Making cops get four-year college degrees will not help this problem.

All it would do is force them to take on immense student debt for a degree that they know would be useless.

What *would* be useful is having those who want to be cops spend 4 years in a paid training program.

Imagine -- Year One is spent as a paid teacher's aide in a low-income school district. If you can't deal with the stress of overseeing students in the cafeteria, de-escalate conflict in the hallways between classes, and listen with empathy when over-tired kids cry, you fail out.

Year Two as a paid orderly's aide in a public hospital. If you can't deal with stepping in to assist nurses and orderlies as they deal with vulnerable, sometimes angry, sometimes drunk, sometimes high, sometimes psychotic patients who need to pee, you fail out.

Year Three as a paid social worker's aide. Spending a year seeing the most vulnerable people in the community and doing enough follow-up with them that they become individuals whose multi-layered struggles you start to respect. Can't hack it? You fail out.

Year Four as a paid assistant to the public defender's office. See the other side of the system that you will be working on, and see how utterly mangled people's lives can become from careless policing, fines, or mis-application of the law. Can't muster any empathy? You fail out.

After those four years, during which the candidate has drawn a salary from the state that allowed them to live during this time, there should be a final review process of the candidate, particularly focused on how they responded in stressful situations.

Then, police training!

Here's my point ---

Forcing police candidates to have a four-year degree would do literally nothing to help them. It would give them some bullshit degree + about 40K of financial debt. It will not spend one second addressing whether they should be trusted with a gun + authority.