Breaking Rank (30 page)

Given the environmental, psychological, and biological pressures that produce obesity, shouldn't we let fat cops off the hook? No. Maybe. Yes. I'm not trying to sound like a consultant or a politician here—“no, maybe, yes” is not an unreasonable answer.

The answer is clearly no if we listen to U.S. surgeon general Richard
Carmona who told the National Sheriff's Association in March 2003 that “being overweight or obese directly impacts job performance when you're trying to defend the public safety. Remember, when you are called upon, you [must] be ready to back up a partner or a citizen. To me, failing at this calling when challenged would be a fate worse than death.” It's rare that I agree with anyone from the Bush administration, but Carmona, who used to be both a cop and an ER surgeon, speaks to me with that “fate worse than death” remark.

An average of thirteen police officers die of on-the-job heart attacks every year. (Carmona also notes that my brothers and sisters in firefighting are felled far more often by heart attack than by flames, smoke, or falling roofs. Forty percent of all firefighter deaths are caused by heart attacks, resulting most commonly from overexertion.)

Also supporting the “zero tolerance” forces in the battle against fat cops is the Municipal Police Officers' Education and Training Commission. Citing the works of the world's foremost authority on police officer fitness, Dr. Kenneth Cooper of the Cooper Institute (whose test we used in Seattle to screen entry-level candidates), the commission found that:

       
•
  
Fit officers use less sick time, and they recover quicker when they do get sick or injured.

       
•
  
Fit officers go to the gym to work off their stress, while “unfit” cops are more likely to rip open a jumbo bag of garlic potato chips, pop open a brew, or light up a cigarette.

       
•
  
Fit officers are less likely to resort to force (they don't need to because, in the [highly debatable] words of the commission, “bad guys don't want to go up against a fit enemy”).

Given these benefits of a fit police force, wouldn't it make sense to mandate physical fitness? For years that was my official position. Several agencies at one point did demand fitness, or at least offered attractive financial incentives to encourage obese cops to lose weight. But police union politics and financial liability issues reared up and smote many of those programs.

Before I arrived in Seattle the city had traded away fitness testing at the behest of the union. This kind of thing happens often at the bargaining
table when cities lack, or claim they lack, enough money to satisfy the financial needs of the membership. Management throws labor a bone, labor picks it up, snarls about the lack of something more tangible, more
bankable.
But at least the members don't have to show up on their days off and run, jump, lift, and sweat their way through a fitness test. And that's how Seattle's fitness program went the way of the vibrating exercise belt. Shortsighted? You bet. I would have reinstalled the requirement, and the financial bennies, but was told fitness testing was a “nonstarter.” I should have pushed it.
*

Liability
is
a significant issue. Picture cops being tested in the gym: running, jumping, lifting, and—falling over dead. But also picture a police force trying to explain to irate citizens that 20 percent of its cops aren't available to answer calls for help because, having failed the fitness test, they're riding a desk. Or, imagine a city defending itself because a cop, officially determined to be unfit, was allowed on the streets—and failed to protect and/or serve.

Given that the whole country is in the middle of a full-blown, virulent outbreak of obesity (with Medicare likely in the near future to begin making payments for obesity treatments) we are unlikely to be filling our 900,000 police officer positions with Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz body types. Besides, the “let it all hang out” argument deserves to be heard.

If, like certain professional football players, cops can carry an extra forty, sixty, or eighty pounds of body weight, and still get the job done, why not just leave them alone? (Have you seen the bellies on some of those NFL offensive linemen? Do
you
want to tell them they're out of shape?)

While my clear preference is that cops look fit, feel fit, and
be
fit, I can't shake the thought that at least some of my partiality is the product of pure prejudice. Since shedding my own surplus weight I've sized up obese cops as slothful, undisciplined.

But I'm also forced to admit that some of the best cops I've ever worked with, including two police chiefs, were overweight. Substantially, conspicuously overweight. But they were fully competent police officers
who could (and did) pass job-related physical fitness tests—a standard and a practice I'm not wishy-washy about, at all. Plus, these cops were sensitive, compassionate, energetic, altogether decent people. So I guess what I'm saying is I'd take one of those fat cops over twenty slender, supercilious “recruitment poster” pretty boys and girls any day.

*
SDPD continues to provide incentives. Its FIT (“Fitness, Image, Training”) program tests body fat, cardiovascular recovery, strength, and flexibility.

THE POLICE DEPARTMENT

CHAPTER 16

DEMILITARIZING THE POLICE

Sgt. First Class “Arnold Davis” and his squad are on a mission to locate and take out a machine gunner who's pinned down half a platoon for the better part of a day. Darkness has descended. Night goggles in place, Davis and his men crawl through a desert dotted with darkened shacks and landmines. They flank the nest where the machine gunner is hiding. Davis signals for two of his men to leapfrog their way behind the nest, avoiding potential crossfire, and for the others to spread out and provide cover fire as necessary. The two soldiers work their way behind the nest, toss a hand grenade into it, and end the threat.

Police Officer “Dan Barry,” while on routine patrol at three in the morning, spots a suspicious vehicle midway down an alley. The car, its lights off but its dome light on, is parked outside the back door of an electronics store. As Barry reaches for the mike to call for backup, a white male in his thirties rushes out of the store, a duffel bag in each hand. The suspect spots the police car, drops the bag in his right hand, and reaches for his waistband. Barry, gun drawn, aims at the suspect and orders him to freeze. The suspect complies, and Barry hooks him up. The officer collects and impounds evidence—including the .380 handgun the suspect had been reaching for—then writes extensive crime and arrest reports. Later that morning, he calls the shop owners on his beat, with whom he had been meeting for over a month, to give them the good news.

T
HE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
A soldier on the outskirts of Baghdad and a beat cop in Schenectady are noteworthy. The mission of soldiers is to win battles on foreign soil, the mission of police officers is to keep the peace in
America's cities. More to the point,
a soldier follows orders for a living, a police officer makes decisions for a living.
Therein resides the justification for a radical reconstruction of America's police agencies.

Many Americans view their local PD as an occupational force—repressive, distant, arrogant. It's no wonder: their police department operates within the framework of a
paramilitary bureaucracy
, a structure that fortifies that image and promotes the behavior. Your local PD takes raw material, the average police recruit drawn from your own community, and molds him or her into a soldier-bureaucrat, starting in the academy.

That rigid, top-down, highly centralized, militarily oriented “command and control” system simply does not work for policing—not in America, not in our multicultural, ostensibly pluralistic, democratic society. The paramilitary bureaucracy, or “PMB,” as I've referred to it in my notes over the years, is a slow-footed, buck-passing, blame-laying, bullying, bigotry-fostering institutional arrangement, as constipated by tradition and as resistant to change as Mel Gibson's version of the Catholic Church. I cannot imagine other essential reforms in policing—improved crime-fighting, safety and morale of the force, the honoring of constitutional guarantees—without
significant structural transformation.

The following is a rational and objective examination of the advantages and disadvantages of the police paramilitary bureaucracy.

A R
ATIONAL AND
O
BJECTIVE
E
XAMINATION OF THE
A
DVANTAGES AND
D
ISADVANTAGES OF THE
P
OLICE
P
ARAMILITARY
B
UREAUCRACY
(PMB)