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It is not a myth. It is a court case that dates to 2000.Robert Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, scored a 33 on an intelligence test he took as part of the application process to become a police officer in the town of New London, Connecticut. The score meant Jordan had an IQ of 125. The average score for police officers was a 21-22, or an IQ of 104. New London would only interview candidates who scored between 20 and 27. Jordan sued but lost, as the court ruled that being smart was not a protected category and the standard of only hiring average applicants was equally enforced.So why bother? The argument goes that police work can inherently be boring and repetitive. A person who is highly intelligent will probably get bored, and look for a new job. When this happens, the department has to recruit and train a replacement, which takes time and money. They figured it was better to just hire average - intelligence applicants who were less likely to become bored and dissatisfied.I’m not saying this argument makes sense. In fact, I think it is profoundly stupid. But that is the argument the police recruiter used when they declined Jordan.So next time you see a policeman caught up in some sort of abuse or misconduct, remind yourself that they deliberately screen out the smart ones.

February 28th, 1997. That was the date when I changed my mind about shotguns and started pricing patrol rifles. That was the day of the North Hollywood Bank of America robbery.Two heavily body-armored gunmen had a running gun battle with an outgunned police department, handguns, and shotguns. The police finally raided a local gun store and got rifles. In this surreal forty-four-minute gun battle, twelve police officers and eight civilians were injured. Both gunmen died, with one dying from a self-inflicted wound.It took several years to secure the funding and find the correct weapons. The weapons weren’t the problem. Many military-style weapons were available. The problem was with the ammunition. These guns are used on the battlefield, where the enemy may be a hundred yards away. Also, in military applications, no one was concerned about over-penetration.If we were going to use similar weapons, we wanted to hit our mark without having to worry about the bullet going through the target and hitting the person behind them.The answer came in a new type of urban assault ammunition. It would take the extreme energy of a high powered rifle bullet and cause the round to explode on impact. This round had interesting properties. I could blow a hole in a cinderblock with the round, yet it acted completely different in soft targets.You may remember from anatomy class that our bodies are made of mostly water. Here was the test that sold me on the ammunition. The demonstrator set up two one-gallon milk jugs full of water, one in front of the other, so they were touching. He would fire a high-powered rifle bullet from ten feet away, and the bullet would lose all its energy in the water. The rifle round was fired, and the first milk jug exploded. But the second milk jug sat intact, still full of water. I was sold.I went to Fort Dix and was certified as an assault weapons instructor. We then started training and graduated a ten officer patrol rifle team, which later grew to nearly twenty. I headed and trained that team for almost eighteen years.We would never be outgunned, and we were deadly accurate, but we also were well disciplined. During those years, we deployed our rifles during many situations but never fired a single shot.Author of the 2020 book “One Cop’s Life” available on amazonGetting many questions on the type of ammo, so this should help: Urban TAP 55g.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I would suspect looking for a history of violent, racist, or anti-social behavior. Has this person shared racist jokes on social media? Have they been the aggressor in an abusive relationship? Have they exhibited cruelty to animals? Were they a bully in school? Some of this would be very easy to determine, but would not show up on a routine background check.On a side note, I almost took a job with our local police department a little over 20 years ago. At the time all I had to do was pass a criminal background check, an embarrassingly simple physical fitness test, and complete a short take-home “test” to determine observation skills. They probably checked a few references, but obviously applicants only list people who will give them a good reference.