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From: Jasper
Date: 10/19/03
Time: 7:03:18 PM
Remote Name: 68.77.160.230
Charlie,
Remember the story 20/20 did about ten years ago about the guy who was turned down for a job on a small town police force because his IQ score was too high? The authorities determined that they didn’t want anyone on their police force with an IQ over 110. He scored 125.
The policy was based on a university study that matched IQ scores to job satisfaction in various fields. The researchers found that people who exceeded the IQ norm (90-110) were undesirable for police work because they were unable to meet the requirements of the job. They were prone to quit because the routine wasn’t challenging enough for them.
I believe that the idea might have come from an episode of The Dark Room where children who did too well on a government test were executed for the good of the state. The underling principle is the same.
Big city police departments do not put ceilings on the intelligence of their applicants. But they might object to hiring and promoting people with too much imagination. Imaginative people are hard to predict and, thus, harder to control than people who aren’t.
Riske and Phillips impressed me as being smart cops. Eventually I saw that Vannatter and Lange were very smart. I thought from the beginning that Fuhrman was easily the smartest cop of the bunch. However, ALL of them seemed to be grossly lacking in imagination. The instant they saw something that reminded them of a familiar formula, they followed the formula and stuck with it no matter what.
Only Furman appeared to be capable of seeing beyond the surface of what was staring him in the face but his observations and theories did not always match the evidence. They did match the movies that dovetailed into evidence left behind by the killer that also came from the movies (dark knit cap, leather gloves, position of the bodies, etc.). Vannatter and Lange didn’t have enough imagination to see any of it. –Jasper