Modern policing requires more skills, education
The Ottawa police services board believes that becoming a cop should require some level of post-secondary education. Currently, high school’s good enough to apply to wear a badge and carry a gun in Ottawa.
It stands to reason that police officers should be educated somewhat beyond that, considering the challenges they confront and the skills higher education often endows. Studying social work could only be a benefit to police who are dealing with marginalized and vulnerable communities.
Oh — and officers with higher education use force less often than their less-educated comrades.
A recent report on such matters, from the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards, was submitted to the province as part of the review of Ontario’s Police Services Act, which governs policing. Two-thirds of the 107 boards around the province that contributed to the submission agreed “post-secondary education … should be a prerequisite to becoming a police officer.”
Yet, not only is it not required for the Ottawa police, it’s not needed for the Ontario Provincial Police or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police either. It does, however, really help candidates get through the hiring process in Ottawa.
Eli El-Chantiry, chair of the Ottawa police services board (and also the president of the provincial association), said the Ottawa board was in favour of higher education given the challenges of policing.
“In the past they hired police officers for a bar fight,” El-Chantiry said. “Today, you have cybercrime, you have child pornography … diversifying our workforce is very important right now.”
For decades, specifically in the United States, education has been seen as a way to professionalize officers from the drunken, gun-toting louts of the early 20th century. At the time of the First World War, 75 per cent of American cops couldn’t pass an army intelligence test.
Naturally, we could hope Canadian cops were somewhat brighter, but the point remains: For a long time, educating police officers has been seen as a way to boost the competence of police forces.
The catch is that the research doesn’t really show this. While it makes perfect sense that a bettereducated officer would be a better officer, or be better equipped to handle mental-health calls, it can’t be concluded with certainty, explained William Terrill, a criminology professor at Arizona State University who’s studied police education.
“There’s not much research — if any — that drills down that deep, to answer that question of whether those (more educated) officers actually will be better at handling calls like that,” Terrill said. “One of the potential big benefits of higher education, is the officers that come in potentially are thinking more globally, thinking more about the role of policing that it’s not ‘catching the bad guy,’ that it is more of a social role of yes, you are going to have to engage in social work type of behaviour.”
Where education clearly does make a difference is use of force. How extensively police use force — defined in some studies as everything from yelling threats, to clobbering suspects with batons or fists, or shooting them dead — may be the most important issue facing police, as it can be literally a life or death matter.
Considering how carefully police are scrutinized — particularly regarding race and the use of force — and the concerns about officers handling, for example, mental health calls, it makes sense for police services around Ontario, and Canada, to consider how best to police a diverse, modern city in the 21st century.
Police should be demanding new skill sets and more education.