Police and Higher Education

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The article Police and Higher Education: Where are We Now by Roy Roberg and Scott Bonn discuss and review past articles and ideas about whether or not police officers should be required to have earned a college degree in order to qualify a position in law enforcement within the United States. The first person who believed in the idea that police officers should be required to hold a college degree in order to be qualified for a position was August Vollmer. August Vollmer was “the father of American police professionalism” (Walker & Katz, 2011). Vollmer is best known for being a supporter of higher education within law enforcement. However, many officers and high ranking officials did not believe in the concept of needing to obtain a college degree in order to protect their community. A majority of police officers in law enforcement did not have a college degree nor did police departments require it to be considered a position. Moreover, many police departments did not necessitate a high school diploma but rather a general equivalency diploma. The first time that this idea was utilized was during the time of the 1960’s, when, in the early 1960’s, crime was increasing drastically and by the late 1960’s the ghetto riots took place, opening the eyes of those in charge that something needed to change, and change quickly in order to prevent criminal activity and chaos.
During the 1970’s, the main objective of law enforcement was now focused on crime prevention and policing programs. Policing programs could be found in mostly every college and school around the United States. In 1968, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 which entailed the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). The ...

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...g side by side with the community and to do so successfully, you must have an open mind and not allow your own beliefs to interfere with the main objective of the policing. In college you learn many things about life and living in a small nit “community” with many different people who you come to accept by the end of your college experience. One of the weaknesses that the article holds is the fact that most of the research done is outdated and now irrelevant to today’s world. The amount of people who graduated high school doubled from 1960 to 2004 and the amount of people who graduated college more than tripled in that same time period (Walker & Katz, 2011, p. 126). In conclusion, I think that having a higher education in policing will benefit drastically when it comes to preventing and dealing with crime in such diverse communities all across the United States.

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