Several readers have pointed me to this amusing story, Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops:
A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.
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“This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class,” Jordan said today from his Waterford home. “I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”
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Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.
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But the U.S. District Court found that New London had “shown a rational basis for the policy.” In a ruling dated Aug. 23, the 2nd Circuit agreed. The court said the policy might be unwise but was a rational way to reduce job turnover.
First, is the theory empirically justified? If so, I can see where civil authorities are coming from. That being said, it’s obvious that there are some areas where “rational discrimination” is socially acceptable, and others where it is not. The same arguments used to be applied to women, in terms of the actuarial probabilities that they would get pregnant and so have to leave the workforce. And disparate impact always looms large in the utilization of these sorts of tests.
Second, can’t you just fake a lower score on an intelligence test? Do police departments hire statisticians to smoke out evidence of conscious selection of incorrect scores? I doubt it. Jordan may be smart, but perhaps he lacks common sense if the upper bound for IQ was well known.
My initial thought was that an IQ of 104 seemed too low for a median police officer, but poking around it does seem plausible as a descriptive statistic. Honestly I don’t have much acquaintance with the police, so I’ll trust the scholars no this. That being said, is it in our social interest for police officers to be so average? I don’t know. Though is it in the social interest that someone with an IQ as high as Robert Jordan’s ends up a prison guard?
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