How many law enforcement applicants fail behavioral and psychological screening? The question matters because the answer determines the cost of discovering those failures late in the pipeline versus early. This data brief compiles the most current publicly available disqualification data from operational screening programs, ranging from 15% to 34% depending on the agency, jurisdiction, and screening stage.

Section 1: Prevalence of Psychological Screening

More than 90% of local U.S. law enforcement agencies require pre-employment psychological screening, according to Department of Justice data reported by NBC News ^[3]. Psychological evaluation is not an edge case or a best-practice recommendation. It is a near-universal requirement for sworn law enforcement positions at the local level. Federal law enforcement agencies, notably, are less consistent in this requirement.

The question is not whether applicants will be screened. They will. The question is when in the pipeline the screening identifies unsuitable candidates and how much institutional investment has been consumed by the time that identification occurs.

Section 2: NY DOCCS 2025 Data - 30.3% Unsuitability Rate

The most recent and most methodologically rigorous publicly available data point comes from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). The 2025 Psychological Screening Program Annual Report, published in February 2026, documents the following ^[1]:

• 2,565 Correction Officer Trainee candidates were psychologically tested in 2025.
• 777 candidates (30.3%) were found psychologically unsuitable.
• Fewer than 1% of appeals to the Independent Advisory Board resulted in overturned determinations.

This is a large-sample, single-year data set from a state-operated screening program with statutory reporting requirements under New York Correction Law Sections 8(3) and 8(7) ^[2]. The 30.3% figure represents candidates who completed the application process, passed initial screening stages, and were then evaluated by the psychological screening program. Nearly one in three was found unsuitable.

An important qualification: the DOCCS data concerns correctional officers, not sworn law enforcement officers. The roles share overlapping behavioral demands, including authority to use force, custody of individuals, and high-stress decision-making, but they are not identical. The DOCCS figure should be cited with this distinction noted.

Section 3: Arizona State Patrol - 34% Disqualification Rate

Historical data from the Arizona State Patrol, documented by the AELE Law Enforcement Legal Center, indicates that 34% of male applicants were disqualified for psychological reasons ^[5]. This is a higher rate than the NY DOCCS figure and represents a sworn law enforcement population.

The Arizona data predates the DOCCS 2025 report and does not include the same level of methodological detail. However, it provides an independent data point from a different region, agency type, and time period that is directionally consistent with the DOCCS findings. Taken together, these two data points indicate that screening programs identifying 30% or more of candidates as unsuitable is not an outlier result.

Section 4: Practitioner Consensus - 15-20% Range

In the practitioner community, the most commonly cited range for psychological screening disqualification rates is 15% to 20%. Based on practitioner experience with applicant pools of approximately 1,200 candidates, psychological screening typically rejects 180 to 240 individuals ^[4].

This range is lower than the DOCCS and Arizona figures. The difference likely reflects variation in screening stringency, candidate pre-selection, agency size, and the specific instruments used. The 15-20% figure represents a practitioner-estimated floor, not an empirical ceiling.

Section 5: The Late-Discovery Cost Problem

The financial implication of these disqualification rates is determined entirely by when in the pipeline the unsuitable candidate is identified.

If 15% to 30% of candidates will ultimately be found unsuitable through psychological screening, and that screening occurs at the post-conditional-offer stage, then the agency has invested the full cost of background investigation (6 to 12 weeks of investigator time per candidate) on every one of those individuals before discovering them. At even the conservative 15% rate, an agency processing 100 applicants is spending background investigation resources on 15 candidates who will never be hired.

Pre-offer behavioral screening does not replace the post-conditional-offer psychological evaluation. It operates in a different legal space, collects different data (biographical history rather than clinical assessment), and produces a different output (an investigative brief rather than a diagnostic report). What it does accomplish is earlier identification of behavioral risk patterns that correlate with the same constructs evaluated at the post-offer stage.

Candidates flagged at the pre-offer stage can receive targeted investigative attention rather than standard processing. Investigators begin their work with structured risk findings rather than a blank slate. The background investigation becomes a focused validation exercise rather than an open-ended discovery process.

The data from DOCCS ^[1], Arizona ^[5], and practitioner consensus ^[4] establishes that the pool of unsuitable candidates is not small. It ranges from 15% to 34% depending on the jurisdiction and screening standard. The cost of discovering these candidates after the background investigation rather than before it is measurable in investigator hours, pipeline delay, and downstream risk exposure.