In 2001, only 69 athletes participated

in the Palm Beach County (Fla.) Sheriff’s

Office’s annual Olympic Games-style compe-

tition, which is open to the organization’s

3,100 employees. This past November, that

number jumped to 177 athletes competing

in 19 events such as basketball, swimming

and even bowling over a two-day period, cul-

minating in the crowning of the “toughest

cop” and “toughest civilian.”

The popular event is part of the agency’s

“Get Fit-Stay Fit” plan, a multifaceted educa-

tion program for sworn and non-sworn

employees and their families.

Other components of the “Get Fit-Stay Fit”

program include a smoking ban for all

employees, free physicals for deputies over

35 years old, and new or renovated fitness

centers at the department’s five locations —

including a 24-hour, state-of-the-art facility at

department headquarters that opened in

January 2001.

“We’re in the business of public service,

and it’s our responsibility to be physically fit.

That’s just as important as teaching some-

one how to go in hot pursuit,” says Cpl. Stan

Bullard, training officer and fitness specialist

at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. He

credits Sheriff Edward Bieluch, whose term

began in 2000, with the department’s strong

emphasis on fitness. “We could easily have

had a new sheriff come in who didn’t want to

upgrade our facilities. But Sheriff Bieluch is a

fitness advocate and he works out, so he

knows the importance of this.”

So, apparently, do an increasing number

F I T N E S S

www.athleticbusiness.com March 2003 ATHLETIC BUSINESS 67

STRIVING TO BREAK DOWN DONUTS-AND-COFFEE STEREOTYPES, SOME LAW-ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES ARE PLACING NEW EMPHASIS ONFITNESS ASSESSMENTS, WELLNESS PROGRAMS AND HEALTHY LIVING.

By MichaelPopke

By MichaelPopke

SSTRIVING TO BREAK DOWN DONUTSTRIVING TO BREAK DOWN DONUTS--ANDAND--COFFEE STEREOTYPESCOFFEE STEREOTYPES, ,SOME LAWSOME LAW--ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES ARE PLACING NEW EMPHASIS ONENFORCEMENT AGENCIES ARE PLACING NEW EMPHASIS ONFITNESS ASSESSMENTSFITNESS ASSESSMENTS, , WELLNESS PROGRAMS AND HEALTHY LIVINGWELLNESS PROGRAMS AND HEALTHY LIVING..

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AB MAR- police fitness 2/11/03 9: 24 AM Page 67

There are plenty of opportunities for police officers and firefighters to testtheir strength, fitness and stamina these days. Such competitions make

sense, as law-enforcement agencies around the country strive to improve the fit-ness levels of their employees — and the public perception of those employees.

Take Yonkers, N.Y., for example. Considered by locals to be the hottest ticket intown, the annual Yonkers Police/Fire Toughman Competition — which pits policeofficers against firefighters in a series of boxing matches for charity — drew about3,000 people last November, a record for the three-year-old event. Ring girls and adeejay add to the electric atmosphere. Proceeds benefit a local memorial built tohonor Yonkers’ uniformed men and women killed while on duty.

For an endurance test of a different kind, the 13th annual conference of theInternational Police Mountain Bike Association, to be held in May in Charleston,W.Va., will offer a challenging urban obstacle-course competition. Riders will navi-gate parking blocks and clay dummies, climb stairs, ride balance beams and dothe limbo on their bikes, and then sprint to the finish line on foot.

New events also pop up every year. Applications are now being accepted for thefirst of what organizers hope will be an annual police and fire bodybuilding compe-tition at Bowie State University in Maryland. The event will be held in June in con-junction with the 4th Annual Nation’s Capitol Musclemania & Fitness/BikiniAmerica Pageant.

Even Home Depot sponsored a tennis competition for local police and firedepartments last year in Los Angeles. Games took place between competitivematches at the 2002 Home Depot Championships, held at the Staples Center.

In addition to a variety of independent events, many states host police and firegames, including Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Wisconsin. California was the firststate to create organized athletic competition for law-enforcement officers with theCalifornia Police Olympics in 1967. Today, the annual California Police and FireGames, now open to firefighters, attract up to 6,000 athletes from around thestate.

The California Police Athletic Federation oversees the state event, as well as theWorld Police & Fire Games, established in 1985. Held every two years over eightto 10 days, the competition is open to active and retired, publicly employed, full-time police officers and firefighters from around the world — including Olympichopefuls. The 2001 Games were held in Indianapolis and attracted more than9,000 athletes.

Even though the emphasis is on individual and team excellence (rather than oncountry, state, province or department), event officials say local and national pridestill runs strong, with athletes competing in more than 60 sports from archery towrestling — more events than even the Olympic Games. This year’s World Police &Fire Games will be held July 26-Aug. 3 in Barcelona, Spain.

Canada will host the 2005 event. Canadian law-enforcement and fire agenciesare also involved in the biannual Can-Am Police-Fire Games, which began in 1977when officials from Oregon and Washington combined their state police and firegames and teamed with a police-fire sports group in western Canada. A multisportevent was held annually until 1996, by which time the event became so big thatorganizers moved it to every other year. Spokane, Wash., hosted the 2002games, while the 2004 event will be held in London, Ontario. Excess revenuesfrom the games go to charities in the host community.

— M.P.

of officials at law-enforcement agencies

around the country, where physical fitness

is considered essential in helping cops cope

with stress and perform tasks ranging from

paperwork to non-lethal combat. After all, an

officer’s daily grind is often a sedentary one,

with opportunities to actually chase bad

guys few and far between.

North of Palm Beach County, officials at

the Winter Haven (Fla.) Police Department

recently spent a $26,000 local grant surplus

to equip a police station with updated fit-

ness equipment — including specialized

machines for female officers. And in

Chicago, $2.5 million has been budgeted in

2003 to reward police officers who success-

fully complete a voluntary but strenuous

police-academy fitness test. A similar one-

month program last October paid $250 each

to 3,700 or so of the department’s 13,500

sworn officers who passed the test. Only

about 100 officers failed.

Even firefighters, who live in extremely

structured firehouse environments that

make it easier for them to live healthier

lifestyles than police officers and sheriff’s

deputies, are striving to enhance their

already solid image. The Tacoma (Wash.)

Fire Department, for example, hopes to save

$200,000 a year in sick leave by implement-

ing a fitness and wellness plan using grant

money and department funds.

But all this is not enough, contends Dell

Hackett, a retired sheriff’s deputy and now

president of the four-year-old Law Enforce-

ment Wellness Association in Elmira, Ore., a

resource center dedicated to improving the

physical and psychological health of the

nation’s police and sheriff personnel. Hack-

ett contends that too many cops embody

the donuts-and-coffee stereotype — “We

hear that one a lot,” says a veteran of one

big-city police department — by being too

fat and living unhealthy lifestyles. Bullard,

for one, says he knows of few other sheriff’s

departments in the United States that offer

the same range of fitness and wellness ser-

vices as Palm Beach County, and no other

law-enforcement agency in the state last

year sponsored Olympic-style athletic

events or department-wide smoking bans.

Consider this: According to the LEWA,

suicide, divorce and alcoholism rates are

higher among law-enforcement personnel

than current national averages. The lethal

combination of monotonous shift work,

68 ATHLETIC BUSINESS March 2003 www.athleticbusiness.com

“We’re in the business

of public service, and

it’s our responsibilityto be physically fit.

That’s just as

important as teaching

someone how to go in

hot pursuit.”

“We’re in the business

of public service, and

it’s our responsibilityto be physically fit.

That’s just as

important as teaching

someone how to go in

hot pursuit.”

AB MAR- police fitness 2/10/03 2: 18 PM Page 68

sleep deprivation, high stress, poor diet and

irregular exercise often results in early death.

A 40-year study of police-officer mortality

rates at the University of Buffalo revealed

that the average age of death for a law-

enforcement officer is 66; the U.S. Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention peg the

life expectancy for an average person at a

full 10 years longer. “Watch the news,” Hack-

ett says. “When there’s a group of cops on

television, just look at them. Those guys

probably don’t meet any fitness standards.”

In many cases, there are no fitness stan-

dards to be met, as there is no governing

body ensuring that law-enforcement person-

nel are held to specific physical fitness stan-

dards. Once someone graduates from the

police academy, he or she has a good chance

of never having to pass another fitness test

again, says Hackett, who wasn’t even encour-

aged to work out on his own time — let alone

on department time — when he wore the uni-

form. “If you do a telephone survey of 2,000

people asking if their local police department

has a fitness standard, I bet you’d get a high

percentage of citizens who think it does,”

Hackett says. “But it probably doesn’t.”

Health clubs have been provid-

ing discounts to local men and women in

uniform for years, touting the important role

physical fitness plays in combating stress

while providing a public service to their

communities at the same time. Some of the

discounts themselves are fairly healthy. For

example, TNT Total Fitness in Aberdeen,

N.J., operated by Nick Metrokotsas, a former

telecommunications employee who once

worked in the south tower of the World

Trade Center, provides half-price “heroes’

memberships” to all police, fire and armed

forces personnel.

But even the lure of favorable discounts

can’t always change behavioral patterns.

The key to ensuring a physically fit force is

education — a topic that’s generated more

interest in the wake of 9/11, which thrust the

physical capacities of police officers and fire-

fighters into the national spotlight.

“9/11 brought to life the criticality of readi-

ness,” says Roger Reynolds, director of con-

tract relations for The Cooper Institute for

Aerobics Research, a Dallas-based research

and training facility that has worked with

law-enforcement agencies (including the

New York Police Department) since 1976.

“Police officers have got to be ready for

everything, and they cannot be ready for

everything by sitting on the couch. They

may never be required to run as fast as they

can for longer than two minutes. But if they

are, they’ve got to be able to do it. When

they are required to do something in the

job’s darkest hour, they’ll be thankful they’re

physically fit.”

Both The Cooper Institute and the Federal

Law Enforcement Training Center — a

Glynco, Ga.-based arm of the Department of

Homeland Security that provides training to

members of more than 70 federal agencies,

plus several state and local authorities —

report increased interest in their programs

since the Sept. 11 attacks. “We used to have

people who were quite a bit more fit than

the average person,” says Cheryl Hoskins,

chief of FLETC’s Physical Techniques Divi-

sion, which provides extensive instruction in

arrest procedures, self-defense, personal

health and physical fitness. “Now, they’re

coming in in all shapes and sizes. People are

finally realizing that fitness, especially in law

enforcement, is critical.”

FLETC provides basic training for thou-

sands of law-enforcement personnel every

year, submitting each individual to a five-

part Physical Efficiency Battery that includes

flexibility, cardiovascular-endurance, agility,

strength and body-composition tests. The

center also offers an 80-hour physical fitness

coordinators training program for federal,

state and local officials who want to arm

themselves with the tools to teach fitness

and wellness in their own agencies.

If individual agencies implement fitness

programs with a mandatory standards and

testing component — meaning that an indi-

vidual will not be hired or will be fired if a

certain threshold of fitness is not maintained

— legal issues become paramount. “In the

past, fitness was used as a vehicle to dis-

criminate,” says Reynolds, citing the Civil

Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991, the Americans

with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimina-

tion in Employment Act. “It does separate

those who can from those who cannot.”

But if job relatedness is established and

documented, then fitness tests, standards

and programs can — and should, officials at

FLETC and The Cooper Institute argue — be

used to determine who can and who can’t.

Furthermore, law-enforcement agencies also

assume a certain degree of liability regard-

less of whether they provide safe tests,

standards and programs. In 1988, the Wash-

ington (D.C.) Metro Police Department was

found negligent for not having a fitness

requirement. An officer, who had not under-

gone physical training for four years, was

involved in a confrontation with a man

wanted for armed robbery. The encounter

turned deadly, and the robber’s family sued

the department for lack of officer training,

claiming that had the officer been fitter, he

wouldn’t have needed to resort to his

weapon. The department paid the family

more than $425,000 in damages.

The New Jersey State Police Department

since 1985 has required every officer to take a

physical fitness test, regardless of age or gen-

der. Troopers must run 1.5 miles in 13 min-

utes, do 32 push-ups in two minutes and

complete 34 sit-ups in two minutes — or risk

being passed over for a promotion. (An alter-

native test, pending a doctor’s written per-

mission, requires participants to swim 22 laps

in 13 minutes.) Historically, fewer than 2 per-

cent of the 2,100 or so troopers who take the

test each year fail — and none have brought a

legal challenge against the department.

“I personally feel it’s great,” says Lt. Al

Della Fave, a trooper and public information

supervisor for the State Police. “It forces you

to get out and do something to stay fit,

70 ATHLETIC BUSINESS March 2003 www.athleticbusiness.com

“9/11 brought to life

the criticality of

readiness. Police

officers have got to be

ready for everything,

and they cannot be

ready for everything by

sitting on the couch.”

“9/11 brought to life

the criticality of

readiness. Police

officers have got to be

ready for everything,

and they cannot be

ready for everything by

sitting on the couch.”

AB MAR- police fitness 2/10/03 2: 18 PM Page 70

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rather than just sit around. I’m 48 years old,

and I’m already thinking, ‘I gotta do this at

age 52, 53, 54?’ ”

Founded in 1921 by U.S. Gen. Norman

Schwarzkopf’s father, the New Jersey State

Police organization has traditionally advo-

cated tough fitness regimens. “We have U.S.

Marines who drop out of our police acad-

emy in the first week,” says Della Fave, who

joined the State Police after spending several

years with another law-enforcement agency

in New Jersey that did not offer a fitness pro-

gram. He lost 40 pounds in less than six

months. “I thought I was going to come into

this agency and they were going to say, ‘Oh,

you were a cop before. You just sit over here

and relax,’ ” he says. “They were actually

harder on me because I was a cop.”

The physical capabilities of

police officers and sheriff’s deputies, unlike

those of most fitness enthusiasts who work

out at health clubs and YMCAs, affect more

than just the life of one person — elevating

the importance of law-enforcement fitness,

in many eyes, to life-and-death urgency. As

Reynolds says, “When you choose law

enforcement, you lose the right to be unfit.”

While law-enforcement veterans like

Hackett argue that too many of his peers still

ignore those discount offers from local facili-

ties, Bullard says some Palm Beach County

deputies prefer to pay membership fees and

work out in a club to avoid the workplace

environment. Many area club owners, while

respecting the department’s decision to

operate its own fitness centers, still market

such amenities as swimming pools and nicer

locker rooms to sheriff’s office employees.

With more than two-thirds of the depart-

ment’s staff — plus limited members of the

public — already registered users of at least

one of the agency’s fitness centers, officials

are now planning the next phase of the “Get

Fit-Stay Fit” program: establishing a volun-

tary awareness curriculum for employees,

spouses and children, complete with well-

ness classes, physical assessments, fitness

tests and personal training.

It’s all part of the department’s efforts to

ensure a healthy future. “If we get a deputy

fit, then his or her spouse will want to get fit,

and then their kids will want to get involved,”

Bullard reasons. “We simply have to be phys-

ically fit. We have to slow down the aging

process. We have to prevent diabetes and

cardiovascular disease. And the only way

someone can do that is to know how to do it.

We now have the ability to do it.” ■

“When you choose law

enforcement, you losethe right to be unfit.”

“When you choose law

enforcement, you losethe right to be unfit.”

AB MAR- police fitness 2/10/03 2: 19 PM Page 72