Police Department Minimum Education Requirement and Use of Force

摘要

The current study is a report on the existing literature regarding police departments, the minimum education requirement for the hiring of new officers and instances of use of force among officers. The professionalization of policing has been suggested and conceptualized for nearly 100 years and the existing literature supports the idea that police officers are less likely to use physical force to gain control of a situation when they have obtained a higher level of education. The present study used the LEMAS 2013 dataset and SPSS software to run Chi-Square and correlation tests between police departments' minimum education requirement for hire and reported use of force instances. As well as a correlation between the number of sworn personnel and minimum education requirement. The results of these tests show that there are extremely weak relationships between the variables and thus, the study concludes that there is a desperate need for more complete data on the subject in order to use education level to predict the likelihood of an officer to use force. Further research should be done on an individual use of force case basis to determine whether or not there is more concrete statistically significant relationship between officers' level of education and instances of use of force.