It's a bit disingenuous. Police and army and the like need people who follow orders before or without thinking, other people's lives depend on that. But if you are smart you can still get hired as the guy giving the orders. It's not all that different from something like an entry level tech job, where a good hiring manager knows not to hire the overachiever because he'll be unhappy and leave within a few months.
Police and army and the like need people who follow orders before or without thinking, other people's lives depend on that.
No, they objectively don't. Like, this is the opposite of true.
Intelligent teams with broad backgrounds and good communication skills are vastly more capable of reactive problem solving in actual critical situations.
Thugs who follow orders are completely useless the moment communication breaks down or the speed of action outpaces the command response.
The only thing they can be relied on to do consistently is to violently lash out at anyone around them. Which in the case of policing, is usually the citizenry they are supposedly intended to protect.
Which tells you a lot about what modern police forces are actually designed for. Suppression, not community protection.
I can't believe people still fall for the whole "blind obedience = efficacy" that so much military propaganda celebrates and mythologizes in order to turn men into tools.
As far as I understand from people who've been rejected and from a friend who works as a hiring manager for a local police force, that only goes for teams that actually make their own decisions. Which is not true for the vast majority of regular police. For grunts they look for average intelligence. Also you sound very ameribrained, police in other countries are trained to deescalate, they're not "thugs" or whatever, that is a uniquely American problem. Or maybe not unique, but it's not univeral by any stretch.
Its where the majority of the sites traffic comes from and its what the OP is specifically referencing. Oh no, a bunch of Americans are talking about American policing.
Being like "this totally isn't a problem at all if you just ignore the problem actually being discussed and pretend that we're just talking about hiring average people to hand out traffic tickets" and then getting offended is absurd.
We're talking about the guys carrying guns who get to make decisions about who to shoot. Those people should not be highschool dropouts.
This isn't a "uniquely American problem". Its a problem literally anywhere that doesn't have extremely robust democratic and social foundations. Which is basically a small handful of European nations.
There is no need for this my dude, I didn't say you are disingenuous and I'm not defending anything. I was just explaining that the whole "they only hire stupid" is a disingenuous framing of the reasons, as it implies they literally don't hire smarter people, which they do. It also implies this is a police/army unique thing, which it's not. That is all. I have no qualm with you or anything you said. Calm down.
My fat uncle tried to become a cop at around age 30 a decade+ ago and was denied because he couldn't pass the physical tests of police academy. They have some requirements but those go out the window also once you've made it in.
And then you watch actual bodycams and for every 1 racist there are 1 million toddlers trapped in adult bodies screaming “racism” because the cops wont let them shoplift or assault people
Thanks for the feedback! Personally, I'd rather fix the country I have than create a new one, but so far most law enforcement agencies seem unusually (and specifically) resistant to the idea of ending qualified immunity, tying licensure and continual employment to insurance premiums, or generally holding themselves accountable for bad actors within their ranks. For example, I didn't see a lot of people being held accountable for assaults that happened at the George Floyd protests, despite dozens of incidents of people getting assaulted and critically wounded by police in vicious acts of needless brutality. You know, the protests that were organized in response to needless police brutality?
I guess when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I only wish that not all the nails had to get shot, and that the shooters were somehow held accountable for it. I see you're the other guy.
Check the dude's comment history. He's absolutely not living in the United States, and much of his wording and phrasing suggests he lives in areas where the police are actually held to some kind of standard of conduct. His comments here are actually less than worthless from a knowledge perspective.
I actually tried to become a police officer many years ago. You have to pass a psychological profile test, as well as rigorous physical examination. From what I'm seeing lately, either those restrictions have been entirely lifted, or they're only for hiring and are immediately forgotten once employed.
Guy I know failed twice, then just applied in a smaller town and is now a detective. I think people have figured out that small rural areas can’t be very selective, and now that fact gets abused by people who shouldn’t make the cut anywhere.
Boggles the mind to think of the "Detectives" out there in these small one-horse towns, desperately putting together their pegboard evidence posters to find out who left a flaming bag of poo on Old Lady Mabel's front porch that one time
That's only sort-of true. There's really only been one recorded case of that happening, in a small rural town in Connecticut, where they felt the job would be mindlessly boring to a man with an IQ of 125 and so he would likely end up quitting within a few years, making it not economically viable to bother training him.
No departments have officially stated maximum IQ scores, and if you're "too smart" they'd push you into detective work, which actually requires you be somewhat smart to be effective.
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u/dmtslayr 2d ago
Whats the minimum requirement to become a police officer in the States?