

Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops (2000) - uptown
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836#.UdsqMT54bSY

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codezero
From the article:

    
    
      "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."
    

This doesn't seem crazy, but I'd like to see if they actually have data
showing a higher turn-over rate for high IQ people they accepted in the past.

The cost of training is high, so filters seem appropriate, if they can filter
out people with low scores (and by proxy IQ), then they can filter out people
with high scores.

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phaus
Don't most detectives come from the ranks of ordinary cops? Don't we want our
detectives to be extremely intelligent?

I'm friends with quite a few police offers and detectives, and the fact that
they are all extremely intelligent doesn't seem to affect their interest in
the job at all.

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codezero
I'm not a cop so I can't say what they find most useful in a detective, but my
guess is that the internal filtering process will select for the most
intelligent of the ones they have recruited, and that a lot of that
intelligence is defined in terms that are specific to being a cop, and
specific to what they learned while already being a cop, so it may not be an
innate intelligence that is optimal for the kind of person you want to be a
detective.

Personally, I'm all for very intelligent cops, and at the very least, having
lots of people on the spectrum of intelligence in various roles makes sense to
me.

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greenyoda
This kind of discrimination against "over-qualified" employees has been
happening for a long time. For example, a fast food restaurant may not want to
hire people with advanced degrees since they'd expect that they'd quit as soon
as they found a better job.

However, now that this practice has been made public, someone with a high IQ
who really wanted to be a cop could probably game the system by deliberately
getting some answers wrong on their IQ test.

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millzlane
I'm certain there are positions for cadets with high IQ's. Maybe not low level
positions like traffic cop. But I'm sure they'd make great detectives or
digital forensic analysts.

Reminds me of Mike Judges movie Idiocracy. I hope it's not where we're headed.
Just a couple of months ago John McDougall, President of the National Research
Council of Canada said "Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has
commercial value"

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wtvanhest
Eventually one of the hires made today as a beat officer is going to have to
become the "chief of police" and I kind of want that person to be as smart as
possible.

Maybe the solution is a faster track for those that show promise on the job.
The officers who demonstrate superior police work should be promoted faster.

