Becoming a LEO Might Require a 4 Year Degree in California

I don’t know what happens once they finish the course. I expect they’re not just chucked in the deep end.

Hi Neil, great to see you here!

Was glad to see you post some sense to that kendo troll.

Right, most people do not know that. I can’t say for sure what the RCMP does with newly graduated Mounties, but I’m betting it’s not stick them in a patrol car and turn them loose with nationwide police jurisdiction.

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I’ve never heard of an agency that didn’t have an FTO process.

Me either, but those darned Canuckians, who knows?

Part of this whole problem is that people who are trying to pass legislation do not know the process for becoming a sworn officer and POST certified.

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Yep, and it’s been that way for years. They are the same ones, who have never walked in those shoes that will be judging your use of force.

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I’ve shared this story here before, but the Princeton NJ detective who took my fingerprints for my PI license blew his brains out a few weeks later.

It’s such a shame that supporting police is always such a hot button issue, these folks need support more than most. I’ve always wondered what was wrong with the detective, he had a sweet job (Princeton NJ is not a crime mecca to say the least). Maybe family, maybe someone he put away he regretted. Maybe even with a Princeton detective’s salary he couldn’t pay his bills.

Cops should get free tuition for any type of training or education, imho, but they rarely do. When I think of Thoreau’s “lives of silent desperation” I think of cops and nurses, like my mom and that detective. Mom was a nurse for 40 years, went crazy. That detective felt his life had hit a dead end. Maybe a little more care and feeding by their establishments would have saved both. I don’t know.

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I’ve known a few LEO who have killed themselves. Really messes with your mind a lot. Well, my mind. One was a pretty close friend. Sucks for his family.

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Too few cops train any combat sports or maintain a fitness standard, although not true for all police departments. I don’t know how a 4 year college degree will change that issue, but it will create an even worse turn over rate.

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Locally the issue isn’t lack of training, its racial prejudice. Lets say I were to strip naked and go on a psychotic rampage, attacking people at random. If I were white and my victim black, its likely HE goes to jail. If I were black, I’d make the news quickly as another police shooting.

Whilst education is important, psychological evaluation is equally so . The FBI has a pretty rigorous screening process, so there is a precedent

A graduate may be educated enough, but if their motivation is bogus , fail

Equally, a high-school drop out who has common sense and a commitment to public service and respect for their community members, pass

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A degree isn’t going to solve racism, also it’ll be a bar to a lot of minorities becoming cops who would be an asset policing their local community.

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That’s another way of saying it’ll create a new generation of cops who have more opportunities than existing ones, who are basically stuck in blue collar jobs hoping for a pension to spend before they get blown away over some bullshit.

I’d approve my tax dollars for that. Think of the scholarship opportunities it would create. Civil servants need upward mobility too, and government work is thankless. Nurses didn’t use to require degrees, now they do, because nursing isn’t a 2 year thing anymore. It takes people made of mental and physical iron.

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I don’t disagree with you with something needing to change. I know several good guy cops, I was a correctional officer for most of my 20s. Here in Vegas beat cops make 100,000 plus with a little bit of overtime 3 days off 4 10 hr shifts a week and there is still an issue with a turnover rate.

That’s spot on.

When I worked in a prison I realized that most of us who actually did their jobs correctly didn’t grow up much different then most of the inmates. The C/Os that were incompetent and scared were usually like the one’s you described in your post.

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One reason why degrees are now required for jobs like LEO and nursing is, IMHO, because bachelor degrees in general have become less valuable because everyone else seems to have one

The Masters is the new Bachelor’s degree

Different levels of nurses have different levels of education.

Honestly, we need to just remove qualified immunity and arrest them for crimes. Defunding them is stupid. Lock up the criminals, let good cops have the resources they need.

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Well the hardest part of any Job I have ever had has always involved dealing with people.

It gets even worse, I found, when you have to be responsible for and try to manage them.

Having to deal with the most difficult overgrown children in society almost exclusively is probably fucking exhausting.

I think all cops should be paid well because of this.

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In theory this shit sounds great but how much do you want to bet that you could cut down on all the shit that contributes to crime in the long term if they just hired more teachers, provided free rehab services, institutionalized the clearly mentally ill and cut the balls off all the heroin dealers?

Am I not a benign overlord? We shouldn’t suffer certain kinds of fools unnecessarily. The ones that can’t help it, should be helped. The ones who can help it, need to be incentivized correctly.

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