Male Cop Fails Fitness Test, Sues For Gender Discrimination
A police officer in New Hampshire who failed on 12 attempts to complete a 1.5 mile fitness run in time is suing the New Hampshire police academy for sex discrimination.
David Scott got a job on the Barnstead, NH, police force in 2009, and is currently serving as a part-time officer, but the department required him to be certified by the state’s police academy to go full time. He qualified under all the screening tests except the 1.5 run, according to WCVB in Boston:
“Scott passed all of the academic exams and met requirements in bench presses, sit-ups and push-ups, but failed 12 times over the next two years to complete a 1.5-mile run in the allotted time, finishing 11 seconds too slow in his best run.”
The officer’s lawsuit alleges that female police trainees get an extra three minutes to complete the run which just isn’t fair and constitutes a form of illegal sex discrimination based on based on “an arbitrarily selected different minimum standard based on sex that does not measure in any way the minimum physical ability required to do the job of a certified full-time police officer.”
The fact that the officer passed all the other required tests should count for something perhaps although the police academy, officially known as the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council, refused to grant him a waiver.
When one group appears to be favored over another, lawsuits are inevitable. Leaving aside the merits or demerits of this particular case, and whether the officer should have trained harder for the run, is it fair that there are different, gender-based physical standards in police/fire training and in the military especially since sex discrimination is illegal under federal and state statutes?
If equality is the goal, and since there is no shortage of people trying to get jobs on the police force, shouldn’t everyone be held to the same rigorous and appropriate (assuming appropriate could be determined) physical standards regardless of gender? If that, for example, resulted in an all-female police force, would there be anything wrong with that?
