They hire less smart people on purpose because they tend to question orders less and do what they are told more (their words, not mine).
The ruling is that it is not literally illegal to refuse to hire someone for being smart. On an totally unrelated note, the applicant was an older fellow, and age discrimination is illegal.
The applicant was also hired as an officer in another jurisdiction.
Most departments that have more than 100 officers require a bachelor's or associate's degree. The department I worked for did not explicitly have this requirement, but I was the only person in our class of 96 hires that did not have either a college degree or military background. Most had bachelor's, a few had master's, some had doctorates.
On a completely separate tangent, law enforcement as a field is much like a skilled trade. To do it well you need a specific set of skills and the desire to learn them. Any high school graduate can do the job more than adequately if hes willing to listen and learn the stuff he needs to learn. At the end of the day a cop simply needs to be an honest person who understands the basic principles of the laws related to policing, and is willing to take calculated risks to help others.
> Policemen: Most Romanian people are not fond of the law enforcement institutions and try to avoid contact with constables. Romanian public opinion about policemen says that they are primitive, uneducated and totally corrupt. Some of these police jokes belong to the absurd genre.
Q: How do you choose a stupid policeman from a group of policemen?
A: At random.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_humour#Stereotypes
So in practice the written test got removed or downplayed
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/f...