* 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.
These aren't deep mysteries; police reform advocates have written volumes on these topics for decades.
This is a popular idea, but it seems like a bad one. It limits the pool of highly qualified applicants, which we badly need to expand. I've seen arguments in favor of this rule that take the form of "why would you privilege nonresidents in the hiring process?", but that is a non sequitur: not requiring residency isn't a way of privileging nonresidents.
In addition, police officers sometimes point to the difficulty of policing in the places that they live. This seems to me like a secondary consideration, but perhaps one that also merits attention.
Seems to have worked out very well...
In adjacent Philadelphia, violent crime fell from 14 to 9 per 1000, the same ratio as Camden enjoyed. Therefore it stands to reason that Camden's violent, corrupt police force was not necessary to reduce crime. This is consistent with other evidence that aggressive, violent police tactics are not associated with lower crime.
Because the question should have been what it was like before, hey
https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...
you're right! It looks like it did work our rather well.
My mother was a dispatcher for 15 years. I was in our local areas explorers program. It’s exactly what you see on Live PD. Traffic stops, drunk and disorderly people, drug busts, or domestic disputes. Cops do almost no detective work. Investigators do that.
Why not? Not enough crime to solve?
Regular cops are first responders not investigators.
How much do you think police are paid?
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be...
> 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.
I really don't believe your typical mid-level engineer is making $500k at any company in the world, let alone that it's just a given if you make it into big tech.
FWIW, I have received offers for senior positions from FAANG before.
Including stock? They absolutely are in the US.
If by mid level you mean actual mid level, like L4, then no.
If by typical you mean someone not working at Google or Facebook, then no.
I don't think half of software engineers are senior or above.
There absolutely are engineers making that much, I even know more than one making 7 digits in liquid comp, but they are not "typical" in any way.
Note the median starting college graduate salary is about $50,000. Median mid-career college graduate salary is $80,000.
Wonder how their recruiting will be doing now? They will need to raise that a lot to get reasonable candidates now.
Like teaching, there's always a lot of rhetoric around how police are valued, but pay scales frequently don't reflect it, and the result is a lot of poorly qualified police who fail the rest of your checklist
>Pays well Not for the amount of danger and emotional baggage involved.
> Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges. > Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation
Which is why you will frequently be following established procedures relevant to the situation at hand and deviating from procedure will often be frowned upon without a defensible reason. Further, you'll often have to suppress your insight because of political reasons. Police frequently know in advance what places are gang hangouts and who's selling drugs or sex, but having the information and having it collected in a format you're allowed to act on are different matters (and that's before getting into whether you're even allowed to try and collect that information).
>Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes.
This is just a progressive way of saying "High tolerance for eating other peoples shit while staying focused on doing your job." There is almost never a real 'resolution' to a domestic dispute for example, there's you getting screamed at and threatened not only by an abuser but also by their victim who will probably lie on their behalf because it was a neighbor who made the call. Then, if nothing immediately actionable is happening, you get to leave for the third time in a week after making a few notes and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not doing anything again.
>Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive.
Being a cop earns you hero points with some groups but in the mainstream will get you villified or at least distrusted. Worse, you will often see people advocating procedural changes in that either increase your personal risk (as if they have a bottomless resevoir of disposable LEOs available) or which reduce your ability to police effectively (but they'll still criticize you for failing to clean up problem neighborhoods). This is a major factor behind why police and their unions almost always stand by each other even when it looks bad, because the public will often demand you fall on a sword or turn on you the instant your optics leave even a little room for doubt.
>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.
Rare exceptions aside, smart people realize the risk isn't worth the reward and emotionally intelligent people realize the job frequently destroys LEOs emotionally. Both groups likely believe that the job is important for a functional society if they're not blinded by cynicism but they'll also understand that the majority of their energy is going to be spent primarily on dealing with beuracracy, paperwork, and simply enduring the situations they'll be placed into. This is far from catnip for these people.
>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.
This is attitude is another reason people who can do the math decide not to be police or cease being police. Because people assume most cops ("the system") in the present are just meat heads. But if you try to introduce tech-centric solutions, like cameras, to cut down on the number of necessary meat heads in an area you get accused of trying to create a dystopian surveillance apparatus. If you try to explain why a proposed change is a bad idea you get accused of everything from being racist to being a sadist who just likes how easily you can abuse the current system. And if you implement new sensitivity policies the public forgets within five minutes anyway because a cop in a totally different part of the country did something bad. This isn't to say that no cop enjoys their work or finds it worth it, but the idea that there's a massive untapped market of uber cops being kept away because of the old guard is just wishful thinking that holds appeal because it makes the problem seem much simpler than it is.
I participated in my local explorers program because my mom was a dispatcher. Go on enough ride alongs to see that 90% of the job is dealing with domestic disputes or drunk and disorderly people and you’ll never want to be an officer
How would this be "a form of corruption?" Lots of stories get posted to HN about the brilliant asshole being a net negative, and hiring people who are all-around easier to work with seems reasonable.
That's probably the reason at least one interviewer in tech interviews covers HR-type questions. Yes, you want someone smart, but you also want someone who's not an asshole.
I remember that one of them even mentioned that the asshole was so brilliant that he wrote code sometimes even the asshole couldn't read.... the manager didn't seem to twig even after writing that that this was a glaring klaxon warning signal that he was an extremely mediocre coder.
IME the most toxic behavior in this profession derives from insecurity, not intelligence, and most of those "brilliant assholes" were actually assholes because they were hoping that their mediocrity wouldn't be uncovered.
I didn't care much, cause I didn't have to use it, but... reviewing it, it didn't make sense. People using it were having to take a lot of time to do basic stuff, and ... people were constantly waiting for the main guy to 'finish up' the next bit that would save everyone 'lots of effort'.
Some of the other 'sr' people there fawned over it - "he's a genius! this code and system is amazing. it's so hard to understand the brilliance, but that's because he's such a genius" (near exact quotes from his internal fans).
Again - wasn't on that team, didn't care. Then... I was told to use it. For a project that needed things well beyond what it had in place. We needed session mgt, authentication, caching, solid XML support, etc - everything this 'framework' didn't have. I criticized it, saying we shouldn't use it for this new project.
What complicated this is that I'd put together a framework before I'd started working there (with a team of other folks). It was far more feature complete (not great but functional). I was accused of being jealous, and wanting to use my system, etc. Well, yeah, I'd like to use my stuff, cause it checked the boxes we needed, and I'd used it for several years, and could be productive in it. But... I said "take my code off the table - it's not about me. System X is just not usable for our project needs - we need to plan to build something new, or spend time building out all the missing stuff."
What a shitstorm that became. Internal fighting between people who'd never looked at the code, but insisting it was fine, and that I didn't understand 'enterprise' work. I left - turned in my two week notice (not 100% over this, but it was a factor). The day after I left... the "genius" quit the company, without telling anyone, no notice, just... left a voicemail saying he quit.
I hire engineers to work on internal tools. It’s far from the most “glamorous” roles in the SWE world and a lot of great engineers would not want to be working with Salesforce or Oracle. However, it’s very important and strategic to our business.
I don’t reduce the qualifications when hiring though. I actually add another. They must be motivated by this type of work. I find people who care about efficiency of teams and are motivated by having a revenue impact more than being able to point to a widget on the main site and say “I did this”.
I’ve been quite successful at it for the last 7 or so years with slightly lower turnover than the rest of the org or industry averages.
For example British mainline railways require Compliance as a (psychologically tested) trait of train drivers and the lack of such a requirement was cited as a contributing factor to a death on a light rail system in a report I read years ago.
Why? Because Compliance says: This speed restriction says 45mph, I personally think 60mph should be safe but there's a speed restriction so I shall limit to 45mph even though I don't understand why.
Whereas without that some drivers will say "In my judgement 60mph seems fine here so I'll disregard the 45mph limit" and when they kill somebody and investigators ask "Why were you going too fast to stop?" their answer is that they didn't realise that would happen.
Compliance is probably a completely reasonable thing to want from regular cops, maybe even all your cops. On a TV show breaking the rules is often portrayed as admirable, but those rules are usually there for a good reason. In particular rule-obedience is very important for a community's perception of police as members of that community subject to its rules, rather than as oppressors.
Often in situation when the boss is insecure.
It also shows misunderstanding of boredom as a process that is not subjective, and does not depend on persons' personal interests.
But guess what? Recession struck(2008) and they selected ~10% of they usually do & that too at random. Only couple of other companies came for placements that year & only few of them respected their offers.
PSA: I assume this is going to repeat this year, so any student reading this shouldn't be choosy when it comes to placements, getting a job should be the utmost priority if you/family are dependent on it.
You can even skip that last part. The first job really is the hardest, so if you find something that's in a location you want and there's a internal or external path to a role you'd rather have, that job's a winner. There's also a lot of value in trying different things in the space, even if you think something isn't for you.
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.