Academy a novel approach to filling public service ranks

Editor,

I'd like to respond to Arun Anand Ahuja's letter published Tuesday regarding the U.S. Public Service Academy.

As someone who questions the extraordinary emphasis our country puts on the military in the first place, I think that the very idea of this civilian service academy rebuts the notion that there's only one way to "serve" your country. Accordingly, my motives to promote the creation of the USPSA aren't quite as nefarious and bellicose as Ahuja's letter implies. I completely understand the need to be wary of authority, but I think Ahuja's charge is better leveled against corruption and despotism in general, and not a public-service academy. While this academy would certainly not be immune to the malfeasance of future leaders, I ask whether the status quo in law enforcement is any less susceptible to the whims of a hypothetical dictator.

I, for one, am inclined to think that filling genuine public safety needs, and particularly a police force with uneducated and under-qualified individuals, is more conducive to a mob mentality and the Indian Civil Service-like atrocities Ahuja warns against. It is reasonable to believe that maintaining a well-educated police force is likely to mitigate many existing problems in law enforcement today (e.g. racial profiling and use of excessive force). Offering people a chance to be trained as police and earn a bachelor's degree for free is a better deal for our country than giving guns and authority to use force to anyone who will sign up because of an ad on a bus.

I do not mean to imply that our existing police force is a bunch of uneducated thugs or slight their services, but the fact remains that we are struggling to recruit and fill shortages at all levels of law enforcement, and without a consistent flow of qualified candidates, police departments and the Border Patrol, for example, are in many cases simply lowering their standards for eligibility to meet "our community's vital needs expeditiously," as Ahuja puts it.

Is this a sustainable and beneficial approach in the long run? It's not just a matter of needing to recruit "willing bodies," but rather finding committed, well-educated and properly trained individuals and giving them an incentive to take jobs that are increasingly hard to fill.

Finally, perhaps the reason I named teachers first in my list of occupations is to emphasize their importance, not to disguise my militaristic motives and pull the wool over the eyes of prospective Academy students, as Ahuja insinuates. I draw comparisons between this academy and our existing military academies because they're the only federally subsidized service academies that exist, not because I want teachers to carry firearms. That said, I regret my use of the term "average" and its implications. I simply meant to argue that combining a traditional four-year education with the training required by many important public service posts is a novel approach to meeting the challenges our country will continue to face.

Zac Westbrook

UNM alumnus