Free Essay About Better Screen Out Than Screen In

Tapping expertise of psychologists has been an increasingly routine practice in many law enforcement agencies country wide. As part of hiring new police officers, performing a psychology test is becoming one essential last step towards candidate final placement or exclusion. Two major strategies emerge for performing psychology evaluations of candidates for law enforcement agencies: screening out and screening in. By "screening out" is meant excluding candidates based on undesired traits in a law enforcement officer. Conversely, "screening in" refers to a process by which candidates join a law enforcement agency based on pre-specified traits to fulfill job requirements. The argument here supports screening out against screening in.
Indeed, given a very broad range of traits and personalities which may qualify a candidate for a law enforcement agency, better to focus more on undesired traits and personalities. This may be justified by a police officer's daily duties which require a lot of skills and personal traits and which can hardly be exhaustible in a psychological screening test. That is, packing a psychological screening test with all required and/or desired traits would be almost a futile effort in deciding whether a candidate is suitable for a career in a law enforcement agency or not. Therefore, better to focus on undesired traits which run, essentially, against widely accepted traits in a law enforcement officer such as general intelligence, integrity, dependability, ability to handle stress and sound judgment – rather than examining each and every candidate – which could be a very expensive and lengthy process – based on almost unlimited set of traits. And since almost everyone can qualify as a law enforcement officer – given a very broad range of personality traits – so any recruitment process for law enforcement officers based on a psychological evaluation becomes more realistic by screening out than by screening in. Interestingly, moreover, screening out strategy is consistent with statistical sampling methodologies by which a rule-out criterion is applied to huge data pools.