The Selection of Police Officers: An Argument for Simplicity
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X8305600108 |
| Published date | 01 January 1983 |
| Author | David Lester |
| Date | 01 January 1983 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
DAVID LESTER,
Ph.D.
THE SELECTION OF POLICE
OFFICERS:
AN
ARGUMENT
FOR
SIMPLICITY
In recent years, psychologists are getting more involved in police
work, and rightly so for psychologists have useful skills to
contribute.'
One area into which psychologists have put much effort is police
selection. Kent and Eisenberg- reviewed a great deal of work relating
psychological tests to police performance, including intelligence
tests, personality tests, vocational guidance tests and psychiatric
tests. More recently, there have been several majorstudies to explore
ways of predicting police performance from psychological
data
and
personal history
data
collected from applicants, for example, Cohen
and Chaiken! and Furcon, et al.!
My intention here is to argue that much of this screening and
testing of applicants is unnecessary. The most important
information comes from performance in the training academy and in
the initial probationary period.
(I)
First, applicants to police departments are reduced
drastically by the civil service exam and background check.
For
example,
data
indicate that in Portland only 6% ofapplicants to take
the civil service exam passed through these stages to arrive at the
psychological screening; in the New Jersey State Police only 8% of
those taking the civil serviceexam, and in Chicago only 10%of those
applying to take the civilservice exam.> Clearly, most applicants fail
to pass these preliminary stages.
(2) Second, there isnot much evidence
that
psychological testing
has any use in predicting performance as a police officer.
For
example, Cohen and Chaiken studied recruits in the New York City
police department and found that, after combining the best
predictors that they were able to identify, they could predictwhether
an officer would get promoted with a correlation coefficient of 0.33.
Such acorrelation explains only 10%of the variation between men,
and psychologists would view such a low correlation as of a little
social use. No decisions should be based upon such a poor predictor.
Furcon, et al. did not intheir report state how large the correlation
was between the predictors and subsequent performance. Even when
the reported correlation is high (Hankey, et al. 6reportacorrelation
of 0.73), this means that the predictors explain only 53% of the
January /983 53
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