Is A College Degree Necessary for Today’s Police Officer?
...e or she will understand that TV and real life police officers are completely different. Since the Rodney King incident, the professionalism of police officers has become more important. One way to help the law enforcement become more professional is to require all officers to have a college degree. This will help officers to understand more about the nature of policing and it will also help increase the standard and proficiency of their work since college students are required to take some kind of writing class that increases their writing skills and abilities. According to Michael Palimiotto, many college course requirements and achievements focus on responsibility in the individual and a greater appreciation for constitutional rights, values, and the democratic form of government. This will allow police officers to have greater respect for the public and it helps the officer become more successful when applying community base policing. Mistakes, such as the Rodney King incident reduce the chances for a college graduate officer to violate others constitutional rights. Because of this, confrontation between police officers and citizens will decrease due to the higher standards of police officers. A college education will not transform an intellectually wanting person into an accomplished one (Sewell, 1999). But, the college-educated person is more qualified and better prepared than the high school graduate. A college education will help the individual to explore more ideas and problem-solving techniques. He or she will also have a greater advantage on handling difficult situations with greater creativity and innovation. Decision-making has become a big part of police responsibility. When complex situations happen, the police officer with a higher education might be more prepared to make the decision, compared to the officer with no college education because of the extra knowledge he or she has. This will also reduce some of the unintelligent mistakes from occurring. As I mentioned above, most police work is very routine and can be solved by common sense. According to many experienced officers, 80% of police work is very routine and basic. If the police department required all police officers to be college graduates, many of them would find their job boring and not challenging enough. If this were to happen, many of these educated officers might not be focus on their job and would end up doing a worse job than the high school graduate officer. This could cause a major problem for the police department if most of officers lost interest in their job. Therefore, a lack of being challenged is one of the disadvantages for only using college graduate police officers. Many of the college graduate police officers will often desire to be promoted. However, this opportunity only comes once in a while. When the college graduate police officer does not receive a promotion, he or she may become frustrated, and this can directly affect his or her ability to work. Many officers may end up leaving the department in hopes of finding other agents who allow more opportunity for growth and faster promotion. Another disadvantage of using all college graduate police officers is cost. If a police department decided to require all police officers to be college graduates, the department might have to spend more money when hiring them. The expectations of a college graduate are higher than a regular person. For that reason, college graduates will not want to work for the same price as the non-college graduates. When hiring costs increase and department budgets stay the same, a police department might have to hire fewer officers or decrease the expenses on equipment to stay within their budget. If this is the case, the service quality of that police department will actually decrease. Police work is like many other jobs. Most of the work is learned by experience, not school. When a police officer has more experience in the field, he or she will find different ways of handling situations and many of those situations will be different from how he or she has learned from the book. Therefore, in law enforcement work, experience will weight heavier than education. A college education is definitely a boost to increase quality and professionalism in the police department. With a higher education, police officers will have more insight about the criminal justi...