Sadly, Don shows himself incapable of understanding or participating in a nuanced conversation.

In his ideal world all of our police officers would be White males.

If this were the case, you must ask yourself, how would we ever get undercover officers into Black or Hispanic street gangs dealing drugs? How would we ever infiltrate Arab Muslim terrorist organizations? How about Asian Gangs? How much money would be spent on settlement of complaints of women who claimed they were sexually molested by male police officers who were conducting body cavity drug searches on them?

Is "changing" the entry requirements necessarily "lowering" them, particularly if they are not related to the job?

The current State of Florida physical assessment test (PAT) for police officers is designed to test abilities that can be shown to be related to duties that are actually carried out by most officers serving on the job. It is not nearly as stringent as some might imagine. Is the test too easy in view of the fact that there are so many female police officers on the streets of Florida?

And, nationwide, virtually no police agency has a very high pistol marksmanship requirement for police officers. That is one reason that you will encounter so many officers who just give a knowing grin when some civilian says that they should shoot an armed suspect "in the arm or in the leg." Most officers are lucky to put multiple hits in the center of a stationary target. This is not particularly a male/female thing, although some malfunctions of autoloading pistols can be traced to "limp wrists" which is more often a female than a male problem.

If we changed pistol marksmanship standards to insist on all officers being capable of shooting a moving target in the leg, we would have few officers.

Arguably, some of our best police officers are those who can talk to an agitated, stressed, violent person, and convince him to submit to police custody with no use of physical force. Such people often find themselves drawn to being Hostage Negotiators. A job that I did for a few years, at a time when I probably could not have passed the physical test to be on the SWAT Team. But, the SWAT Team was never called out without Negotiators; nor were Negotiators ever called out without the SWAT Team.

Carl in Tampa

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