
Court rules that barring high IQs for cops is not unconstitutional (2000) - tosh
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
======
quicklime
> But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on
> the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work
> and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

It's easy to think this is some weird quirk of police recruiting, but the
concept of "overqualified" candidates is common across many job roles. I've
heard plenty of hiring managers talk about candidates that they've rejected
because they thought they'd get bored quickly and move on.

It sucks for people who have had an impressive career trajectory (or in this
case high test scores) but want to shift gears a little to focus on other
things like family, hobbies, or just want to avoid burnout.

There's an implicit assumption on the part of these hiring managers that
everyone should be working at 100% of their capacity, and that flexibility
shouldn't be given to those who want a different balance in life.

~~~
deanCommie
Police work:

* Pays really well

* Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges

* Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation

* Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes

* Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive

And we haven't even gotten to actual detective work and the complexity of
solving crimes.

On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ
individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force. Yes, there
is obviously a danger/risk element, and physical requirements, both which
would lose some viable applicants. But by and large it SHOULD be a job that
attracts interest from highly intelligent members of our society.

It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the
system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population
dominating the forces.

It can be fixed, but it's probably a generational project.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Pays really well

How much do you think police are paid?

[https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-
be...](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-
benefits.page)

> Starting salary: $42,500

That's in New York City. Ouch.

> may potentially earn over $100,000 per year

And that's what they're advertising as an aspirational possibility! Even a
first-year engineer will earn more than that.

You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers
getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers
earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.

~~~
rayiner
New York City is an outlier in combining low pay and high cost of living.
Baltimore (Freddie Grey) officers start at $55k, in a city where a nice
townhouse costs $250,000. In Minneapolis starting salary for new officers is
$55-70k depending on qualifications. Chicago PD officers start at $72,000
after the probationary period. Generous benefits add $20k+ to that figure.

Note the median starting college graduate salary is about $50,000. Median mid-
career college graduate salary is $80,000.

~~~
lostlogin
> In Minneapolis starting salary for new officers is $55-70k depending on
> qualifications.

Wonder how their recruiting will be doing now? They will need to raise that a
lot to get reasonable candidates now.

------
jcrawfordor
The test involved is called the Wonderlic Personnel Test, and is a different
matter from IQ although the creator of the test claims comparability. A
Wonderlic score of 20 is intended to be equivalent to an IQ score of 100 (e.g.
the median), although it's questionable how well it aligns with IQ which is
tested using a pretty significantly different methodology - most
significantly, completion time is a major factor in the Wonderlic (it is
designed to be too long to complete within the short allotted time and the
number of questions the candidate completes is a major factor in scoring),
which is much less the case for IQ tests.

The use of the Wonderlic is actually surprisingly widespread if you haven't
been exposed to the world of industrial psychology. It's supposed to be a good
way to screen people for suitability for all kinds of jobs, and there is
research to show that people with higher Wonderlic scores are generally more
successful in their careers. I do not know of any research suggesting that
individuals with a "too high" Wonderlic score are more likely to turn over,
although there's certainly a strong cultural belief that this is the case.

The Wonderlic has been subject to quite a bit of criticism. First, it is
available in a set of multiple test forms and it is well-known that some of
the test forms are more difficult than others, so you cannot really compare
scores between test forms like you would expect. There are probably still
employers doing this even though the vendor now recommends against. Second,
several of the questions are specifically related to uncommon vocabulary, and
the questions further date back to the 1940s so a couple of them are somewhat
archaic. This creates a strong preference against non-native English speakers.
More generally, the Wonderlic is thought to emphasize literacy over numeracy
or other areas of intelligence.

Intelligence measurement is a complex topic as many ways have been tried to
measure intelligence and it's not always understood how they relate to each
other, as they do not necessarily correlate across people. The Wonderlic
correlates well with certain intelligence measures and poorly with others, as
is often the state of affairs.

~~~
arprocter
It's also used by the NFL during the draft

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rayiner
"OKs" is such a terrible word to use for a court case. The court isn't ruling
on "what's okay" it's ruling on what is and is constitutional. Cheating on
your girlfriend is not OK. It's also not unconstitutional. Here, because high
intelligence people are not a protected class, courts apply something called
"rational basis scrutiny." Under this extremely lax standard, so long as the
government can articulate a plausible rational principle in support of a
policy, it passes Constitutional muster under the equal protection clause.

A better headline would be something like: "Court rules that the Constitution
does not require unelected judges to overturn the policy of a politically
accountable police department to not hire people with high IQs."

~~~
dang
Ok, I've attempted to encode that in the title above.

~~~
rayiner
Great one!

~~~
dang
I enjoy the dry de-baiting of a good double negative.

------
ALittleLight
Here's an online version of the Wonderlic test. There's a "start quiz" button
at the very bottom.

[https://beatthewonderlic.com/take-a-free-wonderlic-test-
onli...](https://beatthewonderlic.com/take-a-free-wonderlic-test-online/)

I was fairly surprised by it. I've tested well on standardized tests and IQ
tests my entire life, so I assumed I would also test well here. Especially
since I saw the test was also biased towards verbal understanding, which is my
strong suit.

Not so! My score was fairly low. The questions, individually, are trivial, but
I ran out of time fairly early on in the test. I think you'd have to be a
quick reader and good at mental calculations to score highly on this test.

~~~
Zanni
Ditto. I score 98+ percentile on SAT, GRE, etc., but only 50th percentile on
this. Ran out of time on question 34 of 50.

I didn't take advantage of scratch paper and pencil, which would have helped.
Or pay much attention to the timer. I'm sure I could get my score up, with
some work, but not _that_ much.

~~~
selimthegrim
Remember, those were recentered in 1995.

------
KarlKemp
I have a friend who is quite obviously way smarter than anyone else around. As
in: I don't usually explicitly notice how smart people are, but when I first
met him it was so plainly obvious to me like few things are.

Anyway: at some point this friend decided all he needed for happiness were
books and water, so he quit his law job and spent a year reading. Once that
got boring, he decided to hire on as a tram driver, which they were
desperately looking for at that time.

He was rejected for this very reason. They have apparently seen quite a few
people on this sort of career trajectory, and since the training is quite
extensive, it hurt them financially.

A year later, their need had grown even worse, or maybe my friend's dedication
made them change their mind. In any case, he was accepted and, after six
months of training, became a driver on his own local tram line.

Six months later, he got bored and quit.

~~~
mythrwy
That made me laugh so much. I've known people like that.

------
hristov
There is a more insidious reason why employers shun people with high IQs for
blue collar jobs. High IQ people may become natural leaders and can start
unions or organize workers against management in other ways. High IQ people
may find ways management is screwing up or quietly breaking some law or
regulation or lying to customers and may make a stink. So it is not only a
wholesome desire to keep geniuses from getting bored.

Although I shouldn't badmouth those high IQ exclusionary policies. They saved
me a lot of grief back when I was young and dumb. You see, once I actually
ended up in a Navy recruitment office. Luckily I was not too dumb and "failed"
the IQ test upwards.

~~~
rubber_duck
> High IQ people may become natural leaders and can start unions or organize
> workers against management in other ways.

Maybe you should take the dogma goggles off ? Public sector unions are pretty
common without the "genius leaders" and from what I see police unions are
often reported covering for the police officers caught in despicable
wrongdoing and obstructing disciplinary measures - they are pretty much the
worst example of a union you want to support, along with prison unions
lobbying for more incarceration and so on.

------
Simulacra
During my ARMY service, my Sargent told me there are two types of people:
hardworking and dumb, or smart and lazy. He said the ARMY wants its officers
to be smart and lazy so they'll get the job done in the least amount of
effort, but they want the grunts to be dumb and hard working so they won't
question.

~~~
BorisTheBrave
Sounds like a paraphrase of this classic adage:

> The German World War II general Erich von Manstein is said to have
> categorized his officers into four types. The first type, he said, is lazy
> and stupid. His advice was to leave them alone because they don’t do any
> harm. The second type is hard-working and clever. He said that they make
> great officers because they ensure everything runs smoothly. The third group
> is composed of hardworking idiots. Von Manstein claims that you must
> immediately get rid of these, as they force everyone around them to perform
> pointless tasks. The fourth category are officers who are lazy and clever.
> These, he says, should be your generals.

------
throwaway_pdp09
First and foremost, I have a very high regard for the british coppa.

Right. Onwards. I don't know how coppers think. I appreciate they are engines
of the law and officially can't pick and choose (though in fact they can and
do, when they can, quite wisely IME). But I could not do a job where I believe
arresting someone for something harmless like various drug-takings is causing
more harm than not arresting them.

A bad law causes damage by being bad. I could not enforce that. Ergo I could
not do that job.

I use drug taking as an example and of course it's not a simple situation, but
another one which is perhaps even simpler is - going back quite a few years -
institutionalised legal discrimination against gays.

This isn't about drugs or gays, but about enforcing bad laws against your own
conscience. I don't accept the view that it's the law so it must be enforced.
Until we get better laws this friction must exist. So how do brit cops deal
with it? Any here to illuminate?

~~~
danpalmer
This is an article about the US. The British police forces do not to my
knowledge discriminate based on a higher than average IQ.

------
ape4
He should have been smart enough to get some questions wrong

------
brianwawok
Is IQ even the right test to decide if someone would be good for a career in
law enforcement?

~~~
joejerryronnie
Probably high EQ, superb communication skills, and indicators for independent
thinking would be better.

~~~
barry-cotter
EQ is bullshit.

> Some historical and scientific issues related to research on emotional
> intelligence

> In the past decade, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has emerged
> as a potential new construct for explaining behavioral variance not
> accounted for by traditional measures of general academic intelligence or
> personality. EI researchers credit E. L. Thorndike as the first to propose
> such a construct when he suggested that social intelligence is independent
> of abstract or academic intelligence. The current paper traces the
> historical roots of social intelligence and the current scientific status of
> emotional intelligence. It appears that emotional intelligence, as a concept
> related to occupational success, exists outside the typical scientific
> domain. Much of the data necessary for demonstrating the unique association
> between EI and work‐related behavior appears to reside in proprietary
> databases, preventing rigorous tests of the measurement devices or of their
> unique predictive value. For those reasons, any claims for the value of EI
> in the work setting cannot be made under the scientific mantle.

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.317](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.317)

~~~
dehrmann
>> Much of the data necessary for demonstrating the unique association between
EI and work‐related behavior appears to reside in proprietary databases

Most of your claim rests on that. That's not saying it's BS, it's saying it's
understudied.

------
supernova87a
The problem is not generally IQ. It's that police officers in the US are such
a poorly-trained bunch while simultaneously being equipped with deadly force
as a nearly default option. They do not get practice at what they would have
to do if they didn't have the weapon, or if their weapon were ineffective at
dealing with the problem.

Any new / uncertain situation is to be approached with the technique "pull
trigger until thing in front of you falls on ground". Which produces the
exactly the stupid result that you think it would. Combine it with the lack of
experience (and _fear_ ) of most officers in any really serious situation =
the first time ends up being their last.

If you look at police officers who are selected from soldiers who returned
from Iraq/Afghanistan, where they've seen some real shit, they don't default
to opening fire nearly so often as with suburban never-seen-anything officers.
Funny how people who've been to war are _less_ twitchy than someone who's only
sat in a car all day for the last year. [1,2,3]. Of course, there are opposing
observations / opinions also [4].

Even in other countries, when officers are trained to finally shoot someone
(and maybe never have to do it in the end), they do it in a targeted way,
stop, see what happened, and decide whether another shot is needed to control
the situation.

The problem is not IQ. It's practice.

[1]
[https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/Publicatio...](https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/Publications/IACPEmployingReturningVets.pdf)

[2] [https://www.npr.org/2016/12/08/504718239/military-trained-
po...](https://www.npr.org/2016/12/08/504718239/military-trained-police-may-
be-slower-to-shoot-but-that-got-this-vet-fired)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/08/17/how-can-
pol...](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/08/17/how-can-police-do-a-
better-job-of-recruiting-officers/military-vets-can-bring-much-needed-
sensitivity-training-to-police-departments)

[4]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/asking-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/asking-
our-soldiers-to-do-police-work-why-it-can-lead-to-disaster/251380/)

------
andarleen
Shouldnt the UN condemn what is going on in the US? Police ramming protesters,
shooting people filming from their own property, and so on reminds a lot about
HK protests. Rohynga, Uyghurs, Black Americans, Native Americans are tortured
in these 3rd world countries and the UN does NOTHING.

------
mnm1
I always suspected police hiring in America targeted idiots, likely idiots
with a penchant for violence. Now we have undeniable proof. I wonder where
else such anti intellectualism is codified into law.

~~~
swimfar
"New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27", and "The
average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an
IQ of 104, or just a little above average."

