outside and skipping the grind to become detectives.

Fast-forward 8 or so years to today, where crimes involving mobile devices or computers are the norm. Police departments are recruiting tech-savvy young adults out of high school, then sending them to training on digital forensics and the like. Everything goes well for a couple years until they hit the agency's pay ceiling and move to the private sector. There are plenty of opportunities for smart people in law enforcement today that don't equate to boredom - compensation has more to do with it IMO.

This implies we have a police force that is unable to sense or react to nuance in a situation, and who implement a fast but error prone pattern matching algorithm to identify criminality - which is entirely consistent with their behavior.

I suppose this wouldn't be a problem if we had a justice system that, presumably powered by better brains, could quickly throw out the inevitable false positives this quick and dirty algo produces. But the justice system is so slow, so broken, and prone to pro-police bias that it exists primarily to get as much punishment as possible out of those the unintelligent police have tagged as "criminals". That is, the police are the de facto judge, jury, and executioner, and they wield that power with all the delight that you might imagine someone of low intelligence would experience at being given such power.

(Of course, there is still a way to avoid a false positive if you have a great deal of money, which is probably why there is no great pressure to reform the system. Otherwise you're spending 3 years on Riker's without a trial.)

The justice system is "broken" only if you believe that it's ultimate goal is justice.

The truth however is that it's simply double-speak. 1984 illustrated this beautifully. The Ministry of Truth was in charge of fabricating lies. The Ministry of Love was in charge of punishing and torturing dissidents. The Ministry of Peace was in charge of conducting perpetual war.

In our case, the justice system is in charge of injustice, for example by making sure that rich people remain in power and that their wealth and property are protected (from the poor) and ruthlessly prosecuting anyone who threatens the social order -- especially minorities.

I think that's a dangerous way to think about things - not dangerous because it will get you branded a Winston Smith and arrested, but because it sets up an unnecessary and unhealthy duality between us and them. Injustice in the criminal system is, more often than not, driven by smug complacency and convenient, lazy bias rather than any real desire for injustice. That is, the "majority evil" position is to simply do nothing while good people get shredded in the machine - they aren't actively trying to sharpen the machine's teeth.

Even the police who make mistakes, I would guess, are usually doing so out of laziness. The details take too much effort to see. The circumstances are always complicated. It's much easier to be happy if you are always "just doing your job". Check the boxes, go home and watch football.

The solution here is not to cynically label the system as unrepentantly evil, but rather to offer inducements to their job properly, by for example installing ubiquitous surveillance, and allowing supervisors (people with higher intelligence and morality) to review and punish police mis-behavior, and reward exemplary behavior.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm not suggesting that the majority is evil. On the contrary, the majority are simply lazy and complacent. In 1984 this was captured perfectly. There is the Inner Party, who is a small, elite group who fabricate the lies and call the shots. There's the Outer Party, the relatively uneducated and loyal group that naively believes in the party's ideals and does its bidding (e.g. the police), and there's the general populace (what Orwell labeled "the proles).

The most remarkable thing about the setting in 1984 is that almost everyone believes that the Party is altruistic and noble and does everything (including conducting wars) for the greater good, and that any imperfections in the way the system works are unintended and can be fixed. Indeed, keeping up this illusion is so important for social order that it is the primary motivation behind the Inner Party's desire for total control through things like state-sponsored propaganda and ubiquitous surveillance.

side note: my hazy recollection of 1984 didn't include the names of the ministries, so when you went from truth to love, i assumed the next one, a la ultima, would be courage.

> The test, which is used by other employers, not just law enforcement, poses questions such as: “In the set of words below, what word is different from the others? A. Beef. B. Mackerel. C. Veal. D. Bacon E. Lamb.”

I hate that kind of question. There are at least two obvious answers:

B. The others are all food that comes from domesticated land mammals. Mackerel as a food comes from a fish. Mackerel is also different because it is both the name of the animal and the name of the meat: mackerel comes from mackerels, whereas beef comes from cows and bulls, as does veal, bacon comes from pigs, and lamb comes from sheep.

D. Bacon is a specific preparation of meat (cured) from specific parts (sides or back) of the pig. The others can be prepared in a variety of ways and can come from more regions of the animal.

Also possibly, "D. Bacon is treif/haram, the others can be kosher/halal."

i was going to go with: all words except for bacon use only the vowels e and/or a.

I cant see anything wrong with this. It's just smart hiring.

The error is first done when you hire detectives and excutives exclusively from the cop force, because then you start with a bad selection (since beeing a good cop and a good detective is two different things).

Does anyone know how much it costs to have a job applicant do the Wonderlic test?

I have a small side business with a friend that has one employee and we're about to hire another one and have long been curious about using the Wonderlic test.

Why don't you google it and find out?

I heard that both cops and taxi drivers aren't suited for creative and theoretical thinkers. Mainly because it's a lot of waiting. They will get bored and quit.

Of course 'smart' means a lot of things. But thinking outside the box is probably not going to make a great cop - there's process and policy to observe scrupulously.

Boredom. There is perception that police work is exciting and fast-paced, presumably from television, movies, and books.

I've heard more than once that police spend a huge fraction of their time waiting, filling out paperwork, and sitting in court.

I drove a taxi for a year back in the 90's. Most drivers do play the waiting game, but that wasn't for me. The company I worked for awarded call-ins to the closest cab available rather than whoever waited the longest, which meant that you could develop a strategy of being at the right place at the right time to optimize your fares. This turned out to be a much more lucrative strategy than the sit-and-wait deals. I rarely drove more than a mile or two without a fare. Competing for fares can be quite challenging and rewarding in the right situation. In the end I didn't quit because of boredom. I quit because taxi drivers were getting killed in their cabs too often.

How did you figure out your strategy for being in the right place at the right time, and what sort of stuff did it consist of?

You learn the people of your town over time. When calls come out they usually come from certain areas of town at certain times of day or certain days of the week. You learn where all the bars are, when they let out, where those people are likely to go and what the odds are that that area will produce a new fare. Companies that are hiring a lot of workers at once house their workers in certain preferred hotels. Longer-term contractors are likely to live in certain other neighborhoods. In my case it was Jacksonville and you have a navy base here where a large number of sailors from various foreign countries will show up all at once needing to go places when their ship comes in. If you can anticipate when that ship will start its shore leave that can be worth money.

In Hollywood movies the taxi drivers will have random conversations with passengers to advance the plot. In real life, the purpose of this conversation is for the driver to learn where his next fares might come from. Sometimes the passenger will figure out what you're trying to do and will offer you valuable information. No reason not to. It's a win-win.

Not all drivers do this. Some companies hand out jobs to the next driver waiting in a queue so everything is fair and equal. Some drivers prefer this system. But this produces poor customer service because that queue of drivers might be on the other side of town, and the fare will be waiting a long time. I never quite understood that mentality. I never worked the airport because the airport does not reward hard work. It's just a dumb queue and the fares are unpredictable. Not profitable enough for me.

Interesting stuff, thanks. Too bad about the safety trouble.

Where were you driving taxis? I was reading your comment expecting "I quit because I moved on to another profession" or anything else that wasn't taxi drivers getting killed.

Jacksonville. Certain areas of town are known for high crime and you take a risk working those parts of town. This was a long time ago, but two or three drivers got killed in like a month's time. It sucks for the people who live in those areas that they can't get good taxi service but you only get one chance at life. I can understand that desperate people do desperate things, but I am not desperate. I like my life so I prefer to stay away from those areas of town even today.

It looks like the servers are getting brought down by the HN traffic.

sherlock

Another "advantage" of the inverse cutoff is that it reduces the racial disparity in test-based hiring.

That statement is predicated on the assumption that one race is smarter than another, which is unlikely to be true.

Or the statement could be predicated on the notion that certain ethnic groups have traditionally written the tests for "intelligence" and thus, have biased them for what that particular ethnic group considers intelligence.

There's a lot of research about how the SAT discriminates against minorities because white people historically wrote the test and that gives whites an edge, intentional or not.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sat+discriminates+against+mi...

There is a persistent scholastic "achievement gap" between races in the US, which jives with fiatmoney's comment: a sufficiently unscrupulous (racist!) employer could use standardized testing as a proxy for racial discrimination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_...

(FWIW, I recently heard the term "opportunity gap" as an alternative to "achievement gap," and I quite like it: it puts the burden on society to improve education, rather than blaming students for "failing" to surmount inequity.)

"acheivement gap" is a factual description of the outcome being described, "opportunity gap" (when used in the same context) is a (reasonable) hypothesis about the (or, used in a weaker sense, a contributing) cause of that outcome.

The key phrase in there is "test-based". http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/S...

Having independent thought is hard to control in making a force of people. To have a force, an army, a unit of people, they have to respond predicatively to all commands. If you put together a force you must believe without doubt that they will follow your command. Police are selected and conditioned accordingly. The military does this as well, training people to kill, and be killed. In previous engagements having people think twice meant death of themselves or others. You had to condition your units to run out into bullets, one after the other, until you made enough of an advance to kill the enemy or die trying. I don't worry about average intelligence officers, but I do worry about average intelligence commanders, judges, and people in control of these forces. When you join they army they will always place you in the position that most suits your psych test, or will even reject you if needed. How is this different? Don't become a cop, become a detective, become an FBI agent, become a judge, or public defender and volunteer firefighter.

What you are describing might be true of other countries, but that isn't the way it works in the US. You aren't too far off on the military training issue, immediate obedience to orders is incredibly important - at the lowest ranks. The US military has an extremely long institutional memory, and over a couple hundred years they've figured out a way of doing this that works pretty well. The conditioning for immediate obedience to orders and illusion of immortality wears off after a couple of years, right around the time that personnel start picking up rank and assuming positions of responsibility over others. So by that time they won't be charging any machinegun nests, they'll be in a position to order others to do so - at this point it should be clear to you why filtering out intelligent people is a bad idea :) The conditioning wears off, but you can't fix stupid.

I think you're right, and as someone else said the commanders, chiefs and detectives are promoted, not hired in, which makes limiting intelligent hires a terrible plan for longevity.

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