Originally published 2020-12-12.
In December 2020 a California lawmaker proposed that new police officers should be at least 25 years old or hold a bachelor's degree before they could be hired. That version never became law. After a year of negotiation, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a softer bill, AB 89, in September 2021: it raised California's minimum age for officers from 18 to 21 and ordered a plan for a new college-level policing programme instead of an immediate degree requirement.
Below is what the original proposal said, why its author believed age and education matter, what the research actually shows, and what changed on the way to the governor's desk.
What AB 89 originally proposed
Assembly Bill 89 was introduced by Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat who represented part of Los Angeles in the State Assembly. As first written, it would have applied to newly hired local and state peace officers. Recruits would have needed either a four-year college degree or to be at least 25 when they joined.
The timing was not accidental. California, like the rest of the United States, was still reckoning with the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in May 2020 and the months of protest that followed. Lawmakers across the country were looking for reforms that went beyond training bulletins, and hiring standards were an obvious place to start.
Jones-Sawyer told Vice News that the measure was data-driven and that it relies on years of study and new understandings of brain development
. His argument had two parts: older recruits are more mature decision-makers, and recruits who have spent years in higher education are less likely to reach for force.
The case for older, better-educated recruits
The brain-development argument
Supporters pointed to neuroscience showing that the brain regions involved in impulse control, planning and working memory keep developing into the mid-twenties. California had already used the same body of research to extend youth-offender parole rules to people up to age 25. If the state treats a 23-year-old's judgement as still maturing when deciding on parole, the reasoning went, it should think twice before handing a 19-year-old a firearm and arrest powers.
The education argument
The second strand was research on officers' schooling. A 2007 study by criminologists Eugene Paoline and William Terrill, based on observations of patrol officers in two US cities, found that officers with a four-year degree were less likely than colleagues with only a high-school diploma to use physical force. Other researchers have found that college-educated officers tend to write better reports and attract fewer complaints, although results vary between studies and departments.
Very few American agencies actually require a degree. A 2017 survey of nearly 1,000 agencies, cited by Vice, put the figure at about 1 percent, even though the share of officers who hold a four-year degree had risen from under 9 percent in 1974 to around 30 percent.
The "too smart to be a cop" case
Discussions of police hiring often bring up a real and strange court case. In the 1990s Robert Jordan applied to the police department in New London, Connecticut. He scored 33 on the city's written intelligence test, roughly equivalent to an IQ of 125, and was turned away because the department only interviewed candidates who scored between 20 and 27. The city's theory was that high scorers would get bored and quit after expensive training.
Jordan sued, arguing the policy was discrimination. A federal district court disagreed, and in August 2000 the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling: the policy might be unwise, the court said, but it applied equally to everyone and was a rational way to reduce turnover. Jordan said the ruling puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class
.
It is worth being careful with this story. It is often retold as proof that American police forces deliberately hire people of low intelligence to make them obedient. The court record shows something narrower: one city's cap on test scores, justified by staff turnover. Whether other departments have similar practices is a separate question that the case does not answer.
How other countries train police
Comparisons with Europe featured heavily in the debate. In Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, becoming a police officer involves some level of college education on top of training, and the Nordic police colleges run degree-level programmes that take years rather than weeks. Many US academies, by contrast, run for a matter of months, and officers then learn on the job under a field-training officer.
Those numbers are not perfectly comparable. Nordic countries have far fewer guns in circulation, different legal frameworks and much smaller police forces. But advocates argued that the gap in preparation time is large enough to matter wherever officers carry weapons and make split-second decisions.
Objections and the compromise
The bill drew objections from several directions. Police associations worried about recruitment at a time when many departments were already short of officers. Others argued that a degree requirement could make forces less diverse by shutting out candidates who could not afford four years of university, and that life experience, military service or a community-college course might be just as valuable.
The final law reflected those concerns. As signed in late September 2021, AB 89:
- raised the minimum age for California peace officers from 18 to 21, starting in January 2022;
- asked the California Community Colleges to draw up a plan for a "modern policing degree program" by 1 June 2023, with input from law enforcement, California State University and community groups;
- allowed that programme to be an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree, with coursework in psychology, communications, history, ethnic studies, law and subjects that build critical thinking and emotional intelligence;
- let law-enforcement or military experience and other post-secondary study count towards the education standard, and called for financial aid for students from disadvantaged communities.
Jones-Sawyer admitted that 21 fell short of what the science suggested but said it was better than 18
, describing the bill as an incremental step towards less police violence.
Common misunderstandings
"California now requires officers to be 25 or have a degree." It does not. That was the first draft only. The age floor that actually became law is 21.
"A degree guarantees better policing." The research shows an association between education and less use of force, not a guarantee. Department culture, supervision, training content and accountability all play large roles.
"Other countries all require university degrees." Requirements vary widely. Several European countries do demand longer, college-level training, but the details differ from place to place and change over time.
Why the debate still matters
Hiring standards are one of the few reforms that shape a police force for decades, because the people hired today become tomorrow's sergeants and chiefs. California's experience shows how an ambitious idea based on real research can be narrowed by practical concerns about staffing, cost and fairness. Anyone following police reform elsewhere can watch the same trade-offs play out: how much to ask of recruits, how to pay for it, and how to avoid closing the door on good candidates who took a different path.
Sources: Vice News, 10 December 2020: California bill would require police officers to have a 4-year degree; Governing, 1 October 2021: California raises minimum age for cops to 21 years; ABC News: Court OKs barring high IQs for cops.
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