Police Officer Hiring Process

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Running head: The Hiring Process to Become a Police Officer 2

If I were to hire someone to fight crime side by side with me, I need to know he or she is the right person for the job. My department in total will invest about $100,000 in this individual to get them up on their feet and reporting to calls by themselves. I demand the best and will not take anyone who is going to waste my time and money. The new officer being hired needs to have the right qualities to make them a good police officer. Some of the qualities of a good police officer are honesty, loyalty, respect, selfless service, integrity and great judgement. During the hiring process, we are looking for these qualities in the recruit and if they do not have them they are …show more content…

The verbal problems will test the judgment of the recruit and see if their judgement is good. Having good judgement in this line of work is important because if need be you are legally able to take another’s life and if you do not have the good judgment you could potentially kill someone who doesn’t deserve to be killed. I also want to know their situational awareness and to test this I will randomly asked them what is behind them. It is always important to know what is on your backside because you never know when a criminal will stab you in the back. This phase of testing is to show I am going to hire an officer who uses their “brain” a lot more than using their …show more content…

But the hardest thing to test for in a recruit is that they want to do this for a career. Life of a police officer is hard and stressful. As an officer you deal with the scum of the earth on an everyday basis. After five years of dealing with criminals and missing out on key life moments such as Christmas morning and their son’s baseball game. An officer might just decide this career is not for him and he can simply pack up and leave. The life of a police officer is hard and you cannot test anything to guarantee they are going to be on the force for a full twenty-five years.
From step one of hiring someone to promoting them to detective there are countless challenges I as police chief face. The biggest challenge during the hiring process is hiring the wrong person. If I need to fire an officer because they are not doing their job correctly I am losing an investment of almost $100,000. All the time and energy it took to get that officer working is now wasted and I am the face to blame for that because I hired that