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9 Am. J. Police 39 (1990)
Intelligence and the Selection of Police Recruits

handle is hein.journals/ajpol9 and id is 575 raw text is: American Journal of Police 39 INTELLIGENCE AND THE SELECTION OF POLICE RECRUITS Dennis Jay Kenney University of Nebraska-Omaha Steuart Watson University of Nebraska-Lincoln INTRODUCTION It is by now well accepted that in the stressful, unpredictable world of policing, officers must possess the emotional tools necessary to perform a variety of difficult and taxing duties. Because of the de- mands that officers confront, most law enforcement agencies have come to accept the need to screen police candidates in an effort to avoid hiring persons with attributes or behaviors which might be detri- mental to either the officer's well-being or the organization's mission. To accomplish this, programs of psychological testing have become almost commonplace. While the need for psychological fitness is obvious, the role of to- day's police officer is becoming increasingly complex in other ways as well. As the more traditional methods of law enforcement are called into question (see, e.g., Kelling et al., 1974; Chaiken et al., 1977; Spelman and Brown, 1984; Burrows, 1986) and experimental efforts are introduced, officers find that their skills in communication, coun- seling, information collection, analysis, interpretation and consensus building are frequently more important than they had previously imagined possible. As more and more agencies adopt these newer methods-such as team policing, split-foree and directed patrol, prob- lem- and community-oriented policing, repeat offender programs, and repeat complaint policing-this refocusing of police procedure will al- most certainly be accelerated. Despite these obvious trends, few in ei- ther law enforcement or academe have given much notice to questions concerning the ability of today's officers to meet tomorrow's expecta- tions. This paper, which reports on a program of IQ testing of police recruits undertaken by a midsized southern city, is one such effort.

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