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1 Police Stud.: Int'l Rev. Police Dev. 32 (1978)
College Education for Police: The Reform That Failed

handle is hein.journals/polic1 and id is 226 raw text is: College Education for Police: The Reform that Failed? Lawrence W Sherman School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany, U.S.A. For more than half a century, American police reformers have argued that police officers should have a college education. In the past ten years, that recommendation has been widely adopted. But while college educated officers have become more common, so has the criticism that higher education fails to improve police performance. The criticism is supported by a number of studies showing little or no consistent differences between college educated and non-college educated officers. Yet the recently published report of the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers' suggests that both the critics and the researchers have been asking the wrong questions. Rather than looking at the differences between individual police officers, one should ask what impact college educated personnel generally have had and will have on the development of policing as an institution. Moreover, one should ask about the kind of education police officers have been receiving, and whether it matches the conception first held by the reformers who recommended college education for police. When these questions are adequately addressed, the inescapable conclusion is not that police education is a reform that failed, but rather that the reform has been subverted by the conservative forces in American policing. The Roots of the Reform Public concern over the low quality of police manpower dates back at least to the ethnic power struggles of the late nineteenth century American cities,2 and possibly before that. Shortly after the Irish and European immigrants had gained firm control over urban police departments, a wave of police reform swept the country, fueled -by the native- American whose morality (and social position) was challenged by the law enforcement practices of the newly powerful immigrants.3 The reformers labelled the police as corrupt and unworthy of theirjobs. But it was not until after World War I in what police historian Robert Fogelson calls the second wave of police reform that higher education was prescribed as the central cure for the diagnosis that the heart of the police problem is one of personnel.4 Unlike the first wave of reform in which aristocratic experts had sought to impose military discipline and the scientific management principles of F. W. Taylor5 on the police, the second wave of reform was led by career police officials who proposed to turn policing into a prestigious profession. Higher education was to be the cornerstone of that strategy. The most influential member of the second wave of police reformers was August Vollmer, whose own eighth grade education did not prevent him from becoming a prolific author and a professor at the University of California.6 From his base as Chief of Police in Berkeley, Vollmer served as interim reform chief in a number of American cities and directed the report on police of America's first national study of crime and law enforcement, the Wickersham Commission.7 Arriving at the beginning of the Great Depression, this Commission's finding that 75 percent of American policemen could not pass an Army intelligence test8 and its recommendation that police be better educated fell on deaf ears. Vollmer and his colleagues did succeed in establishing a foothold for college education on police-related subjects in some excellent universities,9 but the graduates of these few programs were a drop in the bucket of American policing. Not until the national crime wave of the late 1960's did the recommendation that police be college educated receive widespread support. In the context of the double barreled criticism that the police were both too brutal and too incompetent to control crime, President Lyndon Johnson's crime commission recommended that all police recruits should ultimately hold a baccalaureate degree. 10 The idea received more support from almost every one of the many

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