Cities around the country are reportedly struggling to hire and maintain the amount of police officers on the force. Now, the Dallas police department has introduced a controversial new change to its application requirements, or more accurately, the removal of one.
Suggested Reading
In an effort to help meet demands, Dallas is lowering the education requirements on applications for recruits. And the recent change has been a long time coming. According to USA Today, Dallas voters passed a proposition (with a 50.9 percent majority) requiring the department to have at least 4,000 police officers. The problem is the department could not find enough officers to meet this quota as is. One of the major barriers discovered in the hiring process is applicants did not meet educational standards. Now, that’s changing completely.
“In a perfect world, would you want police officers to be college educated? Absolutely, but this is where policing is now,” Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told USA Today. “There simply is more demand for police officers – for qualified police officers – than there is a supply.”
Before this latest hiring practice, department applicants were required to have some form of a college education. Now, that requirement is completely out the window. But shockingly, Dallas isn’t the first city to implement this rule.
In other places like New York City, departments continue to struggle meeting the demand for officers. “I am not going to sugarcoat the real recruitment issues we are facing,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said according to NYC PBA. “In the recent past, NYPD recruits used to wait for years to get the call to go the [police] academy. Now we are practically begging people to take the exam.”
Younger officers are resigning more rapidly, and older ones are retiring. The reasons why? Many have to do with the growing mistrust Americans– especially Black and brown Americans– have because of police brutality concerns, discrimination and other major scandals. In 2024, a Gallup study found only 51 percent of Americans trust police.
Interestingly, researchers found that college-educated officers use less force, write better reports, and have fewer complaints, USA Today reported. On the flip side, other experts claim lowering education requirements make the force more accessible to everyday citizens.
In the end, many advocates of Dallas’ new practice say the best officers are born from experience on the job. “Experience is also something that matters in police behavior and their attitudes,” a professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida told USA Today. “And we find that the same way that college-educated people might use less force, more experienced people use less force because they find alternate ways to handle situations.”
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.