Khross wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
While that's true, LEOS are more heavily screened, have significant personal stake in not going on a shooting spree, and in most cases wear a nice convenient uniform and drive a nice convenient marked car that makes them very easy to identify.
I'm not entirely convinced this is the case, unless we're talking about the FBI, DEA, or State Level agencies. Local and County agencies can get pretty lax and make up the majority of LEO's nationwide.
I don't know of any agency so lax that they don't require patrol officers to wear uniforms.
If you're talking about lax screeing, that may be the case in some places. In many cases (such as, I suspect, Philadelphia) the screening process is not so much lax as it is poorly designed, excessivly subjective, and
To be brief and put it another way, many senior command officers fancy themselves amateur psychologists based on their experiences. They also are used to people lying to them. This tends to creep into the hiring process. Combined with the premium pretty much every department puts on not being sued, this tends to result in placing a high value on people with uncomplicated and unsophisticated personal histories. This is compounded by the fact that while most departments ostensibly value education the actual officers there are often not well educated (high school or associates) and may resent or fear education, or simply assume anyone well educated (and in some cases anyone with glasses) is too bookish to be successful.
In other words, in many places the combination of assumptions and habit results in hiring a lot of kids who are tall, good-looking, and have worked at Jiffy Lube since graduation, with possibly a 3- or 4-year stinit in the military, or else who have been in corrections. This makes for a personal history that's easy to investigate and doesn't lead to the paranoid response of "gee this guy has been all these places and done all these things and we don't want to spend the time and resources to investigate it all so we'll assume he's hiding something". In the end, what it really ends up in is people being hired who are frequently immature in terms of life experience; essentially mistakes of ANY kind (I mean mistakes like getting a traffic ticket or being in an accident; even ones where the applicant was clearly not at fault) are disqualifiers in reality even if they tell the applicant "not going to be a problem".
Federal agencies avoid this by establishing more strict minimums to apply in the first place, and by having more objective hiring criteria. They also have an investigation process that is highly standardized and takes the background check mostly out of the hands of the hiring agency thus avoiding institutionalization of certain perceived needs. They also do not make the mistake many local agencies make of confusing capability and qualifications with background, personal history, and the like. Too many agencies mix these things together.
I chalk this up first and foremost (but not solely) to our litigous culture. Being a police chief in this country means you will be sued at some point, for something someone else did, and often while you were at home in bed and despite the fact that it's either A) perfectly reasonable or B) completely against your policies. Even if the lawsuit eventually ends up groundless it will be a major headache if you're, say, buying a house.
I think that if our tort system were changed so that police and public officials could not be personally named in a lawsuit until after a successful lawsuit against their agency or city or whatever that established misconduct or gross negligence on their part, we would see a significant betterment of he average police officer hired. I think that most states really need to look closely at what their municipalities are doing and standardize things more at the state level. Some hiring processes are truely absurd in terms of their focus on irrelevancies; the most common one is "name every police agency you ever applied to and why you didn't get hired there". I's a lazy man's way of saying "I don't want to investigate so I'll just assume that anyone who has too many applications either doesn't want to be here because they applied too many other places or has something wrong with them so no one hired them." Of course, this means a vicious cycle where initial rejections make the applicant look on future applications. I think this practive really ought to be banned by states. Federal agencies don't have any such question because they really don't give a **** that Podunk Illinois didn't hire you.
Another irrelevancy I've seen, just as an example is "where do your relatives work and for how long?" Who cares? You're investigating the applicant. We don't have corruption of blood in this country; a shitty employment record by one's brother should not be a factor.
There's the further problem that applicants not hired are generally not told why. This prevents good applicants from correcting things that may be simple misconstruement of some information, a poor interview habit, or from giving good answers on the aforementioned question of where you have applied and why you weren't hired.
I didn't mean to turn this into a rant, and yes, in some places hiring standards amount to being fully mobile with normal eyesight and a high school diploma, but in most cases I think the real problem is a poorly run hiring process that lacks objectivity, quality control, and confuses the role of the interviewer, the background investigator, and the psychologist.
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