Well, here's my armchair psychology coming out in full force. A bright policeman is a rare beast. I remember a criminologist who had been a policeman in Australia before he thought better of it and went into academia saying in a talk I attended that IQ testing carried out on police officers in the US (can't remember where or when) showed that they were on average a full 10 percentage points below the average population IQ, and the range was typically no more than fifteen points either way!

He also pointed out that your typical petty criminal, including most street-level drug dealers, exhibited roughly the same deviation from the population mean.

His point was that crime will only be solved and ultimately controlled when the people who are responsible for maintaining law and order are brighter than the criminals they are trying to detect and prevent. But nothing about your typical law enforcement agency attracts anyone but the less-than-mediocre. Or keeps them, anyway.

Police forces also have to eradicate the gung-ho attitudes and laddishness that typically permeates them, he believed. I think that we all see what he means around us. Younger male police officers everywhere tend to shave their heads, grow moustaches, pull their cap peaks down over their brows and wear wrap-around reflective sunglasses. There was also a fad in New Zealand for a while which demanded that they get tattoos. All this is quite intimidating for your average bloke/blokess in the street

A guy I knew finished a masters degree and then joined the police force. He was given hell by his fellow officers for over a year because of his qualification. When the "joke" was reiterated at an awards ceremony by a senior officer he decided enough was enough and went back to university to do a law degree. He is now defending criminals against his former colleagues, with marked success ...