Law Enforcement's High Standards: Why no polygraph or psychological testing for EMS?

[MMiz]

It's common to have to pass both a polygraph and some sort of psychological testing/evaluation for a position in law enforcement. I know that many places run background tests, but it is nowhere near as comprehensive as the background investigation that most police officers go through.

Why isn't the same required for EMS?

 

[usafmedic45]

Because a polygraph is a procedure of questionable value (there's a reason most states do not admit polygraph evidence into court proceedings) and illegal in many states to use it as a requirement for employment. What exactly would it gain by adding this hurdle to the field (which would require legislation in many states) that would not be gained by a regular criminal background check and urine drug screening?

A polygraph is not even required for many of the above top secret clearances in the military. It probably remains as part of the hiring process of some law enforcement agencies for the same reason many states have ambulances carry MAST suits: the theory that it was of value once (because of mistaken ideals and questionable "evidence") and nostalgia ("I went through it, so should the new guys!")

As for psychological testing, what exactly makes you think that is necessary? I see minimal benefit for a lot of trouble and I'm confused by why you started this thread.

 

[Sasha]

They do polygraph and psych testing for the FDs here who are EMS here, so technially they do it for EMS, too.

 

[MMiz]

I started this thread because I saw a job posting for a local police department. Their standards are significantly higher than any EMT hiring process or requirements I've seen.

Why?

 

[atropine]

Most FD's do as well in the southern California area

 

[usafmedic45]

I started this thread because I saw a job posting for a local police department. Their standards are significantly higher than any EMT hiring process or requirements I've seen.

Why?

One word: guns.

If any aspect of hiring standards need to be raised, it is not the background checks (although I'm all for keeping the nutcases out of profession). The aspect that needs to be tightened is the educational standards.

 

[LIL_M0]

One word: guns.

I was in the military: the infantry. I carried guns my whole career and was never polygraphed.

 

[Sasha]

One word: guns.

Fire doesn't use guns but they are subjected to stricter hiring standards. Must be physically fit, must pass a round table interview, must pass written tests, must pass psych testing. Even for some volunteer departments.

If any aspect of hiring standards need to be raised, it is not the background checks (although I'm all for keeping the nutcases out of profession). The aspect that needs to be tightened is the educational standards.

Don't you think that kind of goes hand in hand? If it's tougher to get hired with background checks, psychological testing, etc, don't you think EMS will stop being advertised as an easy job to get once your "real" job lays you off?

To me a big problem in EMS is it's so easy to get into, they'll take just about anyone. How can you raise educational standards when the only major hiring requirement is that you pee clean and pass a basic class?

 

[46Young]

I had two poly's for fairfax prior to being hired here. If anyone wants info(not on how to beat it, not recommended), then PM me.

There are several polygraph threads on firehouse.com for your viewing pleasure. You'll sit for an interview, of which they'll narrow down the actual poly questions to about 10 or so. Each series of questions will be given three or four times. Think of the poly as an interrogation(ploy) to illicit a nervous confession. The ploy measures things like sweat production, breathing, and pulse for comparison between control questions and the actual test questions.

The poly doesn't actually "detect" lies. The poly administrator does. You may not even show a response to a question, but the admin. will tell you that you did, to see if you crack and start blabbing. They'll ask open ended questions such as "have you ever lied to get out of trouble"? Of course you have. Haven't you ever lied to your parents? If you answer no, they'll know that you're full of it.

Often the last question will be.... "Have you lied about anything you've told me today"? Poly's are inadmissable in court for a reason. Their sole value is to use ignorance of the test as well as psychological tricks from the admin(typically a detective with a psychology degree) to illicit a confession, just like a criminal.

I suppose it does weed out some wierdos and crminals, as well as the innocent.

 

[usafmedic45]

I was in the military: the infantry. I carried guns my whole career and was never polygraphed.

Same here and I had a relatively high level security clearance because I was a volunteer with the base protocol office (read as "I was a gopher for visiting VIPs") but yet I never received a polygraph nor a psych profile.

I still fail to see why MMiz is making it sound like adding these particular hoops would advance the field or somehow make the field more "respectable". Most of the people who cause problems in our field would not have any problem passing a polygraph or psych exam.

 

[46Young]

Don't you think that kind of goes hand in hand? If it's tougher to get hired with background checks, psychological testing, etc, don't you think EMS will stop being advertised as an easy job to get once your "real" job lays you off?

To me a big problem in EMS is it's so easy to get into, they'll take just about anyone. How can you raise educational standards when the only major hiring requirement is that you pee clean and pass a basic class?

True. We've all worked with our fair share of wierdos, of whom we've wondered how they ever got hired.

 

[Sasha]

True. We've all worked with our fair share of wierdos, of whom we've wondered how they ever got hired.

80% of my partners when I worked for a private!

 

[LIL_M0]

Same here and I had a relatively high level security clearance because I was a volunteer with the base protocol office (read as "I was a gopher for visiting VIPs") but yet I never received a polygraph nor a psych profile.

Heh. Go for this, go for that.

I still fail to see why MMiz is making it sound like adding these particular hoops would advance the field or somehow make the field more "respectable". Most of the people who cause problems in our field would not have any problem passing a polygraph or psych exam.

Yeah, I don't see the need for it. As you said, a polygraph can be passed by trouble makers.

 

[Shishkabob]

Because it's against the law in many places for a private company that does not provide security or handle top secret info to mandate a polygraph.

 

[usafmedic45]

Don't you think that kind of goes hand in hand? If it's tougher to get hired with background checks, psychological testing, etc, don't you think EMS will stop being advertised as an easy job to get once your "real" job lays you off?

No, it is not an "A" leads to "B" scenario. If you want to turn it into a professional field, you don't do it by making someone sit and pass a psych test (which you have to have some serious problems to not be able to pass as the sensitivity is miserable for most of the screenings; sociopaths can often pass psych screenings since they often know the "right" answers, even if they don't believe them or implement them. That's one reason it's so hard to pick them out of a crowd.) or a polygraph (which is, as I said, generally considered by most to be unreliable and very dependent upon whom is administering and scoring the test....inter-rater reliability is questionable at best for most purposes).

To me a big problem in EMS is it's so easy to get into, they'll take just about anyone. How can you raise educational standards when the only major hiring requirement is that you pee clean and pass a basic class?

Simple, you raise the requirements and standards for the class. Just because DOT curriculum says "X, Y and Z", those are minimum standards. The final say goes to the state and they can set the training requirements at whatever the like for credentialing. If a state wanted to- or if the EMS personnel wanted to mobilize to do so- they could completely do away with BLS providers and have an ALS only standard or require bachelor's degree for it's medics.

The same is true in several other health care professions, which is what EMS is, not a public safety agency and we should be following the lead of nursing, respiratory therapy and medicine and not chasing our tails by trying to "catch up" to police and fire. The example I use to demonstrate how states can have standards that differ from the national standard is in respiratory therapy: I can practice in Indiana, but I can not practice in Michigan or Ohio because I lack an associates in respiratory therapy (I was trained by the military). EMS could do exactly the same thing if we chose to push for it, rather than simply remaining the redheaded stepchild of the fire service.

You can normally tell who is an EMS professional and who is a would-be firefighter or cop who happens to have an EMS credential based on whether they view as a public safety service or a health profession. Often this is also divided along education and credentialing lines (EMT-Bs tend to want to emulate fire/LE; medics tend to want to follow nursing's lead)

 

[PapaBear434]

Quite simply, if you had to pass a psych exam to be in EMS, we'd loose half our personnel the next day. We are all a bunch of loonies that enjoy this kind of work, and without the crazy we'd never get people to willing subject themselves to such long hours of blood, guts, vomit, and under-appreciation.

Seriously, though, I think it has to do with the nature of the job combined with EMS's relative infancy as a profession.

Nature of the job: Police work is a job that centers around authority over strangers. The use of force is necessary at times, unfortunate as it is. Deadly force is discouraged but authorized as necessary. In order to do this job, you have to make sure that the person behind it is getting in for the right reasons. That you aren't a sociopathic bully out to do nothing but abuse everyone within your reach.

EMS, however, is a job where we don't exert much authority OVER a person. Yes, there are times were we "take custody" of a patient, if they are not competent or if they are arrested under a police officers authority. Under normal circumstances, if the patient doesn't want to go, we can't make them. I had a woman crack a windshield with her head the other week, and didn't want to go to the ER because she had no insurance. I tried to convince her, but she wouldn't go, and I couldn't make her.

If we DO overstep our bounds, there is no debate. If I were to have tied that woman to the stretcher to take her in for her own good, I would have lost all my certifications, which would have been the least of my worries as I sat in jail for kidnapping. I overstepped, wham-bam, you're wrong and you're done. The worst we can do as EMT/Medics is abuse our right to strip and/or touch our patient by using it as a sexual device. Either voyeuristicly and unnecessarily stripping down a patient for an "exam" or touching areas you shouldn't be for a little longer than we should be, for instance. And accordingly, our backgrounds are scrubbed by almost any agency to make sure we have no sexually related criminal charges in our histories. I don't know about you, but my background check went back to when I was a teenager to make sure there wasn't criminal sexual assault charges or suspicions all the way back to my high school.

In short, it's a job that nobody is going to get into without wanting to help people, barring the sexual deviants who would get off on an unconscious person. Police work is a job with a lot of authority which could be and is at times easily abused and explained away just as easily by a lie or twisting of the truth. Much more attractive to nutjobs who want a good, "legal" way to exert power over people.

Infancy of our profession: Let's face it, we are fairly new. It has only been, what, since the 60's or 70's that we've become a real service? Before that, it was just 17 year old ambulance jockeys yanking kids off the battlefield and running them back to a med station hopefully soon enough to cut a limb off and save a life. We don't get as much respect as we'd like and in a lot of cases deserve from the rest of the medical community, which has existed in various but mostly familiar forms for hundreds of years now. Doctors, nurses, surgeons... they all have a long and storied history.

Medics? EMTs? Not so much. We have a couple of decades to hang our hats on, and for much of that history people were given no formal training beyond how to put on turnout gear and turn on the lights and siren. And in that short existence, we have seen our continued absorption into other agencies like fire or contracted out to medical transport companies. We are still trying to find our own place on the medical map, as much as we may think we have it figured out. We still don't have a real national educational standard to what should be considered a medic or EMT, and we are continually struggling to get people to consider us more than "ambulance drivers."

If we ourselves are having trouble being able to define what is necessary to be a medic, it's not surprising that we are also having trouble deciding what should be used to disqualify you from the job. Yeah, we have a couple easy, obvious ones like being a sexual predator, but that pretty much goes for any ol' job that requires you to work with people let alone undress and touch them. We need to grow as a field a bit more before we will be able to settle on what weeding-out processes should be used to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

[daedalus]

Because a polygraph is a procedure of questionable value (there's a reason most states do not admit polygraph evidence into court proceedings) and illegal in many states to use it as a requirement for employment. What exactly would it gain by adding this hurdle to the field (which would require legislation in many states) that would not be gained by a regular criminal background check and urine drug screening?

A polygraph is not even required for many of the above top secret clearances in the military. It probably remains as part of the hiring process of some law enforcement agencies for the same reason many states have ambulances carry MAST suits: the theory that it was of value once (because of mistaken ideals and questionable "evidence") and nostalgia ("I went through it, so should the new guys!")

As for psychological testing, what exactly makes you think that is necessary? I see minimal benefit for a lot of trouble and I'm confused by why you started this thread.

Stole the words from my mouth...finger rather.

 

[Meursault]

(EMT-Bs tend to want to emulate fire/LE; medics tend to want to follow nursing's lead)

I resent the suggestion that I want anything to do with fire departments, and the idea that becoming more like nursing is a good direction. EMS already has enough meaningless postnominals, for one.

Discussing potential futures for the profession is another pointless thread, though. As far as this one, it's already been pointed out that polygraphs aren't useful, though I'd like to go through one just to satisfy my curiosity. I doubt written tests are sensitive enough to have any impact on outcomes, and it would just be one more annoying hurdle before getting hired, like driving records and whatever hoops California makes people jump through. It wouldn't improve professional standards at all. Besides, I hate having to give the "right" answers instead of the interesting ones.

 

[usafmedic45]

I resent the suggestion that I want anything to do with fire departments, and the idea that becoming more like nursing is a good direction. EMS already has enough meaningless postnominals, for one.

I was not referring to the NP, CRNA, etc aspect when I said "following nursing's lead". I was referring to how they went from an underrespected, underfunded profession based upon diploma programs to a field that has a lot of pull and is pretty much beholden to no one. They did this by progressively increasing the educational entry requirements, not through instituting asinine hoops to jump through.

 

[fortsmithman]

The time for polygraphs for EMS should only happen when a polygraph would be needed for nurses and physicians to practice.