Is there anything more terrifying than a dumb person with a gun? Well, there are, but an armed dumb person is bad, and if they’ve got a badge pinned to their chest, they have the potential to become a living nightmare. This situation, however, is the norm within the nation’s police departments, who’s officers have a mean IQ score of 104. That’s not all that low, and not exactly “dumb”,with the mean IQ score for US citizens being 98, but a court ruling from 2000 casts a shadow over the correlation between IQ and employment opportunities within law enforcement. Basically, the court ruled that the police can refuse to hire someone based on an IQ that is too high. Robert Jordan applied for a job as an officer but was rejected based an IQ score of 125 which was deemed too high. The court ruled that the department had a right to discriminate based on IQ because it could possibly result in lower turn-over. Theoretically, smarter people would get bored with police work and quit. Seems like any company could then discriminate based on IQ, which I believe is within their right, but I also believe something else is at play here.
Smarter people are less likely to be overtaken by emotion, less likely to follow an order that could lead to harm of someone. It would be interesting to see the IQ score of the SWAT cop who recently murdered a young father-of-two who did nothing more than answer the door, or Philip Brailsford, the Arizona cop who murdered a prone and sobbing Daniel Shaver, also a young father-of-two. It should be noted that Shaver’s 8-year old daughter said she “wanted to die” so she could be with her daddy.
Brailsford clearly looks like a dim bulb, and has a history of unnecessarily injecting violence into situations. But it would be interesting to see the results of an IQ test. I imagine he’s on the left side of the bell curve.
I write this also because of my interactions with police. While cordial, they are clearly very emotional people. I don’t believe its the nature of their job, which is safer than most, but rather the screening process.
Could higher intelligence standards, more comprehensive IQ tests, lead to fewer deaths at the hands of American cops? I have a feeling it could.
