I was watching one of those reality shows called Max-X which consists of mainly of amateur videotape of people being idiots in some way or another. One scene showed a policeman in LA separating two fighting women and I was surprised by his huge overhanging belly. Most police I have seen both IRL and on TV lately seem (overall) to be in better condition than in years past.
In the shows I have seen of police cadets in training the physical conditioning requirements seem quite demanding.
My question is - are the policemen with huge guts simply given a pass on conditioning requirements after they are with the force a certain number of years? How can police departments allow police in such poor shape to remain in a such a physically demanding job, or is there a lot less chasing of suspects IRL than you see on FOX’s COPS show?
It varies from place to place, I don’t think there is a standard. Just from personal experience they usually seem to allocate the heavier cops to desk jobs and such.
Well, the first thing to bear in mind is that an overhanging belly does not neccesarily mean that the cop in question is really out of shape - back when I was into martial arts, I knew several people who had a huge gut and so looked out of shape, but were actually quite capable (as in, go through several sparring matches without a break, do splits while stretching out, etc.). It’s quite possible to have a big belly but still be in reasonable physical condition, especially if there’s some kind of metabolism weirdness to account for the wieght.
While I don’t know the specifics of LA, since they’re a large city I would expect them to have some requirements - larger towns tend to have more formal standards (partially because of lawsuit potential). However, I wouldn’t expect them to be the same as Police Academy requirements; generally the standards at school would be designed to help weed people out and to meet the toughest standards around for police, while the on-the-job requirements would be somewhat less.
And he could always be someone who’s got a desk job but happened to get stuck with that altercation.