FOP Lodges Embrace Enhanced Professionalism And Training Like The NEA Embraces Weight Loss

noahpinion  |  So far I’ve talked about police “professionalization” purely in terms of hours of training. But it’s also important to get the right kind of training — for example, the “warrior mentality” training that some cops currently receive seems a lot less likely to be useful than the “procedural justice” training that has been shown to reduce violence.

And in fact, I think professionalization should probably go beyond training, to include education. Usually, when we think of a “profession”, we think of something that requires a degree. In the U.S., policing tends to be a blue-collar, low-education profession — in California, only 42% of officers have even a bachelor’s degree.

I’m all for expanding opportunity for American workers who didn’t go to college. But policing seems like a special case, because it’s about much more than wages and work — it’s about public safety and the legitimacy of U.S. institutions. Being able to sit through some lectures on Plato and do a bit of algebra homework shouldn’t be a requirement to get a decent, good-paying job in the U.S., but it seems like a pretty low bar for the people who are responsible for deciding when to deal out violent death to citizens on the street. We make teachers get a college degree, so why not cops? In fact, many teachers get a Master’s in Education after college; we should think about expanding the use of Master’s degrees in law enforcement as well.

Requiring higher education works through at least two separate channels. First, it creates positive selection effects — it means that the police of the future would come from a more educated, intellectual subset of the populace. (The military already does this with the AFQT and ASVAB.) But it also changes people’s lifestyles in generally positive ways. A number of studies have established a causal link between higher education and healthier lifestyles, leading to reduced mortality and better overall health. It seems likely that more education would also give cops a healthier mental and emotional outlook as well, which would result not just in less confrontational interactions with civilians, but in better overall policing and crime reduction as well.

Again, requiring cops to get more education would raise the costs of policing in the United States, because educated workers command higher salaries. This would not sit well with some activists, but it seems to me like something worth spending money on.

So I think that when we talk about professionalizing the police, it should mean exactly that: Making policing a profession rather than just a job. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc. all serve specialized and critical functions in our society, for which we require not just extensive training but also formalized and specialized education. I fail to see any good reason why we shouldn’t treat law enforcement as a similarly critical function, deserving of similar investments of time, money, and care.