The Matt Walsh Show - March 23, 2024


Police Fitness Tests Have Reached A New Low [Weekly Walsh Original]

Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Mentioned
Walsh Tiffany Gibson Tyree Nichols George Floyd Auntie Maxine Casey
Ep. 1331 - The Transgender Movement Is Morphing Into The Transhumanist Movement And The Results Are Horrific Ep. 1332 - The Media Panics As More And More Women Choose To Dump Their Birth Control

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

194.36

Word count

1,833

Sentence count

131

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Four years ago, the city of Memphis decided to double down on a strategy of affirmative action
00:00:04.860 policing that they had been practicing for decades. Officially, the city's theory was that
00:00:08.700 black police officers are less likely to mistreat suspects and more likely to do a better job as
00:00:14.480 compared to white officers. There was never any data to support that theory, obviously. If anything,
00:00:26.220 there was a lot of data to suggest the exact opposite. Indeed, Memphis had long been one of
00:00:30.580 the most dangerous cities in the country, despite all the diverse hiring they were doing. But in 1.00
00:00:35.160 2020, Memphis went for it anyway, and they reduced their hiring standards even further to attract more
00:00:40.500 black police recruits, and it worked. As expected, more black people did sign up to become Memphis 0.99
00:00:46.020 police officers, and the police department became more quote-unquote diverse. But getting rid of merit
00:00:51.020 in police academies is a lot like introducing DEI to medicine. I'm afraid you're in trouble here.
00:00:55.360 I got in through an affirmative action program.
00:00:58.760 The dude doesn't need a chest cavity. Or to the aviation industry.
00:01:02.040 Captain Antoine Max speaking. He sounds nice.
00:01:06.600 It doesn't just lead to inefficiency, it leads to death, and very preventable ones at that. But
00:01:12.120 somehow this lesson has not been learned. Even in the state of Tennessee, just a few hundred miles
00:01:16.380 from where Tyree Nichols was beaten to death, efforts to diversify policing by reducing standards
00:01:21.380 are underway. And this time around, the stated goal is not to have more black men join the police
00:01:26.140 force. Instead, the objective is to get more women recruits. So watch what's happening in the city of 1.00
00:01:31.020 Nashville right now. It's a male-dominated profession, so women are scared to take that step, 1.00
00:01:36.320 maybe thinking that they're not able to do it, but you can do it.
00:01:39.740 Their goal? A 30% female police force. Last year, it was 11%. This year, it's 13%. 1.00
00:01:47.600 Commander Tiffany Gibson is Metro's first female director of training. She says among the biggest
00:01:52.760 changes they've made to help attract recruits, especially women, no more physical ability 1.00
00:01:58.400 tests. Now trainees must pass a physical agility test.
00:02:02.440 In that clip, they suggest that the new agility standards will help attract women because they 0.97
00:02:10.380 mirror tasks that these women cops will have to do in the field and read between the lines. And 1.00
00:02:14.960 what they're saying is that the agility test is a lot easier than the old test. They don't go into
00:02:20.060 too much detail about how much easier this new test is. So I looked into it. The old test required
00:02:26.540 recruits to complete sit-ups, a 300-meter sprint, and a 1.5-mile run. Now, even those
00:02:32.240 standards, we're not all that demanding. If anything, in a sane world, we'd be talking about
00:02:36.020 raising those standards. But instead, we're going the opposite direction. The new test only requires
00:02:41.300 recruits to run for 500 yards rather than a mile and a half, plus 99 yards around some cones.
00:02:48.040 There's also a couple of wall climbing tests, including a chain-link fence climb and a solid
00:02:53.600 wall climb. Now, when you hear some of that, it might sound somewhat challenging. You know, a wall
00:02:59.760 climb, a fence climb. And if you're not in very good shape anyway, maybe some of that could be,
00:03:04.460 there could be a challenge to that. After all, climbing fences and walls, you know, it's not
00:03:07.940 something most people do on a given day. Unfortunately, the Metro Nashville Police
00:03:15.400 Department has uploaded footage of what these tests look like in practice. This is the chain-link
00:03:21.520 fence climb. For this test, you're to run up to the fence, scale the fence, and continue running to
00:03:26.440 the finish line. The test may be administered twice with at least a two-minute rest period
00:03:30.280 between administrations. Your fastest time will be used as your score. Solid wall climb. For this
00:03:36.300 test, you're to run up to the wall, scale the wall, and continue running to the finish line. This test
00:03:41.760 may be administered twice with at least two-minute rest period between administrations. Your fastest
00:03:46.400 time will be used as your score. Okay, good thing you get the two-minute rest in between those two
00:03:51.060 extremely physically demanding tasks. So when you hear chain-link fence climb and wall climb,
00:03:55.900 your mind immediately conjures images of a tall fence and like a large wall. The wall just got
00:04:01.700 10 feet higher. At least one taller than a human being that you have to climb. What they don't tell
00:04:06.620 you is that the wall and fence are like three and a half feet high. You don't have to climb them so
00:04:10.520 much as sort of skip over them. It's effectively a test to make sure you're not in a wheelchair.
00:04:17.180 I'm not exaggerating when I say this is a physical fitness test that my four-year-old daughter
00:04:22.100 could easily pass. It's like a parody of a physical fitness test. Pathetic doesn't even
00:04:26.900 begin to describe this. Now, as recently as 2005, things were very different. As WPLN in Nashville 0.96
00:04:31.940 reports, applicants in 2005 had to run up and down a flight of stairs. They had to crawl under
00:04:36.820 obstacles. They had to fire a revolver six times after they were exhausted. They also had to climb
00:04:41.260 a six-foot wall. So like at least twice as tall as what they have to climb now. Can you imagine the
00:04:46.640 people who don't pass the current test? Because I guarantee that's still not 100% graduation rate.
00:04:53.820 There are people who can't even do that. As WPLN reports, quote, the extreme stunts that police
00:04:58.740 would rarely encounter in real life are gone, especially the ones that often weeded people
00:05:02.480 out. Yeah, you wouldn't want to weed people out in a physical fitness test. I mean, silly me. I
00:05:07.180 thought that was like the whole point of a physical fitness test. Apparently not. If you're struggling
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00:06:12.400 today. It's not limited to Nashville, of course. All over the country, police departments are
00:06:16.760 understaffed. I want to be a police officer. What? And they're turning to women recruits and lowering 1.00
00:06:23.160 their standards to fix the problem. This is something called the 30 by 30 initiative. What is that?
00:06:28.280 The objective is to increase the number of women in recruitment classes by 30 percent by 2030. Again,
00:06:33.340 it's all completely arbitrary, but more than 200 law enforcement agencies have signed on to this
00:06:37.320 pledge, including the U.S. Marshal Service and the New York City Police Department. Supposedly,
00:06:41.200 according to the 30 by 30 initiative, women are better cops because they, quote, use less force and 1.00
00:06:46.300 less excessive force, and they're named in fewer complaints and lawsuits, and they're perceived by
00:06:50.760 communities as being more honest and compassionate. Yes, queen, slay. Apparently, perception is what's
00:06:57.300 important here. You know, no word on whether these women cops are actually more honest or compassionate. 1.00
00:07:02.260 Don't move! They're back! Those other two statistics are very likely to be true, if only
00:07:06.980 because there are far fewer female police officers than there are male police officers. It's easy to
00:07:11.140 be named in fewer lawsuits and use force less when you make up just 10 percent of the police department.
00:07:16.460 Even if those numbers are adjusted on a per capita basis, which they don't appear to be, it really
00:07:21.220 doesn't tell us much, other than that women police officers simply don't get involved as much in 1.00
00:07:26.100 making arrests. Drop the knife, miss. Casey, taser! Huh? You're not going to have a use-of-force
00:07:31.260 complaint if you're biologically incapable of using a significant amount of force in the first
00:07:35.380 place. Everybody knows that's true, obviously, even though they get extremely angry when it's
00:07:40.560 pointed out. Female police officers, almost without exception, are much less capable of doing their 1.00
00:07:45.880 jobs effectively. We are going to give this man a ticket, but a ticket to a... A movie!
00:07:53.280 That's why they have to lower the standards. Police departments are having to pretend otherwise
00:07:56.820 because they've demonized all the male cops. You suck. And in fact, they're still demonizing 1.00
00:08:01.680 these cops even after they're mostly gone. Here's how the Washington Post puts it, quote,
00:08:05.660 amid new standards of accountability and awakened mistrust in the communities, especially after the
00:08:09.980 reckoning that followed George Floyd's 2020 death under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman,
00:08:13.840 there has been an exodus of seasoned police officers. In other words, all these cops aren't
00:08:18.120 leaving because left-wing governments slashed their budgets or allowed mobs to torch their police
00:08:22.300 stations or called them racists every day for four years. No, these cops are fleeing because they don't
00:08:26.660 want to be held accountable, apparently. That's why recruiting numbers are down by 90% in some major
00:08:31.000 cities. Unless that messaging changes until a major political party and all the corporate media stop
00:08:35.920 attacking police officers, the problem will continue to get worse. You know, the point of this is not to
00:08:40.240 demonize women, of course. The point is that it's always been a bad idea to deliberately and
00:08:44.800 artificially feminize any institution. With policing, it's particularly suicidal. If anything, a sane
00:08:50.260 society would be having a conversation about how to decrease the number of women cops, which is to say 1.00
00:08:55.780 we'd be having a conversation about how to get more physically fit men involved in policing. We
00:09:01.860 wouldn't be lowering standards and then throwing women into dangerous situations they're not prepared
00:09:05.780 for. That's what a society does if it despises women and despises itself. Unfortunately, as you may
00:09:10.940 have noticed by now, that's exactly the kind of society we have.
00:09:14.100 And then you, this part, bam, bam, then up, down, uh, uh, and then, uh, and then this part, it's this.