Look at Pascoe, Morse, Hathaway…
Excuse me for not joining in the discussion regarding whether or not this is discrimination, in order to bring up two points about this article.
First, the “discrimination” in question concerned one police department. One. Not “some” as mentioned in the title of this post. There is no indication that this type of thing took place in any other department anywhere.
Secondly, this article is fifteen years old, and concerns an action that most likely took place a few years before that. Perhaps the title should have read: “Some US police departments rejected high-IQ candidates 20 years ago”, instead of making a statement that seems to be present-day.
Not that I DOUBT that this type of thing still happens. But if so, please find credible evidence to present, not something that by now almost smacks of “urban legend”.
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As a Mensa member, I am not sure this is not a bad idea. People with high IQ scores can at time over think things to a point of inaction. Also we sometimes have a problem following orders we don’t agree with, and we often have socialization issues since, we tend to look at things differently than most people. I am not sure these are traits that make you a good candidate for police work.The mention of military service is a different animal indeed, as there are different positions where one can be placed that take advantage of their natural skills, and shield them from their natural deficiencies.
I don’t see how having a high IQ would be a real advantage in police work, and like I said it poses some real disadvantages. If one gets a chance to hang around a bunch of engineers, programmers, mechanics, and previously mentioned rocket scientists, ask yourself if you think these guys and girls would make great cops. Like someone mentioned previously, the character of Dietrich was played as a fish out of water character on the show Barny Miller. In the show he was a detective, but this means he had to have at least some time as a regular patrol officer, and in this role he would have been more out of place, and probably ineffective.
Also no one mentions how high of an IQ it takes to get you shut out.Have you ever met someone in the 160 to 170 range?
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I believe you’re over-thinking this.
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Poirot was in the Brussels police (rising to be its chief), until he fled the German invasion.
From here, sounds like less than 125. I don’t know what 27 points on Wonderlic correlates to on IQ.
a lawsuit filed in 1999 by Connecticut resident Robert Jordan, who was told by the New London Police Department that they only interview candidates who score 20 to 27 points on an intelligence test.
Jordan, a 48-year-old college graduate with a degree in literature, had scored 33 points when he took the Wonderlic Personnel Test in 1996, giving him an IQ of around 125. His score was well above the 21 to 22 points that officers score on average, which reflects a slightly above-average IQ of around 104.
Seriously though, I think it would depend on the IQ level these people might deem unacceptable. Yes, I do have a “rocket-scientist” son-in-law, and I REALLY wouldn’t want him in charge of life-or-death situations; because he would be more interested in thoroughly examining the situation from all angles and then arguing about those angles and their applications with all parties involved. Especially to the point of proving that his point of view was the only correct one. This would probably involve diagrams at some point.
On the other hand, I am in the difficult position of generally disdaining the overall attitudes and behaviors of law enforcement officials, but I also have a son who is a police officer. He does NOT fall into the common category of “brutish control freak”; he decided on this line of work because he genuinely wanted to help people. We have had LONG talks about the traps and pitfalls of the LEO life, and he has watched his cousin, a former officer, fall apart because he couldn’t handle the lifestyle. (Fortunately, the cousin got out of the biz before anything bad happened.) My son is a bright kid, and very thoughtful, although not a college graduate. I do know that although he has had to draw his weapon on more than one occasion, including having a perp with a weapon drawn against him, he’s never fired. Instead, he’s taken the time to reason with the perps, and no harm came to anyone at any point. He’s also diffused dozens of situations that didn’t involve weapons, but easily could have if he had simply wanted to “be a cop”. In other words, he has felt that his “life was in danger”, but felt that there was another way to take care of things. If this is “inaction”, I will take that over “shoot now and shirk responsibility later” any day.
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I’ve seen this formula–
Generally, converting a Wonderlic score to a traditional IQ test score uses the following equation – doubling the Wonderlic score and adding 60 points.
so, if one naively uses that conversion, 126-- above average, but less than two standard deviations above the mean.
Caveats abound.
It’s a laugh…
Standards must be different in the U.K.
Yes but that is really because of the hats, isn’t it?
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Doesn’t it seem relevant that this is an archive article from 1999? 15 years ago? Couldn’t someone come up with a current credible example? Cheap shot-Click bait. You’re losing me.
the way I heard it, it was because white Johns wouldn’t get out of their cars to pick up prostitutes in black neighborhoods, so the only white folks seen in the hood were always honking the horn. I recently rehashed it with my buddy who is black, and he said that’s what he’d heard, but who really knows?
also: Barney Miller is awesome
The commenter was extrapolating that this could apply to a gender test, i.e. “too female” - but that analogy could also be “insufficiently male.” But disqualifying based on too low a score is already considered acceptable in a way that a gender test isn’t, so this test isn’t discrimination in that way.
Well, that’s exactly what they’re saying - either that or intelligent people would get bored and quit, and thus are a bad investment for training (a justification I’ve heard used to disqualify people for other jobs). I think it’s absurd, but that premise is what they’re basing their policy upon.
I had this argument with my ex, who insisted that something was “discrimination”. The discussion was about job hiring and qualification, which I pointed out are precisely practices of discrimination. I tried showing examples of the difference between legally-protected categories and simple job qualification, but I was speaking to deaf brains.
I read somewhere that it actually originated from blacks working in the norther states who worked with Bohemian/Hungarians and they were called “bo-hunks”, then eventually “hunky” and after than “honky”. Here is a blog post on grammar that discusses that and some other similar theories.
Bohunk/Honky
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Just a public service message: can it with the misreading of headlines. Just because you can’t notice the use of quotes to indicate an actual quote, or just because you can’t take the word “reminder” as such, doesn’t mean that the rest of us immediately jump to the same dumb reading of a string of text as you want us to.
That noise you make in the back of your throat when you hear a joke? Yeah.
Fair enough, but usually when someone says ‘discrimination’ in hiring, I think they can generally be assumed to me discrimination on improper grounds. It’s become a bit of a bad word, and I’d argue that the older definition has become archaic. I’d only use that if specific jargon that calls for it.
If someone has a high IQ score and doesn’t act they may think of it as over-thinking, if someone has a low IQ score and doesn’t act they may think of it as merely being timid, but I’m not really sure that high IQ scores are correlated with timidity. Brilliant people can be reserved, outgoing, cautious or impulsive. Brilliant impulsive people are often not recognized because they don’t necessarily do well in school (it’s extremely boring after all), they may have trouble holding jobs (also extremely boring) and they probably don’t join Mensa.
This I agree with. Almost every job pretty much has a minimum IQ** that you need to do it effectively but very few allow you to actually utilize IQ above that amount. Some police-work could involve solving very difficult problems, but the idea that extreme intelligence could be used to deduce the circumstances of crimes a la Holmes seems extremely unrealistic.
27! Oh no!
I guess my issue is that if the reasons people give for something are absurd then it is basically just senseless discrimination***. When people wouldn’t hire women for all kinds of jobs, they had reasons. A woman can’t be president because what if there was a national crisis during her ‘time-of-the-month’?!? It’s both an explanation and nothing more than a thin guise over discrimination.
The reality is that smart people are an extremely varied bunch, just like women are extreme varied or Scots are extremely varied. Being able to rotate three dimensional figures in your head (isn’t this like 8 of the questions on the wonderlic?) doesn’t really affect much of the rest of your personality. I’d love to think that smart people are better at tapping into that well known liberal-bias of reality, but some of them just use their vast intelligence to just come up with better justifications for supporting existing power structures.
** By ‘IQ’ I mean type-of-intelligence-that-IQ-tests-purport-to-measure
*** Though, as noted above, it’s probably not a barred grounds for discrimination so you can pretty much just do it. If someone wouldn’t hire you because they just didn’t like smart people, that would be fine. I personally find these legal definitions a little silly, and I think if this were to come to the supreme court of Canada (not of the US) they may read in high intelligence as something we can’t discriminate against. I’m sure most people would think that people with high intelligence hardly need the help, but the rate of substance abuse among very intelligent people is (admittedly anecdotally for me, but I’ve seen research on it at well) high. It’s not actually rosy and wonderful to be of high intelligence.
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Sure, it’s (an absurd, counterproductive) form of discrimination - but I just meant it’s not the beginning of a slippery slope towards gender discrimination, for example, because we’ve already been discriminating based on intelligence, but in the other direction.
