Police Fitness Tests Have Reached A New Low [Weekly Walsh Original]
Episode Stats
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194.35902
Summary
In Nashville, Tennessee, the police department is trying to recruit more women, and they re doing so by reducing the standards required to become a police officer. What does this mean for the future of policing in the state of Tennessee?
Transcript
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Four years ago, the city of Memphis decided to double down on a strategy of affirmative action
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policing that they had been practicing for decades. Officially, the city's theory was that
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black police officers are less likely to mistreat suspects and more likely to do a better job as
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compared to white officers. There was never any data to support that theory, obviously. If anything,
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there was a lot of data to suggest the exact opposite. Indeed, Memphis had long been one of
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the most dangerous cities in the country, despite all the diverse hiring they were doing. But in
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2020, Memphis went for it anyway, and they reduced their hiring standards even further to attract more
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black police recruits, and it worked. As expected, more black people did sign up to become Memphis
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police officers, and the police department became more quote-unquote diverse. But getting rid of merit
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in police academies is a lot like introducing DEI to medicine. I'm afraid you're in trouble here.
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I got in through an affirmative action program.
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The dude doesn't need a chest cavity. Or to the aviation industry.
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It doesn't just lead to inefficiency, it leads to death, and very preventable ones at that. But
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somehow this lesson has not been learned. Even in the state of Tennessee, just a few hundred miles
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from where Tyree Nichols was beaten to death, efforts to diversify policing by reducing standards
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are underway. And this time around, the stated goal is not to have more black men join the police
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force. Instead, the objective is to get more women recruits. So watch what's happening in the city of
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Nashville right now. It's a male-dominated profession, so women are scared to take that step,
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maybe thinking that they're not able to do it, but you can do it.
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Their goal? A 30% female police force. Last year, it was 11%. This year, it's 13%.
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Commander Tiffany Gibson is Metro's first female director of training. She says among the biggest
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changes they've made to help attract recruits, especially women, no more physical ability
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tests. Now trainees must pass a physical agility test.
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In that clip, they suggest that the new agility standards will help attract women because they
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mirror tasks that these women cops will have to do in the field and read between the lines. And
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what they're saying is that the agility test is a lot easier than the old test. They don't go into
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too much detail about how much easier this new test is. So I looked into it. The old test required
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recruits to complete sit-ups, a 300-meter sprint, and a 1.5-mile run. Now, even those
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standards, we're not all that demanding. If anything, in a sane world, we'd be talking about
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raising those standards. But instead, we're going the opposite direction. The new test only requires
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recruits to run for 500 yards rather than a mile and a half, plus 99 yards around some cones.
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There's also a couple of wall climbing tests, including a chain-link fence climb and a solid
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wall climb. Now, when you hear some of that, it might sound somewhat challenging. You know, a wall
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climb, a fence climb. And if you're not in very good shape anyway, maybe some of that could be,
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there could be a challenge to that. After all, climbing fences and walls, you know, it's not
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something most people do on a given day. Unfortunately, the Metro Nashville Police
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Department has uploaded footage of what these tests look like in practice. This is the chain-link
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fence climb. For this test, you're to run up to the fence, scale the fence, and continue running to
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the finish line. The test may be administered twice with at least a two-minute rest period
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between administrations. Your fastest time will be used as your score. Solid wall climb. For this
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test, you're to run up to the wall, scale the wall, and continue running to the finish line. This test
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may be administered twice with at least two-minute rest period between administrations. Your fastest
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time will be used as your score. Okay, good thing you get the two-minute rest in between those two
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extremely physically demanding tasks. So when you hear chain-link fence climb and wall climb,
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your mind immediately conjures images of a tall fence and like a large wall. The wall just got
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10 feet higher. At least one taller than a human being that you have to climb. What they don't tell
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you is that the wall and fence are like three and a half feet high. You don't have to climb them so
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much as sort of skip over them. It's effectively a test to make sure you're not in a wheelchair.
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I'm not exaggerating when I say this is a physical fitness test that my four-year-old daughter
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could easily pass. It's like a parody of a physical fitness test. Pathetic doesn't even
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begin to describe this. Now, as recently as 2005, things were very different. As WPLN in Nashville
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reports, applicants in 2005 had to run up and down a flight of stairs. They had to crawl under
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obstacles. They had to fire a revolver six times after they were exhausted. They also had to climb
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a six-foot wall. So like at least twice as tall as what they have to climb now. Can you imagine the
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people who don't pass the current test? Because I guarantee that's still not 100% graduation rate.
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There are people who can't even do that. As WPLN reports, quote, the extreme stunts that police
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would rarely encounter in real life are gone, especially the ones that often weeded people
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out. Yeah, you wouldn't want to weed people out in a physical fitness test. I mean, silly me. I
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thought that was like the whole point of a physical fitness test. Apparently not. If you're struggling
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today. It's not limited to Nashville, of course. All over the country, police departments are
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understaffed. I want to be a police officer. What? And they're turning to women recruits and lowering
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their standards to fix the problem. This is something called the 30 by 30 initiative. What is that?
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The objective is to increase the number of women in recruitment classes by 30 percent by 2030. Again,
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it's all completely arbitrary, but more than 200 law enforcement agencies have signed on to this
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pledge, including the U.S. Marshal Service and the New York City Police Department. Supposedly,
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according to the 30 by 30 initiative, women are better cops because they, quote, use less force and
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less excessive force, and they're named in fewer complaints and lawsuits, and they're perceived by
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communities as being more honest and compassionate. Yes, queen, slay. Apparently, perception is what's
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important here. You know, no word on whether these women cops are actually more honest or compassionate.
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Don't move! They're back! Those other two statistics are very likely to be true, if only
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because there are far fewer female police officers than there are male police officers. It's easy to
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be named in fewer lawsuits and use force less when you make up just 10 percent of the police department.
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Even if those numbers are adjusted on a per capita basis, which they don't appear to be, it really
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doesn't tell us much, other than that women police officers simply don't get involved as much in
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making arrests. Drop the knife, miss. Casey, taser! Huh? You're not going to have a use-of-force
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complaint if you're biologically incapable of using a significant amount of force in the first
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place. Everybody knows that's true, obviously, even though they get extremely angry when it's
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pointed out. Female police officers, almost without exception, are much less capable of doing their
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jobs effectively. We are going to give this man a ticket, but a ticket to a... A movie!
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That's why they have to lower the standards. Police departments are having to pretend otherwise
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because they've demonized all the male cops. You suck. And in fact, they're still demonizing
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these cops even after they're mostly gone. Here's how the Washington Post puts it, quote,
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amid new standards of accountability and awakened mistrust in the communities, especially after the
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reckoning that followed George Floyd's 2020 death under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman,
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there has been an exodus of seasoned police officers. In other words, all these cops aren't
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leaving because left-wing governments slashed their budgets or allowed mobs to torch their police
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stations or called them racists every day for four years. No, these cops are fleeing because they don't
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want to be held accountable, apparently. That's why recruiting numbers are down by 90% in some major
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cities. Unless that messaging changes until a major political party and all the corporate media stop
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attacking police officers, the problem will continue to get worse. You know, the point of this is not to
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demonize women, of course. The point is that it's always been a bad idea to deliberately and
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artificially feminize any institution. With policing, it's particularly suicidal. If anything, a sane
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society would be having a conversation about how to decrease the number of women cops, which is to say
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we'd be having a conversation about how to get more physically fit men involved in policing. We
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wouldn't be lowering standards and then throwing women into dangerous situations they're not prepared
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for. That's what a society does if it despises women and despises itself. Unfortunately, as you may
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have noticed by now, that's exactly the kind of society we have.
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And then you, this part, bam, bam, then up, down, uh, uh, and then, uh, and then this part, it's this.