A badge and a baccalaureate: Policies, hypotheses, and further evidence

Arguments for and against measures intended to raise the educational levels of police officers turn partly on the hypothesized relationships between college education and officers' attitudes and behavior. The purpose of this analysis is to provide additional empirical evidence concerning these hypotheses. The results suggest that college education is weakly related to some attitudes and unrelated to others. The results also show that officers' performance in police-citizen encounters, measured in terms of citizens' evaluations, is largely unrelated to officers' educational backgrounds. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 1985 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Diego, November 13–17, and the 1988 annual meeting of the Midwestern Criminal Justice Association, Chicago, October 5–7. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments and suggestions of Francis T. Cullen, Stephen Mastrofski, George I. Miller, Gordon P. Whitaker, Alissa Pollitz Worden, and the anonymous JQ referees. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 1985 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Diego, November 13–17, and the 1988 annual meeting of the Midwestern Criminal Justice Association, Chicago, October 5–7. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments and suggestions of Francis T. Cullen, Stephen Mastrofski, George I. Miller, Gordon P. Whitaker, Alissa Pollitz Worden, and the anonymous JQ referees. Notes Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 1985 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Diego, November 13–17, and the 1988 annual meeting of the Midwestern Criminal Justice Association, Chicago, October 5–7. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments and suggestions of Francis T. Cullen, Stephen Mastrofski, George I. Miller, Gordon P. Whitaker, Alissa Pollitz Worden, and the anonymous JQ referees.