Police departments are reducing education levels to fill gaps. Why is it important?

A number of the nation's biggest police departments have reduced education standards in recent years, leading to concerns about what the trend means to communities nationwide.

The New York City Police Department lowered the number of college credits cadets must have from 60 to 24 in February in an attempt to increase declining applicant levels. The Dallas City Council unanimously voted in June to do away with the requirement that recruits have college credit, following similar actions by the Memphis and New Orleans police departments over the past decade.

The reformulations have made headlines at the national level, with experts opining whether they are more positive or negative developments for police forces and communities.

Regardless of the viewpoint, the updates do not necessarily imply much is changing in U.S. policing practices, nor that they are leading the way for law enforcement standards nationwide.

That's because most cities have minimum requirements on the books requiring applicants to possess a high school diploma or GED, Dr. Heidi S. Bonner, Chair of East Carolina University's Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, said to the Washington Examiner.

"Bird's eye level view, there are very few states that have education requirements and mandates," she said.

"There are just two currently, and then California would be the third," added Bonner, citing a legislative initiative currently underway in the Golden State to mandate most new officers possess a policing certificate, an associate degree, or a bachelor's degree.

There's a few states that've recently reformed Basic Law Enforcement Training and then modified some of their courses. But that's not an education mandate. And then there's some individual agencies that've modified in terms of lowering their educational requirements," she went on to say.

Most states, however, at the state level, still have high school diploma and GED cluster academy training and their certification. So that's the standard nationwide.

Statistics from a 2017 nationwide survey of almost 1,000 departments revealed that about 80% of law enforcement agencies merely need a high school diploma to become employed. In states such as South Carolina, which is one of the nation's most rapidly expanding states, but holds education requirements well below a high school degree for only a very small percentage of police departments, changes in larger city departments such as the NYPD or Dallas Police Department to eliminate some college prerequisites have no implications for their future policing standards. Of all law enforcement departments in the Palmetto State that were polled in a 2019 University of South Carolina study of police education needs, 93% of all municipal departments and 95% of sheriff's departments only required a high school diploma or equivalent for recruits. "At state levels, each agency may have more education requirements…so they can establish their own ceilings," said Bonner, but since most still only require a high school diploma, she doesn't see shifts from departments like the NYPD and others to eliminate higher education requirements as likely to have a broad impact on "public trust."

What the changes indicate is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for police departments to recruit young people, a vital change from decades ago when the job was considered to be a worthy career, experts say.

For the biggest departments in the nation, that means they're finding themselves more and more needing to make adjustments to standards to encourage the career path. For them, the plus of a lower education requirement of a high school diploma is that it opens up a wider applicant pool. When the NYPD eliminated some higher education requirements in February, applications every day increased from a then-average of 53 to 231, a news release said. The agency inducted about 1,100 recruits in early August, its largest new class in almost a decade.

In an ideal world, you would want police chiefs to be as educated as you can possibly get them, and that you do know that means getting a college degree.

Policing has gotten very complex," said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, in an interview. "[But] the fact is, it has been tough the last five years to recruit new police officers.". There just is more demand than there are enough who want to become police officers. And so what police departments are experiencing is a hiring crisis, and they're not there are not enough college-educated applicants for policing." Higher standards could be positive as police have been asked to shoulder more and more responsibilities over the past decade in the era of community policing, Wexler said, but it's simply not a feasible requirement for agencies to adopt across the board amid a national shortage of police officers.

And the gap is not soon to be eliminated because of fundamental generational changes in attitudes about policing as a career, and with it, spells portent for states like California, and for any of the thousands of agencies around the nation with minimum educational qualifications with aspirations of elevating their standards.

Where once earlier generations found meaning in police work as a lifelong dedication to public service, younger generations are more likely to reject the long hours and increasingly unfavorable attitudes surrounding the career path for more lucrative jobs with greater flexibilities.

And they also are more likely to be wary of risks associated with the job, said Jillian Snider, a former police officer with the NYPD who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "We have a recruitment as well as a retention problem," she told an interviewer, pointing out that there has been a significant change since the early 2000s, a time of high patriotism and civic duty when individuals were opting to enter the policing vocation "as a response to 9/11" and soldiers were returning from fighting in the Iraq war "and were entering the work." You're not seeing an interest in a law enforcement career among the next generation, these young people that are in their late teens, early 20s, and are starting to contemplate, what am I going to do when I'm a grown-up?

They're not seeing these 20, 25, and 30-year careers.

They're going into 3,4,5-year jobs and then leaving to do something else," Snider said. "Pay is one of the largest motivators in that generation." Police, traditionally, do not offer high, more competitive wages in a great number of jurisdictions." 

Wexler mentioned Michael Brown's killing, which took place the same year, as another incident that stirred a change of opinions, and contributed to a fall in better-educated youths drawn to policing.

A wave of national "defund the police" demonstrations followed when Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. TRUMP'S HIGHER EDUCATION CRACKDOWN RESHAPES ELITE CAMPUSES AS STUDENTS RETURN "Honestly, I believe that we're in an era where policing has been very difficult," Wexler said. "I've lectured at a great many colleges. I've lectured at Georgetown, I've lectured at Princeton, I've lectured at Harvard, and other places. And I'll sometimes turn to the class and say, 'How many of you want to be a police officer one day?'"

"Nobody ever raises their hand," he said.