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Comment by DonnyV | Hacker News Reader

Here one solution that could fix shortage and quality in police departments. I see a lot of college educated people that can't find jobs. Raise the requirement for being a cop to need 2 to 4 years of college and hire all the college people looking for work. That will also fix most of the corruption problems. I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.

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What makes you think this would solve the corruption problem? Cops aren't corrupt because they're dumb, they're corrupt because the institutions they are part of allow and reward corruption. Without some mechanism to change that culture, simply adding more members to it will only bolster it. College degrees don't have anything to do with it.

> I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.

Literally! They might but that doesn't make it a good idea. We don't need more police we need to change the role of police in our society.

Do you know any cops? I know quite a few. Most of them are dumb as bricks and very easily succumb to their base instincts. They also have very over inflated egos. Thinking they know more than their citizens they're supposed to be protecting. Do you know who runs these departments? The ones with the most over inflated egos who literally think that they are in a war with their own citizens. They are also the ones that easily fall for conspiracy theories. I know we want to think its elitiest to require a college degree to do a job. But I don't think it is. Its a filter to get less of these type of people.

Surprisingly I actually do know a lot of cops. They do use the language you're talking about, they view non-cops as too weak and cowardly to do what is "necessary," the violence that they do. They also tend to be fairly unsophisticated sure but they understand what they're part of. And plenty of them are smart, and those tend to be officers in my experience.

But I simply reject the premise that any of this is caused by lack of education and can be corrected by shifting the selection criteria. You need a certain amount of moral flexibility and malice to stay a cop for long, and that will be just as true of college graduates. Policing attracts all kinds of people as it is, but it only retains the ones it can mold into a particular nasty usefulness.

It's not lack of educational degree.

It's lack of ethics and morale.

Impunity is the source of corruption

I dont understand your solution. College educated people dont want to become cops now - despite the pay and pension.

How would adding a college degree requirement make more people want to do it?

Are you if the opinion that college graduates are less likely to become corrupt than, oh, the people who normally become cops?

I worked at a university. The corruption was constant and funny because of the trivial numbers in financial gain terms.

I honestly think this is a great idea, I'd go even further to require a minimum 2-year criminal justice degree.

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