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Review of Literature

Background

In an effort to understand post-secondary school choice for those who want to pursue degrees in police science, emergency medical services, and firefighting, it is crucial to grasp some of the material written about the subject at hand. The research question, “Why do students who want to pursue careers in law enforcement, emergency medical services, and firefighting enroll in 4-year universities instead of a technical school?,” is now a heuristic question in the arena of public service. If this is answered, public servants could be become better trained.
This review of literature has looked into peer-reviewed documents on police education, and technical education. There wasn’t an abundance of literature on the subject, and nothing relevant to fire science or emergency medical services. For the purposes of this review, it will focus on the former.

Reviewed Literature

Of the reviewed literature, many studied police education, however, "Standards for police recruitment and training," (Gourley 522-525) stands out as a chronological review of how officers are trained, and what education they need. The article is featured in the "Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science," from 1962. This gives the reader an understanding of how education has progressed, and perhaps regressed since the '60s. With the topic at hand being why police officers would want to go to a four-year university versus a two-year technical college, this article sheds light on why many police officers don't even go to police academies in present day. In one example used in the article rules and regulations, along with recruitment used to be, "home rule," by the cities, villages, townships that presided over their officers. This meant that they had strict autonomy over what the police could/couldn't do, and who or whom they didn't choose to hire. Since the 60's the rules and regulations have since moved over to the state allowing education to be controlled by the state.

In the article, "How should we educate the police?," (Lankes 587-592) from the same journal as the preceding article, the author discusses an ongoing debate in the 1970's on how law enforcement should be educated. In one section of the article it shows two recommendations the Department of Justice were contemplating. The first thought was, "The ultimate aim of all police departments should be that all personnel with general powers have baccalaureate degrees." The second was, "Police departments should take immediate steps to establish a minimum requirement of a baccalaureate degree for all supervisory and executive positions." The article also discusses that if the first recommendation was carried out, only 47 institutions in the United States offered Police Science degrees. On the other hand there were 180 institutions set up to handle two-year degrees in police science. The article is critical of the second recommendation because of the lack of institutions that were able to grant the baccalaureate degrees. The author stated that it would take, “generations,” to fill in the, “ranks of 420,000 [in the 1960’s] law enforcement officers in the United States.”

In another article entitled," Authoritarianism in college and non-college oriented police," (Smith, Locke, and Walker 128-132) of the same journal, the authors wanted to seek out who was more of an authoritarian police officer, college educated, or non college educated. While using Rokeach and Piven personality scales, the authors conducted tests on two groups, the college educated, and non-college educated. The authors concluded that the college educated policeman were less authoritarian, than the non-college educated. It was also noted that the younger group of the college educated were even less authoritarian than the older college educated officers. The article sheds light on why college education is important, not only for education, but for an understanding of the world, and how public servants should interact with the people that they serve.

In a more current article entitled, “ Trends in the Policing Industry,” (Maguire, and King 15-41) Maguire and King, illustrate changes in police science in the modern era. They write that the police workforce has become “increasingly educated,” and most police agencies have increased minimum education requirements from 1990 to 2004 (present day for the article). In an interesting note it wasn’t until the year 2000 that only 83% of police agencies required high school diplomas. The article ties in with, “How we should educated the police,” and the recommendations laid out by the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers by saying that twenty-five years have passed and not all officers have baccalaureate degrees. The authors end their piece on education by saying that the police force is still likely to become more highly educated, but this seems to be more of a normative statement to the reader with no empirical data. Until this data is released in present day, it’s still unknown the actual percentages of officers with four-year degrees.

Lastly, “Problems of Technical Education,” (D.P. 533-539) is an article written on problems of technical schools that the United Kingdom and India both shared, and references applications to the United States. Although this article was written in 1970, some of these problems seem to be around today. The author states that there are three major problems with technical education, “preparation,” technical education itself,” and “practical training.” In preparation it was written that many of the students didn’t have the knowledge to succeed at a post-secondary school, and many failed because of this. In technical education and practicality, both were seen to carry on the lack of preparation into the workforce with many of the new workers not being able to do their jobs. Although this article does not discuss police sciences, it may be relevant to the topic at hand by helping validate the research question.

Conclusion

While there isn’t an exhaustive list of literature available on the post-secondary school choice for those who want to pursue degrees in police science, emergency medical services, and firefighting these articles will still help to establish a knowledge of what has already been done in the field of research. Some recommendations that come to mind are more research on police education in present day to show the change from what was written in the 1970’s. There also needs to be more written about fire science and emergency medical services, as no pertinent peer-reviewed journals were found.