Minnesota is the only state in the nation that tasks colleges and universities, not police academies, with police officer education and training. To become eligible for a Minnesota Peace Officer License, one must earn at least a two-year degree from a regionally accredited college or university and successfully complete a PPOE program from one of approximately 30 colleges and universities certified by the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). On paper this sounds great. Indeed, it guarantees Minnesota has the most educated officers in the nation. The problem is, they are getting a bad education.
Deadly force myopia means law-enforcement programs are expensive to run (bullets cost money), thus PPOE schools need large numbers of full-time equivalent (FTE) students in their classes in order to continue to offer them. Most PPOE programs are housed in open-access colleges and universities that service anyone and everyone. The problem, of course, is not anyone can protect and serve and certainly not everyone will be good at it. Unless a student has a disqualifier that would clearly prevent him or her from being a peace officer, however, there is nothing a PPOE school can do to stop the person enrolling in the program. They can advise students against it, but not bar them outright, for to do so would violate a schools anti-discrimination policy. Such explains why less than half of all PPOE graduates actually get a police job in the state. College gets you license-eligible (for a fee!). Police agencies control who gets licensed.
License eligibility is no indicator of quality
Since all law-enforcement graduates have invested two to four years minimum into becoming a cop, at an estimated cost of anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000, depending on the school, there can be no question they are objectively qualified for and committed to the profession before they enter it. But license eligibility, the true outcome of PPOE, is no indicator of quality. Graduates all look, sound, and think the same, chiefs tell me. The process intended to separate high-quality law-enforcement graduates from their low-quality counterparts is actually pooling them because a) law-enforcement degrees provide a pretty narrow workforce preparation and b) the high financial and opportunity costs associated with PPOE compared to traditional police academies dissuade diverse or second-career candidates from taking the plunge.
