“Are you really that stupid? A university education makes you smarter but not necessarily a better person,” an irate reader told me in response to my Feb. 28 column suggesting that new hires in the Toronto police force should have a mandatory university degree. My readers are often quite cross, I note. Is it me or a sign of the times?

She’s right, of course. And so were thoughtful retired police officers who told me that “the quality of policing is on the decline,” that a cultural shift is needed, but also that many officers who “struggle with a written exam” are brilliant in simulations and other kinds of testing. They need idealism and solid instincts but I still say a young officer needs more than Grade 12. University credits are a tool, much more useful than a gun.

Policing sounds a lot like journalism, a crucial industry struggling to modernize after decades of neglect. Journalists don’t have tasers but have been bonded to their cellphones since the 1980s. Toronto police officers are only being given cellphones now.

It seems unreal. The force has begun to hand them out this year, having previously relied on radios and computer systems in their cars. Cops are heartbreakingly happy to have them, especially as they do more beat policing that takes them out of their cars, often those unhappy grey stealth things. Now they can quietly check mug shots on their phone and call each other, imagine that.

For good or ill, a university degree has become almost basic in Canadian life. I sorrow for millennials who graduate and find themselves unable to find jobs or afford housing in this city. Have they considered policing? An officer with Grade 12 can easily earn more than $100,000 a year. The Ontario Sunshine List for 2016 shows that of its 7,700 employees, 4,762 made at least that.

But, my reader asks, what good is a university education? In the best sense, it makes students aware of the vast expanse of their own ignorance, a lack of knowledge that could fill the ocean beds. I remember the despair of this moment but it does spur a young person on. Chastened, you spend the rest of your life open to learning, staying current and wondering endlessly about Kant’s “unsynthesized manifold,” a.k.a. everything.

I heard from one smart former cop who listed the job’s miseries, including few chances at promotion, public unpopularity, being constantly second-guessed, boredom, the intangibility of success in neighbourhood policing, and the lack of praise.

So it’s just like my job and yours too but with the Grim Reaper hovering. Will you kill someone or be killed? He didn’t mention that policing is still a boys’ club, a scarring place for women, but so are most workplaces.

Toronto police should have welcomed that July 2017 call from Sasha Reid, a University of Toronto PhD candidate with a national missing persons database and a profile of a killer that turned out to closely resemble alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur. Her field of study? Sexually motivated, psychopathic serial killers.

Assembling and understanding data is a crucial skill, especially in policing, yet police never contacted her again after her initial meeting. Data is golden, as resistant Vancouver police learned to their cost in the Pickton serial killer case, and artificial intelligence will be invaluable in predictive policing and information-sharing.

The police need a variety of officers with different skills, and yes, I do love cops on bicycles. They’re so cool. Thanks to its recalcitrant old-school union, the Toronto force can’t get rid of its bad apples — violent authoritarian cops fed by shamelessness — but needs new officers with people skills, courtesy, and an innate respect for the art of policing and those policed.

The recent case of CTV’s Marci Ien being pulled over after running a stop sign in a school zone is a case in point. She blames racism, the police say otherwise, and as usual, the police union turned vicious.

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Is there no way Ien and the police could sit down together in a spirit of understanding, study the video of the encounter, and just talk? That’s how a university seminar is conducted. It works.

hmallick@thestar.ca