I have lost complete and utter faith in the police. A bunch of scared, cowardly, scumbags.
I hate to sounds classist here. I really do. It’s not like I’m some blue blood, I’m a country bumpkin who got edumacated. But the police force in this country are some of the dumbest, least educated people alive. They are the dregs of society. These are purple who wouldn’t survive any other job. Literally it’s cop or private security patrol car for them. No job skills, no innovation, no brains in the whole force, front the privates all the way up to the Chiefs. Have you ever met a cop? 90% are the dumbest chip-on their-shoulder wannabe you will ever meet. There are exceptions, but there it is laid bare. We have a systemic problem here, and it won’t go away until the people rise up and demand it. I’m not sure what that looks like. I hate to think it’s organized retaliation against the specific officers behaving criminally. But I’m not sure what the recourse is. They never procecute and half heartedly investigate. They always justify the murder. What recourse do the people have but murder themselves? Are we really in this predicament? With ubiquitous surveillance and not a due process in sight it’s reaching a tipping point. We HAVE to start jailing officers who behave this way.
You’re absolutely right, well put. And then that coward shoots members of the general public. In the back even in some cases. Why would you want to be friends with someone like that or who associates themselves with people like that? Thanks for making my point!
Here is one article explaining it, the source of their info is a state sponsored test, an officer’s personal testimony, a court decision, and statistics from ABC News. You can find many, many others, this is just one. It’s the only profession I can think of where they can refuse to hire you because you’re too smart. Think about that. They want idiots working for them. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/court-police-departments-refuse-hire-smart/
Well I don’t know about the idiots part but yes, they do have tests that screen out people over a certain level of intelligence. I’ve always found that odd.
I don’t find it odd at all. Training a police officer from civilian to patrolman is expensive so you want to hire people you believe will stay with the job and make it a career. Someone “too smart” for the job will likely not be satisfied with the tasks and will question the chain of command. The latter, in particular, is not conducive to a well-run quasi-military outfit.
The actual armed forces have ways of dealing with this issue. Primarily, they have different career paths within the military that can offer more mentally stimulating jobs for people that need that kind of work. The municipal police don’t have that luxury outside of a few specialized administrative positions in each department.
Maybe. Unlike Guap, I don’t believe anyone wants “idiots” working as cops, but I doubt they want potential Harvard professors donning the blue and hitting the streets either.
Regardless, I don’t see a test to keep police candidates within a certain optimal range of intelligence as being something nefarious.
Can anyone else think of a single profession that eliminates candidates not on too much experience, or education, or a bunch of other factors that may influence a person’s desire to stay at a job they consider “beneath” them, but rather being “too smart” based on an aptitude test?
I can’t think of one. If police officer is the only one, I submit this as proof of them being the dumbest profession, as no other profession eliminates the intelligent like that. Clearly it’s not about job satisfaction or retaining people who aren’t interested. If it was lots more places that train their employees even more would use tests like that to ensure the pool is not smart. They want average or below average intelligence for a police officer because they want people they can easily manipulate and control and who won’t question the status quo. I’m sure this came about organically. Perhaps smart people used to join the force but caused too much trouble. I suspect this “malaise of the below average” is now a systemic problem with the police force, from new hires all the way up to every police chief in America. Not a bright bulb in the whole bunch. Think about it. If you are smart, you have to hide that fact every single time you take a test or interact with your colleagues. I’m sure (I know from experience) there is a tendency for local and state cops to scorn and fear the intelligent and especially federal agents, who often have post-grad degrees. Cities, town, counties and municipalities are intentionally creating police forces that they ensure have no intelligent people in the entire organization.
So there we are. We let the police forces in this country provision, train and promote an entire group of people whom they specifically weed out smart people from, ensuring there are no smart people in local law enforcement. And thus they make mistake after mistake as mistake because they start to see an “us versus them” dichotomy as all dumb people do.
As a broad category? Can’t say. But certainly in specifics that is a thing that happens a lot. I know at my company they had people they didn’t hire because of experience translating to higher salary demands, or that there was a perception they would seek to move into another position elsewhere once it became available.
Yep, happens all the time. My brother got royally screwed by this when he got laid off with 10 years experience as a software developer just as the recession hit.
So you don’t think that a butcher can be smart? You don’t think someone in the trades with an intellect that rivals some of the top minds at universities can be good at and find reward with their job? Isn’t that the kind of elitist attitude the Trump supporters believe in?
There are a lot of rewards you can gain from an occupation that doesn’t intellectually challenge you. I suspect more likely they don’t want people who question authority and have designed tests to weed those out.
A butcher can be a genius. A beat cop can be off the charts for MENSA. I personally knew infantry grunts in the Army that I believed were intellectual giants. God knows I’m satisfied with my job even though I think a high graduate could do it with about six weeks of training.
None of that changes the fact that most employers are loathe to hire people overqualified for the job being offered.
I had to take a critical thinking test and pass to receive my job. Most employers don’t institute a test to weed out smart people. They rely on resumes and questions and interactions to try and gauge ambitions. I was under the impression they will test, for lack of a better word, smart people out of hiring for police while they kind of hot potato the ones with a long line of issues at various cities.
There was a lawsuit in this area a couple of years ago, maybe, and he lost. Intellect is not a protected trait, so employers are allowed to use it for screening during employment processing.
Just kidding. It actually mentions the court case that was lost (he even appealed to a US Circuit Court so the decision and the reasoning behind it is codified and has precedent now).
Also, Telefrog, that statement you made above is only partially correct. An infantry grunt can be a genius, or as you put it, an “off the charts for MENSA”. A beat cop cannot. They make them take cognitive tests that weed out the smart ones. See linked article and discussion. This is the problem.
It seems like many bureaucracies would prefer to hire people that aren’t too smart (but also not too dumb). Either way might make them look bad.
I don’t think this is true, but your own reaction to them might provide a hint. I remember a story during the leadup to the election that argued that Trump supporters weren’t all uneducated idiots on welfare but rather one tier up from that, so they resented the people just below them. Kind of like you do.
There’s also the old thing about Irish police in the Northeast that I think we talked about earlier. The Irish dealt with a ton of bigotry but they were still higher on the totem pole than black people, and joining the police force kept it that way.
Obviously it’s stupid to try to extrapolate this to an entire industry, but I’m at least giving you something plausible to support your ranting. Hope it helps.
Unless they’re so smart, they see through the test and intentionally score lower than they could to make sure they qualify. Didn’t think of that, did you?
The military tests for a baseline of minimum intelligence through the ASVAB.
I met plenty of geniuses in my time in the military- though the biggest genius ended up in and out of prison due to his inability to handle any authority.
