Do we ‘need’ more female police officers?

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Mike Buchanan

We recently posted a link to an inspired video which addressed the intriguing question:

If we ‘need’ more women in boardrooms, do we ‘need’ more white Olympic 100 metres sprinters?

The video’s here:

http://j4mb.org.uk/2014/01/12/the-creator-of-manwomanmyth-returns/

Many years ago fitness tests for people wishing to join the police force were made less challenging. The following Daily Mail piece is undated, but refers to Oliver Letwin as the Shadow Home Secretary, which would place it somewhere in the period 2001-3:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-181623/Police-fitness-tests-downgraded-women.html

Letwin’s comment at the end of the piece:

I have to admit this leaves me at a loss. How can it be that the next generation of police officers won’t need to be as nimble as their present colleagues? Are we to imagine that criminals are going to oblige by becoming less fit as well?

From the article:

At present, while 95 per cent of men pass the tests, the success rate for women is just 51 per cent. Police chiefs believe it is proving a major deterrent as they attempt to increase the number of women officers.

Four out of seven unemployed people in the UK are men, and unemployment is known to be a bigger driver of suicide among men than among women. So why are police chiefs trying to increase the number of women officers? Back to the article:

Last night the move was backed by the leader of rank-and-file officers. Jan Berry, chairman of the Police Federation, said: “We welcome the decision to amend the tests. We want to ensure that many good potential officers of both sexes, who would otherwise be lost to the service, stand a fairer chance of becoming police officers without falling at the first hurdle.”

What do we know about the fitness levels of serving police officers, who’ve had to undergo compulsory fitness tests since last September? Only a minority of police officers are women, yet of the officers who’ve failed the fitness tests, two-thirds are women:

http://www.hartlepoolmail.co.uk/news/uk/hundreds-fail-police-fitness-tests-1-6434177

About Mike Buchanan

I'm a men's human rights advocate, writer, and publisher. My primary focus is leading the political party I launched in 2013, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). I still work actively on two campaigns I launched in early 2012, Campaign for Merit in Business and the Anti-Feminism League. In 2014 I launched The Alternative Sexism Project, aiming to raise public understanding that the sexism faced by men and boys has far more grievous consequences than the sexism faced by women and girls.
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  • THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES’
    At this point,the whole situation regarding female workers is rather similar to Han’s Christian Andersen’s fairy tale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’…. We need to send a couple of small kids to observe the fitness tests of both female and male officers and wait untill they ask the inevitable question: Why do we need more female police officers ? Perhaps only then the relevant person in charge might stop,scratch his/her head and realize that not only is it pointless,but completely counter-productive to the force itself and the society in general.