TexasCHLforum.com

I generally think unions have outlived their usefulness in most cases. But I will be fair and give them some credit too. The reason they have to fight to protect the incompetent's job is to also protect the good guy's job. The current SAPOA president is a friend of mine, and I served on their board for two years when I was an officer. I know there were a few cases where we really wanted the officer fired, but had an obligation to protect him so we could protect the other officers. I also know that if employers kept good records, it is fairly easy to build a case against the incompetent. Too many times, the city would try to hang an officer who really deserved to be fired but would use some minor mistake or made up charge because they could not prove the real problem. This is almost always a lack of documentation.

In some cases, it is much like defending others' rights. The only way to protect my rights is to defend yours, even if I don't like what you are doing.

flb_78 wrote:I they're good shots, they shouldn't have to run to chase a BG.

There was actually a court case over this. IIRC it was out of the DC Court of Appeals (sorry, I do not remember the citation and may have the court wrong). The case involved an officer who shot a suspect because he was in poor condition and could not continue to fight.

As is proper IMO, the court ruled that it was excessive force. Keeping fit is part of the job and the need was foreseeable, so not doing so was negligence and made the shooting a bad shoot. I used this in my classes to try to convince officers to stay fit.

There are many reasons that officers develop weight problems, and the job is one. In addition to the lack of exercise provided (which is about the same as most jobs other than the Fire Department), there are the lack of meal times and eating fast to get it down before the call comes in. Then there is the stress involved, and medically this helps produce fat. Add in the shift work, and you get overweight officers.

There are a couple main reasons why most departments do not have fitness standards. One of the big ones is the unions in larger cities. It can be be very hard to get a standard in place when the union's job is to protect the officers' jobs.

The second is the anti-discrimination laws. You must be able to prove the fitness test is directly related to job requirements. TABC started a fitness requirement to meet state law. The law actually provided some cover from some claims. They hired a consultant to help them develop the standards. The consultant analyzed the job for what officers do, then developed physical simulations of these tasks. The next step was to test a representative sample of the agency (1/3 of them that showed the same demographics as the department) for their ability to perform the simulations and their fitness on standard exercises. This let the consultant say what the actual fitness standards of the job were.

And after going through all this, the whole agency was tested. And not a single female agent passed the test the first time through. This is despite the female officers who were used as part of the sample that developed the test. Some of them passed certain parts, but none passed the whole thing. And the federal courts define this as a disparate impact and will normally rule against the test. It can be defended in court, but the disparate impact is obvious and hard to beat without big cash expenditures.

So, in many cases, no standard gets implemented to avoid being sued. TABC did implement theirs, without changes as I understand it, and worked with the existing female agents to get them built up to pass the test the next year or so. I left before this was fully implemented and do not know the final results. The law still requires the standards though.