They wouldn’t have anyway, because they cannot retain the “brightest” individual due some other problems, like low pay and slow promotions[edited].
The IQ limits were enacted to avoid having to train someone who was likely to leave not long after joining.
It looks stupid and it just solves a different problem, but sometimes that’s all you can do.
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Baloney. Remember that campus cop who pepper-sprayed a bunch of peaceful protesters at point-blank range at UC Davis a few years back? He was making a lot more than most of the faculty.
American police are generally quite well compensated compared to workers with similar levels of education and training.
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I cosign that expletive; I just saw an ad for Oakland PD recruitment recently - the starting pay listed wasn’t ‘peanuts.’
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Yup. An NYPD cop with 5 years of experience makes more than an engineer with 10 years of experience.
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The “low pay” part is my mistake, i misremembered the articles listed on this thread and associated the higher attrition with lower pay.
From the second link:
The city’s rationale for the long-standing practice is that candidates who score too high could get bored with police work and quit after undergoing costly academy training.
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Which raises the question: why do cops get the municipality to pay for their training when teachers and librarians and civil engineers and countless other public employees have to go out of pocket for costly degrees just to have a shot at a job that probably pays less?
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Regarding the pay issue brought up, I recently looked at local rates.
I was shocked to see that (locally) starting pay for police is a little above $15/hr.
That seems too low for what we expect of them (leaving aside all other diatribes about how they actually behave, etc.). It’s no wonder the pool is, well, shallow and unsatisfactory.
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If I may ask, just for the purpose of comparison; what’s the minimum wage where you are currently?
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Good question. It’s $12.15.
A bit of personal context to my post: my field (home energy efficiency upgrades, so, going into existing homes and crawl spaces and whatnot, and adding insulation, etc.) has been beset with workforce issues for years so I was thinking of how, if we can’t find good people to do this work, work that has such a positive and immediate impact in the community, how can we expect our police force to be filled with good people there for good cause.?
Just gonna attract bullies who wanna bully. 
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Absolutely.
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before that it was the abolitionists
WHY DO THEY HATE OUR HERITAGE
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Big Yep on that:
NYPD:
Salary
Starting salary: $42,500
Salary after 5 ½ years: $85,292.
Including holiday pay, longevity pay, uniform allowance, night differential and overtime, police officers may potentially earn over $100,000 per year.
Additional Benefits
- 27 Paid vacation days after 5 years of service
- Unlimited sick leave with full pay
- Selection of medical benefit packages
- Prescription, dental, and vision coverage
- Annuity fund
- Deferred Compensation Plan, 401K and I.R.A.
- Optional retirement at one half salary after 22 years of service
- Annual $12,000 Variable Supplement Fund (upon retirement)
- Excellent promotional opportunities
And this from 2018:
Generous pension benefits that annually average $74,500 - which can be collected after just 22 years on the force
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That has never worked in the US.
Probably we should just cut our losses and dismantle the police as we know it, then spend a year or two making an entirely new organization that will specifically not include any former police at all.
The barrels are entirely full of rotten apples, there’s so little worth saving its not worth getting rotten apple sludge all over us trying to figure out which ones are the “good ones”
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Lol “costly academy training” oh you mean six weekends with mostly volunteers teaching such illustrious classes as “warrior mentality” and “killology”?
Not only do they select for violent men of mediocre intelligence, they spend all their training time teaching them how to make excuses for murder, vandalism and perjury.
It’s like prison, it just teaches criminals how to be better criminals. Except they also get paid and can go home every night to beat their wives and kids.
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I’m not sure how it is in the us, but in my country the training takes a whole year.
I also think that that excuse is just bullshit, but they probably still have a problem to retain the ones that score too high, which i think is due they getting completely frustrated by how the things that don’t work (or shouldn’t exist) are impossible to fix.
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Around 21 weeks in the US.
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Krautistan: around 2.5 years (varies a bit from state to state), and that’s just for starters.
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The UK is aiming for a minimum of 3 years, more if you specialise.
This won’t solve the systemic problems in British policing, but it is far better than what is going on in the US.
There are currently no standard recruitment requirements for officers across the 43 forces in England and Wales (in 2016).
Some forces accept officers with Level 2 qualifications (A-C grade GCSEs), while others insist on Level 5 (diplomas or foundation degrees).
GCSEs are roughly equivalent to a high school diploma in the US, although you do the exams at age 15-16.
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The US has no standards for police training.
Indeed some places is actually 6 weeks (granted not weekends), most places do have a specific focus on teaching cops that they are soldiers occupying hostile territory.
And in many cases, if you want to become a cop with no effort at all, just go to some rural county, and a sheriff has the right to deputize you with no training whatsoever.
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