[QUOTE=Blanche]
It’s because there’s really only two reasons to be a cop - to abuse the power or to use it to improve the world. As you mentioned, the pay is pretty lousy for the degree of risk they face (though a lot better than I’ve ever made in most cities). There’s not many people out there who would be willing to put their life on the line to help others, a lot of other jobs that let you help others at lower risk or with better rewards. From my experience of humanity, there’s a lot more people who would be willing to take a job because it’s a power trip, or the best money they can make with their level of education (many small towns hire people with only GEDs to be police, and most police departments don’t require a college degree), or they think they can make money on the side, or they like to hurt people. Though I’ve met plenty of good cops, I’ve met a lot more who fall into the latter category, ranging from apathetic at best to sadistic and sociopathic at worst.
I’m sure some areas have better cops than others, but I think the nature of the job, and the nature of people in general and how they react to having power and having to deal with annoying ‘customers’ leads to a lot of people who shouldn’t be cops working as cops, even in the best departments.
[/QUOTE]
You were doing well in this thread until this post (and well, the post directly prior to it.
There are many reasons to become a police officer. The pay isn’t necessarily great, but if you don’t have a college education it isn’t easy to get a job that pays well anyways. If you become a cop you have a job that typically is there to stay, aside from when local governments are deep in the red and have to slash police officer positions. This is generally somewhat rare and politicians are loathe to do it because constituents don’t like hearing that the government is in such bad shape we have to lay off the people who keep the streets safe.
Furthermore there are some people who actually enjoy police work. As other posters have already mentioned. The pay isn’t that great, but in most areas you have good benefits. Say you’re a young man, in good physical shape, you don’t want to sit behind a desk all day or do back breaking manual labor all day, and you aren’t really into going to college–becoming a cop doesn’t look that bad. Unfortunately you realize like most cops do that there is a ton of paperwork involved, but that’s usually after the person has already been attracted to the job.
LIke a lot of other fields that used to be wide-open to people with only a high school degree, policing more and more is starting to favor people who have a college diploma under there belt, but for the present time my comments in regards to “no college required” are still accurate in most places.
