Physical Fitness and Training

Police officers who are unfit put their own lives, the lives of their partners, and the lives of the public at risk. Today, American police academies lasting 12 weeks or more graduate fit recruits. The unsolved problem for many police departments is the rapid and severe physical deterioration of too many of those academy graduates.

The general definition of physical fitness as the ability to perform everyday activities without injury or undue fatigue applies to police but is incomplete. Police physical fitness refers also to the officer's ability to perform all job-related tasks successfully.

The earliest police system in America began as a night watchman function in New York City without physical training standards of any kind, and it continued that way for the rest of the 19th century. In the first two decades of the 20th century, scholars began to study all aspects of police training. August Vollmer, who was also Chief of Police for Berkeley, California, stated that successful fulfillment of police responsibilities would be best accomplished by college-educated officers, and physical education classes would be part of that preparation. However, such adjustments in the physical training of police did not occur until 50 years later as a result of three factors. In the 1960s, there was a significant rise in crime in the United States; in the 1970s, there was an increase in awareness of the depart-ment's role in attending to the health of its officers; and in the 1980s, there were several relevant [Page 330]court decisions. These three developments led gradually to changes in three aspects of police physical training: selection process, recruit training, and the department's contributions to postacademy fitness programs.

Postacademy fitness programs included department subsidies for fitness center memberships; department sponsorship of sports, races, and competitions; return of unspent sick leave monies; provision of exercise equipment in the precinct; promotional exam points based on fitness test scores; and special fitness bars for uniform display.

Vollmer's vision of college physical education classes did eventually prove to be useful to some police officers, but his plan for recruit preparation was not nearly sufficient to meet police needs. By 1913 in New York City, a Special Committee to Investigate the Police Department suggested that unfit men admitted by civil service tests should be dropped as a result of unsatisfactory showing in the school. By 1927, there was a law in New York State requiring physical tests for the state police based on standards set by the superintendent.

When compared with departments across the nation, the New York State law was the exception, and there were few advances in police physical training in the United States from 1916 to 1963. Many recruits during that period had been introduced to physical training and combat techniques in one of the U.S. military's boot camps.

With the dramatic rise in crime in the 1960s came a realization by American society that the police needed to set higher training standards for themselves.

In 1968, the U.S. Department of Justice described tasks required by an officer, including exhibiting a number of complex psychomotor skills, such as firing a weapon under extremely varied conditions; maintaining agility, endurance, and strength; and showing facility in self-defense and apprehension, as in taking a person into custody with a minimum of force.

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