EXPOSED
The modal worker here teaches criminal justice, corrections, and policing courses at a community college or regional university, often part-time and often with a prior career in law enforcement. The document layer of the job — syllabi, lecture decks, case summaries, quiz banks, discussion prompts, rubric-based grading of student papers — is squarely inside what current AI does at usable quality, and online course sections are the most exposed of all. What holds is the live classroom: scenario-based training, use-of-force and ethics debates that require a credible practitioner voice, field placement supervision, and the mentorship that gets students hired into agencies.
Most of this decline happened after 2021 — it is not the pandemic dip.
Median pay $62,860 → $76,590 -2.5% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+2%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 13,150 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +2% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~1,200 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
ProfessorInstructorPenology TeacherAdjunct ProfessorCollege ProfessorJustice ProfessorAdjunct InstructorPenology ProfessorAssistant ProfessorAssociate ProfessorCriminology TeacherCriminology LecturerCriminology ProfessorCollege Faculty MemberPolice Academy InstructorUniversity Faculty MemberCriminal Justice ProfessorCriminal Justice InstructorCriminal Justice SpecialistDigital Forensics InstructorCriminal Justice Faculty MemberAdjunct Criminal Justice ProfessorAdjunct Criminal Justice InstructorCriminal Justice Adjunct Instructor
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Roughly half of the workload — building a 15-week corrections syllabus, updating lecture decks on Terry v. Ohio or the 4th Amendment, writing multiple-choice banks from the textbook, and marking rubric-scored incident-report exercises — is already deliverable by a model at community-college quality, which is what pulls this to 9 rather than into the teens; what keeps it off the floor is the live use-of-force scenario, the mock interrogation you have to interrupt and redirect, and the internship site visit where you tell a sheriff's captain whether your student is placeable.
Some physical or field component You are physically in a classroom, a scenario room, sometimes a firearms simulator or a mock crime scene with evidence tape and casts, and you drive to jails, dispatch centers, and agency ride-alongs for practicum oversight — but none of that is uncontrolled the way a patrol shift is, and a large and growing share of these sections run fully online, which is why this sits at 9 and not 14.
No licence, no signature requirement Nothing in this job requires a licence you can lose: a state POST instructor certification matters if you teach in an academy, and regional accreditation cares about your credentials on paper, but the community college — not you — carries the liability, and an 18-year practitioner with an MS can be replaced in the catalog by an adjunct or a courseware package without any board hearing.
Meaningful discretion Real calls exist and they are not procedural: whether a student with a juvenile record should be steered toward corrections instead of sworn patrol, how far to let an ethics debate about a shooting go before it becomes unsafe, mandatory Clery and Title IX reporting on things students disclose in class — but curriculum outcomes, grade scales, and academic-integrity processes are set above you and appealable, which is why this is 9 rather than mid-teens.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (9/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (13/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (9/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 25 of this occupation's 43 points (58%).
Embodiment (9/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Law Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 62/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift: this occupation genuinely has two tiers. If institutions accept AI-generated syllabi, quiz banks, case digests and first-pass paper grading, what remains is scenario/simulation facilitation, de-escalation role-play debriefs, internship and field-placement supervision with agency liaison, and background-sensitive advising. Accreditor or POST rules requiring documented live scenario hours accelerate this concentration.
POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) commissions increasingly certify academy and college-based pre-service curricula; if state POST rules require a named, POST-certified instructor of record to be physically present and to sign off on each student's use-of-force, defensive tactics, and firearms competency attestation — as California and Texas commissions already do for academy modules but not for most academic CJ degrees — the signature becomes non-delegable. Extension of POST instructor-certification requirements to degree programs feeding academy admission is the specific thing to watch.
If programs expand mandated in-person practical hours — scenario villages, simulator (VirTra/MILO) sessions, defensive tactics mats, ride-along coordination — the instructor's day shifts into unpredictable physical spaces requiring hands-on safety supervision. Watch for state POST minimum practical-hour mandates being applied to college CJ programs.
Agencies hiring from feeder programs already screen for named practitioner instructors; if hiring agencies or state POST boards formalize preference for graduates of programs staffed by sworn-experienced faculty, or if union/FOP-affiliated training partnerships specify practitioner instruction, the human credential is priced explicitly rather than assumed.
If programs formalize instructor responsibility for fitness-and-suitability referrals — flagging students with disqualifying conduct or psychological concerns to agency backgrounds units, a call already made informally — the role owns a consequential, contestable decision about who enters policing.
The limit. Adjunct-heavy staffing and online section growth cap most of this: a shield or premium attached to an 'instructor of record' concentrates value in a few full-time faculty while the part-time majority teaching online lecture sections gains nothing. Realistic ceiling for the modal worker is mid-50s.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 920 | $86,690 +13% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 660 | $103,870 +36% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 340 | $66,040 -14% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 270 | $83,930 +10% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 250 | $81,080 +6% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 240 | $79,420 +4% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 240 | $71,230 -7% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 230 | $85,560 +12% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 150 | $223,240 +191% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 130 | $170,070 +122% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 150 | $168,410 +120% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 43. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.