Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop?

Re:Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop? by RIMR on Thursday October 09, 2014 @12:20PM (#8433347)

"However, the courts sided with the lower police department. In its ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the city did not discriminate against Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test. In other words, no one who was deemed “too smart” for the job after taking the intelligence test was hired."

You can apply that logic to race too: "We tested ALL applicants for blackness, not ONLY the black applicants".

You are still sorting people out for something they cannot control...

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Re:Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop? by callahad on Thursday October 09, 2014 @12:36PM (#8433465)

True, but there are specific attributes that constitute classes legally protected against discrimination. Race is one of them. Intelligence is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

I am not a lawyer, but it sounds like Jordan attempted to argue that intelligence should be considered an additional protected class, like race or religion, but the courts disagreed. Since intelligence isn't a protected class, and since the discrimination was applied equally across all applicants, Jordan didn't have any cause for compensation from the police department.

Your hypothetical situation, screening for blackness, would absolutely not fly since color is a protected class.

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Re:Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop? by dllthomas on Thursday October 09, 2014 @03:38PM (#8434599)

There is also (though on a skim it might well not be relevant here) the notion that something else might be used as an excuse while someone is actually not being hired because they are part of a protected class. That is where "but we do this consistently" often enters in...

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Re:Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop? by devinmontgomery on Thursday October 09, 2014 @12:57PM (#8433600)

This is the standard applied to treating people differently on characteristics not part of a protected class:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review

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Re:Can Someone Be Too Smart to Be a Cop? by devinmontgomery on Thursday October 09, 2014 @12:34PM (#8433446)

High intelligence isn't what's called a "protected class," meaning smart people have not historically been discriminated against. That's the difference.

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