Is There “One Best Way” to Select Law Enforcement Personnel?

• Author: Christopher Daniel
• Published date: 01 September 2001
• Date: 01 September 2001
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X0102100305
• Subject Matter: Articles

REVIEW OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION / Fall 2001
Daniel / LAW ENFORCEMENT PERSONNEL SELECTION
Is There “One Best Way” to Select
Law Enforcement Personnel?
CHRISTOPHER DANIEL
Kentucky State University
Police selection can be broadened in many jurisdictions, moving beyond tradi-
tional reliance on cognitive skills testing, but managers should be aware of dilem-
mas this process may entail. Jurisdictions differ from one another and trade-offs
often need to made between competing values; therefore, there is no “one best
way” to select law enforcement personnel. However, in light of several jurisdic-
tions’ problematic experiences, managers should take care not to place undue
emphasis on any single knowledge, skill, and ability (KSA) or demographic con-
sideration. Also, personality measures have limitations and may never fully
replace cognitive tests.
Legalandprofessionalstandards,embodiedintheUniformGuidelineson
Employee Selection Procedures (1978), the Society of Industrial and Orga-
nizational Psychology’s (SIOP) Principles for the Validation and Use of Person-
nel Selection Procedures (1987), and an ongoing stream of court decisions, sim-
ply create a framework within which law enforcement personnel can be
selected; managers’ real challenge is to balance competing values within the
space created by those legal and professional boundaries. As Joan Pynes has
pointed out elsewhere in this symposium (2001 [this issue]), police selection
practices merit review, expanding their focus beyond cognitive skills testing.
This article, concluding the symposium, identifies dilemmas that agencies
sometimes encounter as they confront this challenge.
FUNDAMENTAL DILEMMAS
Law enforcement selection cannot, and should not, be standardized
because there is no one best way to perform this activity. This is true partly
because the content of law enforcement jobs sometimes varies within, and
between, jurisdictions. In recent years, the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Cus-
toms Department, Chicago Police Department (Ernest Brown v. Chicago,
1998) and Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) (Lanning
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REVIEW OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION / Fall 2001
v. SEPTA, 1999) have all faced high profile litigation concerning their
selection and/or promotion programs, but the controversies have varied
greatly. As I have noted elsewhere in this symposium (2001 [this issue])
industrial psychologists increasingly generalize validity across employment
settings, provided jobs are similar or part of a job family (SIOP, 1987, p.
28). The fact that validity sometimes can be generalized gives managers the
freedom to adopt standard practices but does not dictate that they necessar-
ily do so. As Pynes (2001) has pointed out, the character of law enforcement
is changing; some departments now emphasize community policing; how-
ever, others remain more traditional.
A more fundamental problem facing managers is the multidimension-
ality of most, if not all, law enforcement jobs. Reflecting the jobs’ complex-
ity, selection systems can assess applicants’ cognitive skills, physical abili-
ties, personality/emotional capabilities, and ethical character. The latter
area, character, is typically assessed using reference checks, producing a sim-
ple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” determination of whether individuals
ethically and legally qualify for police employment. Combining informa-
tion about the other three domains, cognitive, physical, and personality/
emotional is challenging, however, because higher performance is likely to be
more desirable than lower performance. In theory, ideal law enforcement can-
didates can pass satisfactory reference checks and simultaneously score at the
top of the applicant pool on cognitive tests, physical tests, and personality/
emotional measures. In reality, selecting to optimize promise in any one of
these three areas inevitably means reducing the impact that the other types
of assessments have. Those hiring police (or other workers performing
complex, multidimensional jobs) inevitably need to make judgements
about how disparate measures should be weighted and combined to make
selection decisions.
If, for example, a hypothetical jurisdiction sought only to maximize
police applicant performance on a test of cardiovascular performance, the
individuals selected would inevitably be different from the group that
would emerge from a process selecting solely on the basis of cognitive skills
measures. So, someone must assign weights to these two dimensions of job
performance or else achieve the same result by setting passing scores or
establishing bands of scores. Deciding how to make and justify this trade-
off would be difficult even if the issue were not complicated by demo-
graphic considerations. The hypothetical jurisdiction may need to increase,
or at least maintain, minority representation within its law enforcement
ranks, but unfortunately, cognitive skills tests tend to produce adverse



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impact against African Americans and Hispanics. Tests of cardiovascular
endurance, on the other hand, adversely impact selection of women.
The laws addressing adverse impact require employers to demonstrate
that practices are job related and/or justified by business necessity, but once
this is accomplished, managers can exercise some discretion. Simply
because a jurisdiction may sometimes legally use practices adversely
impacting minorities and women does not necessarily mean that it should
do so. When deciding how to use such measures, managers need to consider
several issues. They should ask, how many women are already on the force?
How many minority group members are there? How racially and ethnically
diverse is the community? What problems will occur if minority and female
representation is not increased, or at...