Fucking Cops

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Many years ago, my neighbor was a psychologist and one of his clients was the county PD. His job was to do personality testing on police recruits.
One day he asked me if I would read a proposal for a paper he was thinking of writing and wanted a non-specialists opinion.

The gist of the hypothesis had to do with the prevalence of alcoholism, divorce and suicide among police officers. His idea was that it was not the job itself which led to these conditions but that a certain personality type tended to be drawn to police work. In effect, had these people become firemen or garbagemen or teachers they would still have been alcoholics, lousy husbands and suicidal. The allure of police work was the inherent power as an attraction to rigid personalities, as he called it.

I said something like "interesting but how will you prove it?" It was at that point that he told me that he routinely washed out about 1/3 of the recruits because of psychological instability, BUT. That was because of the rules he was forced to follow which required him to only wash out the ones who demonstrated current psychological problems. Had he been allowed to use discretion about what might develop he would have washed out more than half.

This was well before the internet and I don't know if he ever published the paper. Maybe I'll go looking around the web.