nonombre wrote on Jul 16
th, 2005 at 4:21am:
Sergeant1107 ,
I understand your point. I truly do. However, what if I had studied and planned my whole life to go to work for the local police department, and was denied employment, because two of the members of the panel decided they did not like my accent, perhaps the way I part my hair?
Nonombre,
I understand your point as well, I think. You are implying that none of the subjective aspects of the hiring process are perfect. I agree.
The oral boards I’ve gone to consisted of between five and nine people. The more people are in the room, the lower the chance is of some sort of arbitrary prejudice affecting the outcome. If I have five people on my oral board, and one or two of them don’t like my hair, their prejudice should be balanced out by the other people. At the very least they might recognize their prejudice as stupid and be reluctant to voice it. (I cannot imagine telling the other officers I’ve sat with on oral boards that the last candidate shouldn’t be hired because I thought his tie was ugly, or his hair was too long. Saying those things would make me look stupid, not the candidate.)
Such is not the case in a polygraph exam. You are dealing with a single person’s prejudices and opinions. If you happen to have a hairstyle the examiner doesn’t like you may fail before you start. If you happen to remind the examiner of his favorite nephew, you may pass before you start.
I don’t know of any police agencies that conduct oral boards with only a single person on the board. I also don’t know of any polygraph examiners who have multiple examiners in the room conducting the exam.
Getting back to the question you so adroitly sidestepped… Let’s change it around a bit, and suppose that your agency has decided to send every sworn officer to a private polygrapher as a routine check to make sure no one is on the take. You go through your exam, tell the complete truth about never having taken a single favor or a single dime, and you fail. Your chief calls you in and tells you that you will be terminated. Was that to happen, do you think you’d still be writing on these boards in support of the polygraph?