Colarelli, Nick J.

Siegel, Saul M.

English

Northwestern University Illinois, School of Law: Scholarly Commons

Journal of Criminal Law and CriminologyVolume 55Issue 2 June Article 13Summer 1964A Method of Police Personnel SelectionNick J. ColarelliSaul M. SiegelFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclcPart of the Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, and the Criminology and CriminalJustice CommonsThis Criminology is brought to you for free and open access by Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted forinclusion in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by an authorized editor of Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons.Recommended CitationNick J. Colarelli, Saul M. Siegel, A Method of Police Personnel Selection, 55 J. Crim. L. Criminology & Police Sci. 287 (1964)A METHOD OF POLICE PERSONNEL SELECTION*NICK J. COLARELLI AND SAUL M. SIEGELDr. Nick J. Colarelli and Dr. Saul M. Siegel are both Staff Psychologists at the Topeka StateHospital, Topeka, Kansas. Their present paper reports on research in the selection of police per-sonnel which was carried on in association with the Kansas State Highway Patrol.-EroR.The effectiveness of a law enforcement organiza-tion rests to a large degree on its ability to ade-quately select, train, and supervise its personnel.The critical problem of selecting candidates is oneof the thorniest, the most expensive, and the mosttime consuming tasks facing such organizations.Within the past three years the authors havehad the opportunity to work closely with theKansas State Highway Patrol in an effort at im-proving personnel selection. During this period,the authors had been impressed with the fact thatthe officers within this organization have had anexcellent, well conceived picture of the attributesand performance that made for an effective patrol-man. However, the problem appeared to be one ofapplying this knowledge and information to therather large number of individuals applying for thefew positions available. This organization had,like most, a selection system composed of a seriesof stages through which the applicant had to pass.At each of these stages, certain selective criteriawere employed.At the first stage the requirements to be metconcerned residential status, age, height, weight,physical defects, etc. This information was deter-mined from the applicant's application blank. Thesecond stage was one of testing, i.e., a job perform-ance test, and an intelligence test, that were as-sumed on an a priori basis to select desirable appli-cants. The third and possibly most important stagewas that of an oral interview by a board of knowl-edgeable interviewers who then rated the appli-cant's fitness. The final stage was a comprehensiveand intensive investigation of the applicant's back-ground. If the applicant had cleared all of thesestages, he was then seen as a "good" candidate.When applicants were omitted at each of these* The authors wish to express their appreciation toAlfred Paul Bay, M.D., Superintendent, Topeka StateHospital, Topeka, Kansas, for making time availableto the authors for participation in this study and toMr. T. E. Mathews, former psychological intern atTopeka State Hospital, for his participation in theearlier phases of the study.stages, the assumption was that undesirable ap-plicants were being rejected and desirable onesaccepted. However, as is frequent in personnelselection, the individual selection devices did notdo their task, especially the test procedures. Quitefrequently undesirables would be accepted anddesirables rejected. The last two stages-the inter-view board and the extensive investigation ofbackground-were felt to be the most effective,but also impossibly expensive to be applied to theentire applicant group. It is at this point that theknowledge and the experience of the police organi-zation about what makes a good applicant can bebrought to bear most intensively and most keenly,and it is at the first two stages, especially the stageof testing, that police organizations experiencemost difficulty in using their experience.It is the impression of the authors that recentadvances in test construction and in test method-ology within the area of psychology now makes itpossible to glean more of the law enforcementorganization's experience about what makes de-sirable applicants. This experience can be trans-lated into test language, and applied more effec-tively at the earlier stages of the selectionprocedure. Through the use of tests, the organiza-tion's experience about desirable applicants can beeconomically and fruitfully utilized. It is the pur-pose of this paper to describe a method wherebythis was accomplished.METHODOLOGYThe purpose of the joint study undertaken bythe Kansas State Highway Patrol and the Psychol-ogy Department of Topeka State Hospital wasseen as that of articulating, in a systematic fashion,the Patrol's experience in selecting desirable ap-plicants. This experience could then be appliedeconomically to the entire range of candidates forpositions in the Kansas State Highway Patrol. Theproject was conceived of and carried out in fivesuccessive phases,Phase 1-Selecting the Tests. The task here wasN. J. COLARELLI AND S. M. SIEGELthat of obtaining adequate measurements onpatrolmen that would enable one to make predic-tions about their future performance. The attemptwould be to measure characteristics such as intelli-gence, personality, etc., that have generally beenconsidered important factors in an officer's capac-ity to adequately perform his duty. Psychologicaltesting was most useful here primarily in terms ofdescribing, in test language, what those factorsmight be. Initially, the researchers thought interms of a broad battery of tests including someof the more well known projective techniques. Itsoon became apparent that although some of thesetechniques could be valuable, the amount of timeand the cost involved in testing a large group in thisway made their use impractical. Instead it wasdecided to develop a battery made up of objectivepaper-and-pencil tests that could be easily andeconomically administered to a large group ofapplicants at one sitting. Other advantages of theuse of these tests were that they could be easilyprogrammed for electronic data processing, andthat further they did not require interpretation onthe part of a skilled psychologist. The final batteryagreed upon was comprised of four tests. The firstof these, the California Test of Mental Maturity, isa rather comprehensive test of intellectual func-tioning. The second, the Allport-Vernon Study ofValues, evaluates the individual's value system or,in a more general sense, his philosophical orienta-tion towards life. A third, the Edwards PersonalityPreference Schedule, is a test of personality traitsthat permits an assessment of the individual'sbasic psychological needs and to some extent themanner in which these needs are integrated into theindividual's personality functioning. The finaltest, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality In-ventory, provided data on the state of the in-dividual's mental health.This battery was then administered to allpatrolmen in the Kansas State Highway Patrol.The tests were scored and averages were thencomputed on each of the scales of each of the testsfor the total patrol force. At this point, in terms oftest language, a description was then available ofthe average Kansas State Highway Patrolman.Phase 2-Evaluating Performance. While a de-scription of the average patrolman was available interms of the test language, there was still no meanswhereby those men who performed in an aboveaverage manner on their jobs could be differen-tiated from those who performed below average.To obtain this information it became necessary toselect some criterion whereby a man could bejudged as "good" or "poor." After extensive inter-views with the headquarters staff of the HighwayPatrol, the researchers turned to the statistics anddata collected monthly by the patrol headquarterson the individual patrolman's job performance.(It is important to note at this point that a goodrecord keeping system turned out to be an absolutenecessity in the disposition of this study.) From themonthly report a list of job performance items wasobtained. This list of variables was then rated inorder of usefulness in differentiating "good" from"poor" men by the headquarters and field officersof the patrol. A final list of eight variables, includ-ing moving hazardous arrests, moving hazardouswarnings, other arrests, services rendered, lightcorrection, miles per contact without radar, milesper contact, and hours per arrest, were agreed uponas being important in determining whether or nota patrolman was doing a good job.At this point, this data was collected for eachpatrolman in the Kansas State Highway Patrol forthe year previous to the inception of the study.Average monthly performance on each of theseeight variables was computed for each patrolmanon the force. It became evident that differences inperformance were not due solely to whether or notthe individual was a "good" or "poor" man, butalso in part due to the opportunities available tohim. Those men who patrolled in large urban areashad many more enforcement and service opportu-nities available to them than did men in low trafficvolume districts. Consequent to this, a measure of"opportunity" was devised and each man's scoreon average monthly performance was recomputedas a function of the opportunity available to him.In this manner it was hoped that the opportunityvariable had been equated for all of the men on thepatrol.Phase 3-Interrelating Test and PerformanceScores. Two sets of data were now available oneach man in the patrol. One, his scores on a seriesof tests that provided measures of his intelligence,his value system, his personality, and the status ofhis mental health; the other, eight measures of hisactual job performance during the previous year.These two sets of data were then submitted to IBMelectronic data processing wherein the statisticalrelationship between the test scores (the predictorvariables) and the job performance scores (thecriterion variables) was established for the patrolas a group. In this way the researchers were nowable to determine what test scores were related to[Vol. 55POLICE PERSONNEL SELECTIONhigh job performance, and therefore indicative of a"good" patrolman, and what test scores were re-lated to low job performance and therefore indica-tive of a "poor" patrolman. By virtue of these com-putations a psychological test description wasavailable not only of the average, but also of the"good" and "poor" patrolmen.Phase 4-Predicting the Performance of Appli-cants. It was now possible to utilize the data thathad been arrived at through electronic data proc-essing to establish mathematical equations thatcould be utilized in predicting the future perform-ance of an applicant on the basis of his psycho-logical test results. The same battery of tests thatwas administered to the total patrol was admin-istered to incoming applicants. There scores werecomputed and entered into the predictive equa-tions that had been established. On the basis ofthese tests then one could predict the applicant'sprobable future performance on each of the eightcriterion variables. In effect, one could make aprediction about the number of arrests he couldmake, the warnings he would issue, the number ofmiles he would drive, the number of services hewould render, etc., on the basis of his psychologicaltest scores. These could then be combined into asingle score with which one could predict the prob-ability that he would be a "poor," "average," or"good" patrolman.Phase 5-Checking the Validity of the Predictions.To this point this study has made it possible topredict the future performance of a patrol appli-cant. The question, however, still remains-doesthe individual who, on the basis of his psychologicaltest performance has been predicted to be a "good"patrolman, in actuality turn out to be so once hehas been hired and placed in the field? The processof checking the predictions made has been the taskof Phase 5-Validation. Here again, through theuse of electronic data computers, the researchersare in the process of collecting each man's currentmonthly job performance on the eight criterionvariables selected and correlating this with hispredicted scores on each of these eight variables.In this way, each month it will be possible to obtaina check between what has been predicted for theindividual patrolman and what he is actuallydoing. This aspect of the study is not completedat this time and is unavailable for reporting.However, other validational data are available.During the period in which the study has beenoperating, four groups of applicants have beenhired by the State Highway Patrol. All of theseapplicants were tested on the psychological testbattery described and predictions were made foreach of them. Even though some of these men werepredicted to be "poor" men, they were hired on thepatrol force so that the predictions could bechecked against their later performance as ob-served by their supervisors who were unaware ofwhat had been predicted. Of this group of approxi-mately 60 men, there has been no substantialdisagreement between the psychological test pre-dictions and the supervisor's judgment as to theman's performance in the field in ninety percent ofthe cases. With one exception, every man predictedto be a "poor" patrolman has either been ter-minated or is seen by his supervisor as poor ormarginal in his job performance. Similarly, thosemen judged to be excellent or above average havegenerally proven to be so. It is within the middlerange, i.e., for the man predicted to be average,that the predictions hold up least well.In summary, the experience of the Kansas StateHighway Patrol would indicate that the applica-tion of scientific principles of psychological assess-ment and prediction to selecting applicants hasresulted in improved selection.According to the data now available, it wouldappear possible for law enforcement organizations,through the use of paper-and-pencil batteries ofpsychological tests, to make useful predictions onthe future performance of applicants in terms ofthe criteria utilized by that organization.

A Method of Police Personnel Selection

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A Method of Police Personnel Selection

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