One of my favorite movies is The Parallax View where a shady corporation tests individuals to find those with the right stuff to be assassins. Given the number of bad cop stories we’ve posted (and far more we haven’t), one has to wonder if some police departments not only want lower IQs, but violent tendencies, rash judgement, etc.
A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.
“This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class,” Jordan said today from his Waterford home. “I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”
This story goes well with this.
UPDATE: Going in the opposite direction, Dallas won’t send cops for under $50 shoplifting complaints.
Unfortunately I may fit the profile , back in the early eighties I scored a 97 on the written and passed all the other tests, even the psych, ha ha. Received letter upon letter asking me to become part of the NYPD. 18,ooo to start when I was making 30,ooo as a machinist working 64hrs a week. Plus the girl friend whose now the wife wouldn’t marry a cop. So no uniform for me.
Corporations need dumb, heartless thugs.
You got that right. However, it is one of the few skills that we don’t need to offshore.
And here we have the reason why so many police departments are populated with former members of high school wrestling teams. Looks like it’s official policy to hire characters from Idiocracy.
Ever notice whenever you see a cop on TV news try to explain anything it sounds like a 4th grader reading a book report to the class?
While I don’t disagree with your assessment, I think that has more to do with the cops not being trained in public relations and trying to tread a fine line. Many civilians look equally “dumb” on TV.
We need a Happy New Year post! Lots to cheer about!!
– The unfunded Teapublican war in Iraq is no more!!
– Economic recovery has turned the corner
– 11 more months of Teapublican campaign comedy
– Huge street party to Prez Obama election to second term
– iPAD 3
– Discovery that the Mayan Calendar merely forgot to carry the one.
The Parallax View did not test people who would be assassins. They tested paranoid outcasts who would be accused and convicted of being assassins. The real assassins from the grassy knoll were a separate and parallel branch of that corporation.
I still remember the Cheeck & Chong routine from the 70s “Are big, stupid and ugly? Then the LAPD has a job for YOU!”
Its a well known trope that the only reason criminals get put behind bars is that they are even stupider then the cops that arrest them.
Cops deal with the semi-simian dregs of society, the real losers, the bottom dwellers, the sociopaths and violent non-contributing portion of the demographic bell curve.
Potential criminals who are smarter or more cowarly get into financial services.
The ones who are smarter still get into the 1%, culminating in politics.
Having to work with the 0.01% on a daily basis I can only support the Police notion that the 140+ are unsuited to dealing with normal people. They can barely stand their own company, let alone others.
0.01 is already 1%. 0.01% is one hundredth of that, or one ten thousandths of the population.
The rest of your missive seems to be as incoherent.
Lets deconstruct it:
Having to work with the 0.01% on a daily basis I can only support the Police notion that the 140+ are unsuited to dealing with normal people. They can barely stand their own company, let alone others.
Sorry but I’m still coming up with “squat.
Maybe that 140+ refers to IQ but they’re actually 0.0833%percent of the population. (I am one of those poor souls. IQ:145 just means you’re off the bulk of the chart, nothing else.)
What the fuck are you talking about></b<
.08 vs .01 doesn’t change his point at all. This is still less than one in a thousand.
So many of us? Gee, I’ve been too busy to notice.
Some years ago when Michael Moore was still relevant, his show The Awful Truth had a segment about a potential cop that was knocked back on the pre-entry exam to be a police officer because he scored too high.
He apparently scored 33 on their IQ test type thing instead of their ‘preferred’ 20-27.
northernmuckraker.blogspot.com/2008/08/too-smart-to-be-cop.html
Median salary: $90,638 (I said MEDIAN not MAXIMUM)
Pension: 50% of salary when 20 years service attained. If you live to age 78 then what is the payout? Do the math on the expected value of this pension payout yourself. Note: Occupation does NOT appear in 2010 Top 10 Most Dangerous Jobs by Mortality Rate by US Dept of Labor. Source: US Dept of Labor.
Educational requirements: College degree not required, nor desired. However, lettering on the high school football team is useful, as is prior service in Special Operations Command. Your daddy should also be popular around town.
Infrastructure work is DOWN, because salary payments of government officers is UP.
Too smart to be a cop? And now the EEOC says you probably don’t need a high school diploma, either! http://bit.ly/rFmMp2
I mean, WTF ???
I’m not a mathematician, and I really tried to ignore it, but what with Peapod telling us how smart/advanced he is all the time, its has to be noted he got his simple math wrong.
But I’ll add my own little story. I scored in the top 10 thousandths of the FBI qualifying written exam. I wanted to go thru the basic training and then decide whether or not to make it a career or go do somthing else. BUT–I flunked the oral interview. In followup correspondence I think someone fouled up and sent the last few pages of a written review: “candidate expresses a history revealing a tendency to get easily bored with routine tasks.”
All I can remember saying on the killer question of “was there anything in the Military you didn’t like?” was my what I thought was a safe answer: “I guess I’d have to say I didn’t like marching in parades.”
Damn!!!!! Such a rookie mistake. Ha, ha. Certainly sad since I LOVED my few days off being used to get my clothes all sweaty and dirty marching for the good folks who paid my salary. What was I thinking of?
and like every other bad decision, my life path still was pretty good. So–if life turns out pretty good, what’s there really to complain of? Marching in parades? Not learning how to do simple exponents?
Life is so bright, I gotta wear shiny chrome glasses so no one can tell where I’ma lookin.
I had a similar experience with a verbal Q and A for a job. I believe some life choices or paths taken are for the best even if the path was diverted because of some simple answer. And when reflected upon is obviously not the answer the employer was looking for or what your rational thinking would surmise. You were not meant for(or really didn’t want) the position.
Happy New Year.
Wonderful intelligence/qqq (sec) exam question here:
A ball and a bat together costs $1.10 cents. The bat cost one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
a. 10 cents
b. 1 dollar
c. 5 cents
d. cant be calculated.
I always laugh BEFORE I take these tests as I always go for the dummy answer: 10 cents.
If you don’t like to march either, you are guilty more of word association type “quick” thinking rather than the slower math driven “reflective thinking.”
You know that puzzle of counting how many “o’s” are in a short sentence? I get it wrong even when I know what the trick is. How fricken mentally caught in a rut is that?????
The FBI was probably right.
Dallas won’t send out cops for small shoplifting? Goes in line with how you whined when Walmart called the cops for small shoplifting.
Neither will Pedro.
I hope you understand this..
IF a medium to HIGH tech person applies for a job that is mostly data entry..word processing, appointments, maybe spreadsheet use…
WONT get the job.
They are afraid..HE MIGHT do something..
Do you think intelligence tests ever have a purpose? Performance tests, maybe. But an “intelligence” test? To be a cop?! Didn’t they apply intelligence tests in Nazi Germany?!!!
Certainly, it can’t be due to the fact than an intelligent person might become bored and/or tend to bend the law for his/her own benefit. Na. That never happens. After all, we don’t even punish (rich) business leaders for breaking laws.
…And just why do cops always want to know about an arrest record when they detain you? Aren’t we all innocent until proven guilty? I think the very fact that cops never ask about convictions pretty much shows their general ignorant and wrong mind-set. A smart cop might catch that little oversight where “all suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” – so you just can’t have that.
Therefore, you just can’t have smart cops. We need stupid arrogant bullies to patrol the streets simply because there are too many candidates already filling our jails!
One test given is for personality. It’s called the MMPI.
IQ vs performance vs personality testing: all quite relevant. I heard that the most predictive question to ask Pilot Applicants was what they did for a hobby. given the group being asked is all college grads, the best answer was: ride motorcycles. ((I almost chocked on my popcorn watching Top Gun for the motorcycle scene!)) I rode a cycle 3-4 times but they were too fast and uncontrollable–they scared me==but I said I did anyway.
Knowledge is power==and no cop should have it.
This unfortunately isn’t something recent. I’m a fan of the old 1970s Columbo Tv series. And in one episode, a young boy tells the detective that he was turned down as a student in the LA police academy, because he tested as being too smart. This was 40 years ago!
At the time, I believed that it was policy that a high IQ was valued too much to be risked in public service. Though it doesn’t seem to stop smart people from being drafted and sent off to die in some war. While stupider people, with political connections, get to stay behind. And some day be a US President, like their father.
So since then, I’ve changed my opinion about this hiring policy, for some jobs. Likely they don’t want cops who are too much smarter than their bosses. Because who gets to be successor, has already been carefully worked out. And smart cops, working their way up thru the ranks, would only upset the arrangement. The fix is in.
And BTW, in the US Air Force, the two lowest IQ jobs are cooks and Security Police. I heard about a female SP who caught a splinter in her eye from target practice. So she no longer had perfect 20/20 vision. Afterward, without any training, her job was changed to food service worker.
So you need the best possible vision to aim the guns, but not the best possible brains to decide whether you should be firing the guns. Just follow orders, and bust heads. That’s how police states work.