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In times passed, to become a state trooper, one had to have a college degree. However, instead of keeping these standards higher for those tasked with upholding the law in Kentucky, times have changed.

The Kentucky State Police seem to be so pressed for new recruits they’re relaxing educational and experience requirements in an effort to attract more candidates to their profession.

For many years, the bar was set pretty high for the state’s police force, which included the equivalent of two years of college and two years of experience as a member of the armed forces or police force. But now the KY state police are taking applicants who hold a high school diploma, a GED, and three years of experience as a soldier or a cop.

In some odd form of double speak, the state troopers are saying that lowering the standards for state troopers is not lowering the standards for state troopers. Trooper David Loudermilk, a six-year veteran of the KY State Police told reporters the lowering of the entrance requirements doesn’t represent a lowering of standards for admittance. WCPO reported;

This doesn’t represent a lowering of standards. New recruits will still undergo the same rigorous 24-week training regime, take the same tests and be subject to the same background check as they always have been. The difference now is that a wider variety of people can join the force.

“All we’re doing is widening the opportunity for people who maybe didn’t have the chance to go to college…We’re really opening a door for them to be able to fulfill their dream of coming on,” Loudermilk said.

Coincidentally, as the Free Thought Project has pointed out in the past, the training requirements for hairdressers are often times two or three-fold longer and more rigorous than training for police. In Kentucky, a licensed cosmetologist is required to undergo twice as much training as a state trooper.

It has been the stance of The Free Thought Project that police require more training, a thorough education in the law, and de-escalation of conflict techniques which go way beyond a summer police academy. Kentucky’s decision to lower the bar leaves more questions than answers as to how their policy change will benefit the public it is sworn to protect.

Already, as TFTP has observed and reported, there appears to be a preponderance of state patrolmen who are abusing their badge, and authority, often violating the civil liberties of people with whom they interact. Lowering the educational standards for troopers seems destined to result in more infractions of civil liberties.

Public relations officer David Jones said troop levels have not seen the crisis they witnessed in 2015, but added, “We want as many applicants as we can (get)…We want to hire the best…Anybody could get through the training if they want to, but you’ve got to have the want and the desire to get through it.”

Lowering the educational requirements to applicants with GED’s and High School Diplomas seems contradictory to both men’s statements. Not only does it seem as though Kentucky has lowered its standards, but asking for “the best” applicants while being content to accept those who were unable to even graduate high school is contrary to logic.

In a state where the cost of living is much lower than in other states, Kentucky pays its first-year state troopers about 40,000 per year. That should be enough to attract many troopers from out of state to the Appalachian Mountain state to work, without lowering educational standards.

Dropping the state standards to those with a basic education has many scratching their heads wondering and asking the question, “why?”

Lowering the bar should come as no surprise given the fact that a federal court ruled police departments across the nation can discriminate against applicants who are too smart.

This decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to condone the ability of police departments to discriminate against smart people is one of the most profoundly ridiculous moves ever made. But it also tends to explain the state of police departments today.

It takes a special kind of person to go to work every day and harass, kidnap, and kill people for victimless crimes. The act of unquestioningly carrying out orders to ruin the lives of good people whose only “crime” was to do with their own body as they wish, would eventually have to raise the eyebrow of a person with a higher level of intelligence…or so we’d like to think.

Knowing that this ability to discriminate against intelligence in police departments exists coupled with the lowering of the academic bar tends to put ‘Police State USA’ in perspective. In the past decade, we’ve seen heavily militarized actions against non-violent protesters. We’ve even seen school districts accepting MRAPs. And we’ve watched from the sidelines as Mayberry transformed to Martial Law.

A smart person does not deliberately tear gas journalists. A smart person does not point a rifle at an innocent person and tell them that they are going to kill him. A smart person does not severely beat a person with down syndrome because he sees a bulge in his pants, which is actually a colostomy bag. A smart person does not continuously shoot at an unarmed man who posed zero threat and whose arms are in the air.

If more people knew this information you could rest assured that they would try and reform their police departments. No one wants their police officers to be unintelligent, right?

Controversial filmmaker Michael Moore helped to expose what happened to Jordan as well as the ridiculous notion of discriminating based on intelligence levels, on his show “The Awful Truth.” The 8-minute segment, while hilarious, paints an ominous picture of adhering to such tactics.

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