INTELLIGIBLE WRITING PRE-EMPLOYMENT SCREENING TEST

Here is a little quiz: WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT REQUISITE FOR BECOMING A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER?

(A) A college education
(B) A strong body and sound mind
(C) Superior firearms marksmanship
(D) Common sense
(E) Ability to control one’s temper
(F) Absence of racial, ethnic and religious biases
(G) None of the above

The answer is: (G) None of the above.

THE MOST IMPORTANT REQUISITE FOR BECOMING A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER IS THE ABILITY TO WRITE INTELLIGIBLY.

Throughout the United States, law enforcement agencies are expending a great deal of time and money on the application process for and training of police recruits only to discover that they’ve hired officers who are unable to put anything down in writing that makes sense.

Why are intelligible writing skills so important? In order to answer that question you have to know something about how the initial investigation of a crime is conducted. It’s not anything like how investigations are depicted on the CSI television shows.

When a crime is reported, the first responder is almost always a patrol officer. There are also those instances in which an officer observes a crime-in-progress. In the first instance, upon arrival at the scene, the officer must scope the situation, protect the crime scene and any physical evidence, attempt to hold and question any witnesses or potential witnesses, and take copious notes of all he observes and learns.

When it’s a crime-in-progress, the officer has to perform all the same tasks in addition to stopping the crime and attempting to apprehend the perpetrator(s). All these tasks have to be performed by the first responding officer(s) before the case is ever turned over to detectives and crime scene specialists.

Then comes the really hard part. Using his notes, the officer then has to put all the information he obtained into a written report, the narrative of which is accurate and will enable anyone who reads it to fully comprehend everything he observed and learned at the crime scene. That is the INITIAL INVESTIGATION report. If that report is screwed up, the detectives will have to start over from scratch and by that time evidence will have been contaminated and potential witnesses will have disappeared.

The initial investigation reports will also be read by prosecutors, defense attorneys (under the rules of discovery), probation officers (for their pre-sentence investigations), trial judges and appellate judges, and often members of the press. If these reports are well written, the readers should be able to see and proceed through the crime scene with its evidence and witnesses as though they themselves had conducted the investigation.

It is not uncommon for a prosecutor to refuse to accept a criminal complaint because of a poorly written police report. And during trial, a defense attorney will try to plant a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury by using a poorly written report to question the credibility of the entire police investigation.

In my day, we didn’t have computers. All reports were handwritten or typed up. Nowadays, the reports are entered into computers. It’s all the same though – the narrative has to be well written, whether it shows up on a computer screen or on a sheet of paper.

Here’s the rub. Many of our high school graduates can only write at a grade school level. Even some college graduates cannot write intelligibly. It is hard for me to fathom how a student who can only write at a grade school level can earn a high school diploma and how anyone who cannot write intelligibly can obtain a college degree. The bottom line is that there should be no place in law enforcement for anyone who cannot write intelligibly.

The problem is that most police entrance exams do not test an applicant’s writing ability. If the applicant meets the educational requirements and passes the written test, the physical agility test, a psychological evaluation and a comprehensive background check, he is eligible to be hired as a law enforcement officer. If he gets hired he has to successfully complete a lengthy basic peace officer certification course before he can take his place as a police officer.

Your larger police agencies have their own training academies and the recruits are on salary while they are in the academies. Counting their salaries, those training programs cost a lot of money. The smaller departments hire recruits who have completed a similar training program at a college, usually a community college. In either case, the police agency could be stuck with a rookie officer who cannot write intelligibly.

Is there is a way to avoid getting stuck with a police recruit who cannot write intelligibly? There sure is! How? By requiring every police applicant to take a simple pre-employment screening test.

Some years after I left the police agency I served with, it took steps to prevent the hiring of applicants who could not write in a way that it made sense to the reader. When an applicant first seeks to become an officer, he is given two blank sheets of paper. On one he is told to write down his personal history. On the other one he is told to write down why he wants to become a police officer.

Those two written pages are evaluated by selected members of the department. Spelling, as long as it’s not atrocious, is not a factor in the evaluation. If what the applicant has written makes little or no sense, he is not allowed to proceed with the application process. The applicant who cannot write intelligibly is advised to go to a community college and enroll in some remedial writing courses if he wants to apply again.

The NAACP threw a fit because most of the black applicants could not write intelligibly. It alleged that these simple tests were racially discriminatory despite the fact that most white applicants were also prevented from applying as they could not write intelligibly either. Because those writing tests were relevant to police work, the department prevailed over the NAACP’s complaints.

So, there you have a simple solution to a very serious problem. My suggestion to all police agencies is to adopt that simple two-sheets-of-blank-paper writing test. By screening out any applicants who cannot write intelligibly, they will not have to proceed with an expensive and time-consuming application process, only to end up with an officer who will not be able to write an acceptable police report.