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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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