Criminal Justice

CJ-1010
Nick Snarr
Do Police Officers Need a College Education?
It has been a long debated topic, does a college education make a difference
in police work. Some argue that it is an art to become a cop, or that being on
the street is the way that you know and become a police officer. I believe
that being a police officer is extremely hard and takes a certain type of
person. I think that having a college education will not only improve the
effectiveness of police officers but improve the publics perception of them.
Rasmussen College student, Grant Titus (2) has a list of lesson that are
learned in college. Among them are:

Learning is a lifetime activity

Become solutions based
Its all about people

All of which are extremely important to the policing profession. Those that
make learning a lifetime activity are more open to new ideas and ways of
thinking. Being solution based makes it so that not only do you want to
solve the crimes that have been committed but to help make solutions to
prevent them from ever happening. And being a police officer can take a
toll on a person. Remembering that it is about the people will enable an
officer to remember why they wanted to become an officer in the first
place.

A study (1) conducted for the Police Quarterly shows that officers with some
college education are less likely to resort to force than those who never
attended college. it found that in encounters with crime suspects, officers
with some college education or a four-year degree resorted to using force 56
percent of the time, while officers with no college education used force 68
percent of the time. In another study it showed that officers who had worked
at least eleven years or more on the job resorted to force 51 percent of the
time. Experience and education have similar effects on policing, the author

of the study said, but experience takes longer to accumulate, and many
mistakes may be made along the way.
"Irrespective of experience, college is going to give you bang for the buck
right out of the gate," he said. "By having an education, you're actually
speeding up the process of experience and you're getting the effect of better
policing in the form of less force."
For these reasons I believe that Policing can only be helped by having its
applicants and its current police officers from attending college. Just like in
most other professional careers a college education enables the people who
work in those jobs to be more informed, better socialized, more adept at
solving problems than those who have not attended college at all.

Citations
1. Burns, Melinda. "Cops and College: Do Police Need Book Smarts?" Pacific Standard. N.p.,
02 Sept. 2010. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.

2. Tilus, Grant. "10 Life Lessons You Learn In College." 10 Life Lessons You Learn In College.
N.p., 06 June 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.