Just another example of how ripe for innovation our beloved institutions are. Hanging on to century-old processes for how we match young people to them and prepare and certify them is madness. There are lots of good ideas in the comments and I like the idea of a national training program, but I think a good first step would be leveraging the community college system to provide basic core curriculum, match young people to necessary institutional professions (police, fire, health care, education, civil service, social work, etc.), and then pass them on to universities, academies, etc. for further education and training. We need to generate a pipeline of talent to fill these necessary roles in our communities. It would be a good use of federal funding to make community college tuition-free, much better than to send them off to high-dollar universities only to come back and pay off their student loans later. Just an idea, there are many others out there that need to be considered rather than the NIMBY approach to holding on to these 1924 ways of filling out the workforce that somehow are still in place.
It's a good idea, but there are going to be some problems. First, it remains unclear whether "college degree" is mainly a marker for someone who thinks clearly, or mainly a marker documenting that someone has received valuable training. Second, when comparing policing in the US to Western European countries, a major issue is the ubiquity of handguns in the US.
In my state (Mass.) there is a law (the Quinn bill) that entitles police to pay raises when they get degrees. The first raise comes through for a bachelor's degree, but additional raises are granted for a masters and Phd. It's been in effect since the early 70s, so it would probably be possible to study what effect that has had...
It’s important to point out that police officers in Europe get much more training but it would be important to know what all that training is about and how much relevance it would have to a college police training program rather then US police training in general
I certainly appreciate the contrast to other open-society-democracies, and the humble tone of "lets maybe try this small thing first". I wish we did that more instead of just comparing how things are done in CA vs. AL, Liberal-urban vs. Conservative-rural. Yes, yes, things are different in the USA vs. Denmark, but surely there is _SOMETHING_ to learn from places where results are plainly superior?
I 100% agree with the idea of recruiting more educated cops but, let's be honest, the reason cops with degrees perform better is about who you recruit not what skills they learn (indeed, arguably, this is most of what higher ed does generally). If all you do is send existing police to sit in a classroom for a year free of charge while you pay them not much is going to change since it's ultimately the filtering effect doing the work (I'm sure there is a bit of additional benefit from the particular subject but I bet bachelor's degrees in poetry are almost as correlated with outcomes).
Yes, I believe we need to turn policing into a higher status profession -- otherwise you get too many police officers taking the job just so they can push others around or don't get tickets etc. But that requires changing who becomes an officer and how selective and difficult the process to become one is.
And the elephant in the room here is that if you want people who have the skills/qualifications to enter other professions, e.g., the kind of people who are motivated to and can succeed in an educational environment, to become police you need to either pay them more or offer more social status (and the later is a chicken and egg situation).
I am less sold on the need for a West Point. But I do think a sort of ROTC for police would be a great idea and could encourage folks to go into the police who might not otherwise and improve the quality of police officers. In states were community college isn't free, a similar program for that makes some sense to me too.
I would also like to see a system where someone with a four year degree could serve as a police officer for 6 years, take a set number of online classes in civil law topics, and then qualify to take the bar exam to being come an attorney. In Washington State, we have a similar program where someone can be a paralegal for four years and then take the bar exam. I think being in law enforcement would provide a similarly useful program. I think this would be a good way to recruit policy officers as, strangely, many more folks want to be attorneys than can get spots in affordable law schools. People working in the police with the goal of going into law would also be likely to be more interested in understanding the legal rights of the public would be my guess. It could also help increase access to justice for citizens by expanding bar associations so that the price of legal services wasn't so out of reach for so many people. It would also likely help to diversify the bar since the normal tracking into law (4 year degree, LSAT, expensive three year law degree) seems to be creating barriers to getting more BIPOC folks in the law. Police departments tend to be much more diverse in terms of race but also class and life experience than your average law school class and we could use more of that in my profession.
I think when it comes to having better data driven information, states would be better served investing in research in already existing state university programs in criminology.
There is an existing parallel in the Fire Service (the other high cost and high value municipal service). Fire Departments often require recruits to have a basic Fire Science certificate which can be obtained through Community Colleges (which are much more accessible) - see https://www.kckcc.edu/academics/programs-and-departments/fire-science/index.html - as an example. Going a step further some departments require that new hires get a Paramedic certification within three years - which the department will pay for - so employees can run fire or ems calls.
There is the need for more elite training as Slow Boring has written about - eg supervisory training etc - but for entry level there is a model that could be readily adopted.
When I worked with law enforcement with the state park system in CA, most of my supervisors were Rangers with college degrees and then went to get POST certificates and were clearly better on average than the non-degree Rangers in terms of judgement visitor service. I'd agree that a 4 year degree isn't necessary but helpful, however a 23 or 25 year minimum age requirement to be a cop is a good idea IMHO as the maturity absolutely matters. Some kind of workshop/continuing ed requirement would be great! As with everything I think the big problem is funding and the fragmented nature of law enforcement in the US, probably impossible to get a college program/academy system to recruit more broadly and keep up standards without it being federally funded as localities by and large won't/can't fund them.
I fear the governors and state legislators would simply impose a curriculum consistent with their police as social workers or police as paramilitary philosophies with said curriculum including only texts and studies which support their view of what policing should be.
I kind of like the idea of cop West Point for people in leadership positions. I still regularly think about this in depth look at Minneapolis’ police department from a few years ago:
I think you could read this and reasonably come away from it with the attitude that they just need to get rid of the whole organization and start over. You could also read it and come away thinking “huh, so have they actually tried managing the department? What if we tried that?” I used to be on the board of a public sector union, and it is very possible to fire bad public employees. You just have to write some stuff down and go through a somewhat lengthy process.
All that said, there are many parts of the public sector (others in this thread have mentioned teaching) that have been carpet bombed with master’s degrees, and they basically all work worse than before that happened.
Maybe the main thing is that people should get in trouble for doing a bad job.
Build the National Police University. Put it in North Carolina (more college-educated voters in the Research Triangle? Yes, please, hehe). Offer a 1-year non-degree track, a 2-year Associate degree track, and a 4-year Bachelor degree track. The difference between the tracks? Level of abstract thinking (although all 3 tracks would have a solid basis in communication, criminal justice, psychology, sociology), and earnings potential (the 1-year track salary ceiling maxes out before the 2-year track, which maxes out before the 4-year track). Subsidize satellite 1-year and 2-year programs at public universities, and anyone who completes the 2-year track at State U can have the option to transfer to the National Police University to complete the 4-year track if they desire.
I think forming national education programs for police leaders is a good idea. I'm not so wild about creating an elite West Point-type university or inserting programs into existing universities. Most of these would presumably be to train higher ranking officers -- lieutenant and above. In other words, these are the people who would be taken out of executing typical police operations and instead be providing more administrative and managerial functions as they rise through the ranks. I don't see how this would have a big impact on police culture which tends to be set and perpetuated at the lower ranks.
What would be far more useful and better for transforming police culture would be to adopt military-style non-commissioned officer academy type approaches. These are the institutions that train sergeants (at various ranks) who work directly with the mass of service men and women, train them, help imbue them with culture and, unlike higher ranking officers who may face and up or out pressure, can stay in those roles for most of their careers. An interesting model for this type of training can be seen in the Army's NCO Academy, with its four levels of training: base leadership course, advanced leadership course, and senior leadership course, and master leadership course (https://www.ncolcoe.army.mil/Portals/71/NCO%20Academies/JBLM/ref/4.May2021Volume1%20Common%20Core%20Competencies.pdf?ver=lla-ftQ26sXq2-YogCK6-g%3d%3d). Nor should such a program be housed at a four-year university (in the Army's case, the four courses total ~400 hours of courses). Instead, they should be instituted at one or more of our excellent technical schools.
There's no competitive advantage for existing cops to making new cops go through onorus procedures to get a job, but there is for incumbent professionals.
I genuinely find the level of criminal accountability for police violence quite scary but I’m just not sure that sending a sizable minority of officers to college is something that would make me know that I’m totally safe if I’ve not done anything wrong.
Nor does it really move the needle that much that police are going to become good at protecting people from certain types of abuse.
Just another example of how ripe for innovation our beloved institutions are. Hanging on to century-old processes for how we match young people to them and prepare and certify them is madness. There are lots of good ideas in the comments and I like the idea of a national training program, but I think a good first step would be leveraging the community college system to provide basic core curriculum, match young people to necessary institutional professions (police, fire, health care, education, civil service, social work, etc.), and then pass them on to universities, academies, etc. for further education and training. We need to generate a pipeline of talent to fill these necessary roles in our communities. It would be a good use of federal funding to make community college tuition-free, much better than to send them off to high-dollar universities only to come back and pay off their student loans later. Just an idea, there are many others out there that need to be considered rather than the NIMBY approach to holding on to these 1924 ways of filling out the workforce that somehow are still in place.
It's a good idea, but there are going to be some problems. First, it remains unclear whether "college degree" is mainly a marker for someone who thinks clearly, or mainly a marker documenting that someone has received valuable training. Second, when comparing policing in the US to Western European countries, a major issue is the ubiquity of handguns in the US.
In my state (Mass.) there is a law (the Quinn bill) that entitles police to pay raises when they get degrees. The first raise comes through for a bachelor's degree, but additional raises are granted for a masters and Phd. It's been in effect since the early 70s, so it would probably be possible to study what effect that has had...
It’s important to point out that police officers in Europe get much more training but it would be important to know what all that training is about and how much relevance it would have to a college police training program rather then US police training in general
I certainly appreciate the contrast to other open-society-democracies, and the humble tone of "lets maybe try this small thing first". I wish we did that more instead of just comparing how things are done in CA vs. AL, Liberal-urban vs. Conservative-rural. Yes, yes, things are different in the USA vs. Denmark, but surely there is _SOMETHING_ to learn from places where results are plainly superior?
I 100% agree with the idea of recruiting more educated cops but, let's be honest, the reason cops with degrees perform better is about who you recruit not what skills they learn (indeed, arguably, this is most of what higher ed does generally). If all you do is send existing police to sit in a classroom for a year free of charge while you pay them not much is going to change since it's ultimately the filtering effect doing the work (I'm sure there is a bit of additional benefit from the particular subject but I bet bachelor's degrees in poetry are almost as correlated with outcomes).
Yes, I believe we need to turn policing into a higher status profession -- otherwise you get too many police officers taking the job just so they can push others around or don't get tickets etc. But that requires changing who becomes an officer and how selective and difficult the process to become one is.
And the elephant in the room here is that if you want people who have the skills/qualifications to enter other professions, e.g., the kind of people who are motivated to and can succeed in an educational environment, to become police you need to either pay them more or offer more social status (and the later is a chicken and egg situation).
I am less sold on the need for a West Point. But I do think a sort of ROTC for police would be a great idea and could encourage folks to go into the police who might not otherwise and improve the quality of police officers. In states were community college isn't free, a similar program for that makes some sense to me too.
I would also like to see a system where someone with a four year degree could serve as a police officer for 6 years, take a set number of online classes in civil law topics, and then qualify to take the bar exam to being come an attorney. In Washington State, we have a similar program where someone can be a paralegal for four years and then take the bar exam. I think being in law enforcement would provide a similarly useful program. I think this would be a good way to recruit policy officers as, strangely, many more folks want to be attorneys than can get spots in affordable law schools. People working in the police with the goal of going into law would also be likely to be more interested in understanding the legal rights of the public would be my guess. It could also help increase access to justice for citizens by expanding bar associations so that the price of legal services wasn't so out of reach for so many people. It would also likely help to diversify the bar since the normal tracking into law (4 year degree, LSAT, expensive three year law degree) seems to be creating barriers to getting more BIPOC folks in the law. Police departments tend to be much more diverse in terms of race but also class and life experience than your average law school class and we could use more of that in my profession.
I think when it comes to having better data driven information, states would be better served investing in research in already existing state university programs in criminology.
There is an existing parallel in the Fire Service (the other high cost and high value municipal service). Fire Departments often require recruits to have a basic Fire Science certificate which can be obtained through Community Colleges (which are much more accessible) - see https://www.kckcc.edu/academics/programs-and-departments/fire-science/index.html - as an example. Going a step further some departments require that new hires get a Paramedic certification within three years - which the department will pay for - so employees can run fire or ems calls.
There is the need for more elite training as Slow Boring has written about - eg supervisory training etc - but for entry level there is a model that could be readily adopted.
When I worked with law enforcement with the state park system in CA, most of my supervisors were Rangers with college degrees and then went to get POST certificates and were clearly better on average than the non-degree Rangers in terms of judgement visitor service. I'd agree that a 4 year degree isn't necessary but helpful, however a 23 or 25 year minimum age requirement to be a cop is a good idea IMHO as the maturity absolutely matters. Some kind of workshop/continuing ed requirement would be great! As with everything I think the big problem is funding and the fragmented nature of law enforcement in the US, probably impossible to get a college program/academy system to recruit more broadly and keep up standards without it being federally funded as localities by and large won't/can't fund them.
I fear the governors and state legislators would simply impose a curriculum consistent with their police as social workers or police as paramilitary philosophies with said curriculum including only texts and studies which support their view of what policing should be.
I kind of like the idea of cop West Point for people in leadership positions. I still regularly think about this in depth look at Minneapolis’ police department from a few years ago:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-minneapolis-protects-its-worst-police-officers-until-its-too-late/
I think you could read this and reasonably come away from it with the attitude that they just need to get rid of the whole organization and start over. You could also read it and come away thinking “huh, so have they actually tried managing the department? What if we tried that?” I used to be on the board of a public sector union, and it is very possible to fire bad public employees. You just have to write some stuff down and go through a somewhat lengthy process.
All that said, there are many parts of the public sector (others in this thread have mentioned teaching) that have been carpet bombed with master’s degrees, and they basically all work worse than before that happened.
Maybe the main thing is that people should get in trouble for doing a bad job.
I *LOVE* this take.
Build the National Police University. Put it in North Carolina (more college-educated voters in the Research Triangle? Yes, please, hehe). Offer a 1-year non-degree track, a 2-year Associate degree track, and a 4-year Bachelor degree track. The difference between the tracks? Level of abstract thinking (although all 3 tracks would have a solid basis in communication, criminal justice, psychology, sociology), and earnings potential (the 1-year track salary ceiling maxes out before the 2-year track, which maxes out before the 4-year track). Subsidize satellite 1-year and 2-year programs at public universities, and anyone who completes the 2-year track at State U can have the option to transfer to the National Police University to complete the 4-year track if they desire.
I think forming national education programs for police leaders is a good idea. I'm not so wild about creating an elite West Point-type university or inserting programs into existing universities. Most of these would presumably be to train higher ranking officers -- lieutenant and above. In other words, these are the people who would be taken out of executing typical police operations and instead be providing more administrative and managerial functions as they rise through the ranks. I don't see how this would have a big impact on police culture which tends to be set and perpetuated at the lower ranks.
What would be far more useful and better for transforming police culture would be to adopt military-style non-commissioned officer academy type approaches. These are the institutions that train sergeants (at various ranks) who work directly with the mass of service men and women, train them, help imbue them with culture and, unlike higher ranking officers who may face and up or out pressure, can stay in those roles for most of their careers. An interesting model for this type of training can be seen in the Army's NCO Academy, with its four levels of training: base leadership course, advanced leadership course, and senior leadership course, and master leadership course (https://www.ncolcoe.army.mil/Portals/71/NCO%20Academies/JBLM/ref/4.May2021Volume1%20Common%20Core%20Competencies.pdf?ver=lla-ftQ26sXq2-YogCK6-g%3d%3d). Nor should such a program be housed at a four-year university (in the Army's case, the four courses total ~400 hours of courses). Instead, they should be instituted at one or more of our excellent technical schools.
I was required to do twice as many hours of training to become a hairstylist as the average cop in the US.
Somebody explain that.
There's no competitive advantage for existing cops to making new cops go through onorus procedures to get a job, but there is for incumbent professionals.
More people want to become hairstylists than cops, so less of a pipeline problem?
Okay, I’ll bite! 🧐😉
The taboo against ruining a woman’s hair is REALLY strong.
I genuinely find the level of criminal accountability for police violence quite scary but I’m just not sure that sending a sizable minority of officers to college is something that would make me know that I’m totally safe if I’ve not done anything wrong.
Nor does it really move the needle that much that police are going to become good at protecting people from certain types of abuse.
"...it could be merely the fact that a college education is just a proxy for an older police officer."
It'd be a lot cheaper to try that first and use the money saved to raise police salaries.