Open Thread = Wed. Jan. 13, 2016 - Police Hiring Issues
Good Morning 99%'ers. I have been struggling with what direction this series would head as I waded deeper and deeper into the issues and potential causes of police brutality and the rising number of people being killed by the police.
As a quick recap, in my first essay of December 30, 2015, we learned that even though overall crime rates have declined significantly, the rate of police killings of civilians has risen sharply to nearly 1,200 people killed in 2015, based upon the best information possible. In addition, blacks and people of color are far more likely to be killed by a police officer than whites, with the rate of killing 21 times greater for black males age 15-19 than for white males of the same age. Overall, blacks are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than whites.
In my second essay of January 6, 2015, we looked at some of the broader causes behind the increase in both police brutality and killings of civilians, including racial bias against people of color.
In both of the first two essays, the issue of police departments actively recruiting and hiring veterans was raised as a possible link to police brutality. This is a difficult issue because I could not find actual statistics on this subject, so this essay is one of generality than of quantification. I tried to explore this issue from the perspective of whether or not actively recruiting former combat vets was a good idea and of course, my research took me down several side roads, particularly on the issue of psychological testing. As with the first two essays, I am not going to come to any concrete conclusions in this essay, but am putting information out as kindling for discussion.
Before we even begin to look at the hiring of veterans as police officers, perhaps this one statistic should be considered. For various reasons, the Veterans Administration has grossly under estimated the number of veterans experiencing PTSD. While there are no definitive statistics on the number of combat veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been diagnosed with PTSD, experts estimate that between 30 and 35% of returning combat veterans experience some degree of PTSD. I will return to this later in the essay when we review psychological testing of police recruits.
The new PTSD report of nearly 30 percent actually is closer to the predictions from a 2009 study by Michael Atkinson of the Naval Postgraduate School, Adam Guetz of Stanford University, and Lawrence Wein of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which is not cited by the V.A. The study concluded that PTSD among Iraq veterans will be as high as 35 percent.
The United States government has a program called Vets to Cops which funds grants to local police departments for the hiring and training of post 9/11 veterans as police officers. (h/t to Pluto) As per the White House press release of 2012, here is how the program works.
The U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) today announced funding awards to over 220 cities and counties, aimed at creating or saving approximately 800 law enforcement positions. The grants will fund over 600 new law enforcement positions and save an additional 200 positions recently lost or in jeopardy of being cut due to local budget cuts. All new law enforcement positions funded in the COPS 2012 Hiring Program must be filled by recent military veterans who have served at least 180 days since September 11, 2001.
Apparently, the idea behind the Vets to Cops program was to help address the high unemployment rates among veterans while helping to address funding cut backs in local police departments.
Recent vets face high unemployment rates, and Vice President Joe Biden said Monday that this initiative is part of the Obama administration's effort to try to help them transition to civilian life.
Supported by the Vets to Cops program, many local police forces are actively recruiting veterans for their police forces using a pitch similar to this one.
Military service can be a perfect entrance into a law enforcement career. While military police and security forces may have the most directly applicable skill set, service members from a variety of occupational specialties are also well suited to police service.
While directing veterans into policing sounds like a great idea on the surface, there are many potential problems associated with this program. There is no real consensus as to whether or not this is a good idea. Even veterans themselves have mixed feelings about sending recent combat veterans into police work.
Veterans face challenges that civilians do not. Some are unsure how to express to potential employers how skills learned in the military translate to the civilian job market. Some return with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury and wonder if those conditions will be a deal-breaker if they reveal them when interviewing for a job.
So the notion of taking military skills to a civilian agency that has a similar structure can be appealing. And that's a two-way street. Several job fairs for veterans have been held in the Bay Area over the past few months. They all seem to feature multiple law enforcement agencies looking to hire.
So in regard to the issue raised in previous essays which was that of veterans being steered into policing, the question became can combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan be a good match for policing in the United States after discharge? But to answer that question, the more important question is how are police recruits (including veterans) determined to be fit for the job of policing our communities?
Two of the safeguards most often cited to ensure police recruits are suitable for their jobs, are the use of back ground checks and the use of psychological testing of police recruits. These two factors are designed to weed out the most unsuitable candidates (veterans or not) for policing. Background checks are fairly self explanatory so the rest of this essay will focus upon psychological testing of police recruits.
The point behind such psychological evaluations isn't solely to determine whether an applicant has a diagnosable mental disorder, but also to flag potential recruits whose personality types and behavior are unsuited to a job in which sound judgment - including the ability to make quick decisions - is key, as is emotional stability in tense situations. It's a determination that plays a substantial role in keeping trigger-happy cops off the streets - and thus, more people alive.
A big part of the problems associated with psychological testing are two fold. First there are no nationwide standards, so the standards vary from state to state as to what the tests are designed to do and how the tests are constructed.
Truthout reviewed the websites for each state's standards and training commission and/or state statute and found that 22 states' commissions and/or state statutes do not explicitly mandate that a licensed psychologist administer a psychological evaluation as a minimum qualification for a potential police recruit.
Some states use vague language in their statutes, requiring only that a candidate must "be free of" any mental or emotional condition that may affect the candidates' ability to perform their job functions. In some cases, this determination is made through the background investigation process alone. In other cases, the commission and/or state statute says that a clinical physician will make such a determination as part of a required physical examination.
The second problem with psychological screening of police recruits is that most tests are only designed to weed out the most unsuitable candidates.
Another problem that most assessments have in common, Dantzker observes, is their objective of screening out unfavorable profiles, instead of trying to screen-in resilient, stable and conscientious personalities less likely to abuse the powers of their badge (at least initially). Like the lack of consensus surrounding the best protocols to use for psychological screenings, there remains no consensus as to the ideal personality profile for potential police recruits.
While psychological testing of police recruits may weed out only the most unsuitable candidates, the number that are eliminated from the process via psychological testing is abysmally small.
Interestingly, data suggests that the psych exam typically only screens out about 5 percent of those tested. With so much on the line, is it worth these departments' money to go to the added expense and effort if they're losing such a small percentage of applicants in this particular phase?
This is because most police recruit psychological exams are based upon weeding out the most unsuitable officer candidates rather than looking for the best possible candidates. This wonderful
article that appeared in the June issue of GQ features an interview with a former police officer who now does psychological testing of police recruits.
Still, tests are not required in every state today and, in fact, the American Psychological Association is currently in the process of deciding on guidelines for the psychological assessment of police officers.
With the field in flux and increased attention to psychological screening, GQ spoke with David J. Thomas, a Florida-based instructor, therapist, and former cop, whose practice provides counseling services for law enforcement officers. In his work as a mental health counselor, Thomas does evaluation and testing of police candidates, offers therapy services, and counsels officers in stress management. He shed light on the psychology, good and bad, behind policing.
Mr Thomas gives us a more in depth look at how psychological testing of police recruits can be used to improve policing in the US. Ironically, psychological testing is not being used to determine racial bias.
Racial bias testing has come up a lot in recent months in response to high-profile incidents of alleged police brutality. How common is bias testing in the psychological screening of police candidates?
It’s not common at all. With everything going on in the country, I’ve heard the politicians and others say it’s something we need to assess, but it’s not a common assessment at this point. Being an African American and having been a recruit, I can tell you that issues of race do come up in the police academy. They came up when I was a recruit and, as a mentor to younger African-American officers, I know that they still come up today.
The issue with bias testing is that setting a threshold is subjective, and there are still questions around the validity of the test themselves. Things like that are hurdles to incorporating bias testing into screening. I may be wrong, but I don’t think we’re going to it widespread bias testing in policing any time soon.
I strongly recommend you read the entire GQ article. It is a fascinating peek inside the world of psychological testing of police recruits.
In my next essay on this subject, I will be discussing the militarization of police departments and the internal culture within them.
Comments
Morning GG
My Briggs-Myers is seriously skewed, I doubt the police will take me.
The police, lower ranking authoritarians, are just following the cues of their puppet masters.
How else could anyone explain the police union aligning with Scott Walker?
Today, in 1939, Doc Barker is killed by prison guards as he attempts to escape. That's their story and it made it into history.
Happy Wednesday.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Good Day, Tim
Yeah, I would probably score way too high on empathy to make the cut too. I would rather be too empathetic than not.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Today
On January 13, 1842, a British army doctor reaches the British sentry post at Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the lone survivor of a 16,000-strong Anglo-Indian expeditionary force that was massacred in its retreat from Kabul. He told of a terrible massacre in the Khyber Pass, in which the Afghans gave the defeated Anglo-Indian force and their camp followers no quarter.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
yes
I guess that is why Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires. Aside from really difficult terrain, it is not really a country, but more a series of fiefdoms controlled by warlords.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Not a sign of economic health
link
not surprising
When people have little or no disposable income, it all goes toward the basic necessities.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Thanks. An interesting look at the dog that didn't bark.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Good day, el
I am not sure that the dog that did not bark or if the dog's bark is small part of a bigger issue, which is what I am beginning to believe.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Well, I suspect that the dog has been muzzled. What
are the real goals of each force and each element thereof, as well as the overall "club" is a major question, issue and problem. Historically, it was to keep the peons subservient to the elites. Has that changed in any way? Doubtful.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Why do they hate us: Part Nth
link
i think
the primary problem with today's police is that anyone who would want such a job, is someone who shouldn't have it. A domestic law-enforcement unit is these days pretty much a criminal street gang—the LAPD was nearly declared such by the judiciary a while back—whose initiates are charged with zealously roaming the streets specifically looking to put people in cages. No evolved human being wants a job that involves caging other human beings. So those who do seek out such jobs, they shouldn't be hired, because there is something deeply wrong with.
Clearly no one wants in a police force any serial killlers, who have been programmed to be such, and not at any later point deprogrammed, and so of course no one who has been through the deliberate serial-killing programming of US military basic training should be permitted on any police force. But such people are not the only problem. Many of the more malodorous gendarmes around here, for instance, have never been in the military.
Humans have come up with a lot of bad ideas—money, cities, "jobs"—and the police are one of them. It is well to remember that police as we know them have not been around all that long, only a couple hundred years; they arrived around the same time as "jobs" . . . which are a sickness of cities, in service to the sickness of money.
There is probably a sort of Unified Theory Of Badness that would encompass and account for a lot of this wrongness.
More than half this county is mountainous, or otherwise rural and remote, and when I first came here, back in the last millennium, those areas were served by "resident deputies," part-timers, loosely linked to the sheriff's department, who lived full-time in the little communities, where they could, when the need arose, exercise police powers. Because they were part of the community, they knew everybody in it, all their little frailties and foibles, and so not a lot of arrests were made. Because there wasn't any reason for them. Whatever the situation was, it could generally be handled in other ways. But then the asses in the insurance industry stripped the counties of money, with their ludicrous Proposition 13, and the law-enforcement agencies themselves rebelled against the resident-deputy concept, because they want all the law jockeys to be down there in the cop-shop, at all times, one with "the brotherhood," all lost and paranoid in the lizard-brain us-vs-them fear-state that so infects them. So today those sorts of part-time community-based law people are gone.
What we get now, instead, is something like what happened up the road here a few years ago. A guy was raising a stink in a store in one of these little burgs. Some nosey-burger called the cop-shop down the hill. By the time the centralized cop-shop could get anybody up there, 90 minutes had passed. The guy had calmed down, was back in his little cabin, taking a shower. The problem was over. But the two responding deputies, after gathering information, decided to just walk into the guy's cabin. In his shower, the guy heard somebody in his house, poked his nose out, saw some stranger in streetclothes (the lead cop was not in uniform), striding towards him, holding a gun, in his house, and he picked up his gun and started firing. The two cops were killed, and so was the citizen. The citizen, though, he would not have died, except that the later cop-units to show up waited around outside the cabin for several hours before going in. While the homeowner inside bled to death.
That is what is going to happen, when you don't know the people you are policing. Though most often, as we know, it is just the citizens who die. Not the police. In all these horrors that reach the news, so very rarely do we read that the cop who shot the person had ever before encountered, much less knew, that person. Instead, the first time the cop ever meets the citizen, the citizen becomes dead. This can't continue. If you are going to have something like the police, you can't have something like the "New York Police Department." That is just nuts. Throughout that sick BF Skinner experiment of cramming humans too close together, should in fact be hundreds of wee little departments, modest tiny ones, the officers living in the communities they serve, pretty much knowing everybody in them. The cop just another tradesperson, like the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. And the cops don't have guns. Why would they? Nobody else has one.
I like your series.
I really like this comment
I believe it is where I am heading with this series. Each time I do more research, I find multiple paths. It comes from not really knowing the subject intimately myself. I have been trying to cast aside pre-conceived notions as I write these essays, but we all have our biases, me included.
Thank you for your comment, hecate.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
wouldn't it be nice, if
not any nilly-willy citizen could carry a weapon and all police officers were disarmed? May be they could all fight it out with fists and knives or sticks and let the police have more guys to just be sure to be able to hold down a guy, who deserves to be arrested.
not all cops are killers
if they were there'd be a lot more dead people. That's not to say they're not bullies, abusing their power. It'd be nice if the police departments cared about the killing rate. Then maybe they'd take steps to screen applicants better. And it'd be nice if they punished the killer cops. And it'd be nice if city governments noticed that the police shield these killer cops and did something about it. And it'd be nice if the voters realized that the city government does nothing about it and voted in new people who care enough to force a change.
IMHO
There is a culture of impunity in most police departments. Also they will tend to mirror the elected officials attitudes. As a taxpayer, it makes me angry to see my tax dollars supporting payments to citizens wronged by those who are supposed to serve and protect us. And yes, most of those payments are probably covered by insurance, but I am sure that locales that have a history of police violence probably have much higher insurance premiums too.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Problem with that
is that cops are not nice people. Their hiring criteria weeds out everybody who's not at least a sociopath and highly favors the hiring of outright psycho's. As for voting in new people at a local level who care enough to do something, 'I just said good luck'. Portland's Democratic majors staring with Vera Katz imported a bunch of killer cops from LA and have never wanted to do anything about it. They like these pigs, the fear of getting killed keeps the riff raff in line. The DOJ ordered Portland to implement over-site to it's out of control cops and so the city government hired some cop loving 'law and order' federal judge to do the 'job'. No nice people are allowed to wield power. Nice people are subversive extremist troublemakers to our 'security' and dirty rotten Dr. commie Rat's Their fixation with authority and law and order however does not apply to a not nice armed Militia who need snacks. These guys would pass the test with flying colors.
yes, there's that
everything you said is true. It comes down to the voters and yeah....too many go "Novick...he's a liberal. I'll vote for him" or "Jules...he's a liberal" All they know is what they've read in the self-serving candidates' statements in the voter pamphlet.
what a great and well researched OT, thanks gg /nt
There is a lot of employment law that also dictates what can and
can't be done based on psychological testing. Standardization and who can administer which psychological tests is usually determined by the company that developed and sells the test. Employers with jobs of all sorts are tripping over each other trying to hire vets, but they want the recently discharged (insert young here). Unemployed vets are the older vets - Gulf and Viet Nam era. Nobody wants them anymore than they want dislocated workers 55+.
While Meyers-Briggs couldn't be used to screen cops, it does show that certain jobs attract certain personality types. As hecate said, most normal people wouldn't want the job. Even if you convinced yourself it was helping career, beating and shooting people as opposed to teaching or operating on them calls for a willingness to hurt people as a primary job function.
Lots of good work GG.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon