http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17382096

about time

to quote the article referncing the report it used

52% of male officers in the Metropolitan Police were overweight and 1% were "morbidly obese

fooking joke

I would have no problem getting a job as a police officer then!!!

Don t you get one when you become a police officer??? you need to be fit anyway as there is alot involved being a bobby not a easy job thease days.

I assumed they had annual fitness tests anyway! Shocked that they didn't, tbh.

In the Forces if you lose your fitness you can't get signed on. There are disciplinary consequences if you can't sort yourself out too.

some shit level on a bleep test 6 or something like that and a push and pull, mega hard

dont know how it is for other service but the shame for royal would be the worst thing

Personally I was always allergic to gyms and avoided them like the plague. By the time the fitness regime was brought in I was old enough to legally avoid it. When I think of it though, there was no way a submariner in the old diesel boats could get fit anyway, the exercise bike rusted up with the condensation when we tried it. As a radio op in the RAF there was again no need to be a jockstrapper either. However, now I'm retired I do exercise because I want to get my pensh for as long as I can and also remain mobile, funny how things and attitudes change.

I know most training is done in Hendon and you get fittness test as well.

Even I was super fit in training, most initial training courses make sure of that anyway. It's what happens when you get out in the mainstream that things change and a few sherberts later you're snookered. The police need to be fit though if they are on the "front line", whatever that is.

It is a joke!!

What the media didn't say was where they got their figures from (they even got the figures wrong). The actual amount in the Winsor Report was 75%. They also forgot to say that the 75% of officers branded by the media as being overweight were, in fact, actually 75% of those officers WHO ATTENDED A PROGRAMME FOR, AMONG OTHERS, THE OVERWEIGHT. And who, moreover, voluntarily joined the programme because they were determined to lose weight and get fit.

Tom Winsor actually opens his comments on police fitness by admitting: “There is little data on the fitness of those in the police service” adding that when Hampshire Constabulary conducted a trial fitness test, 97% of those who took it passed.

I do wish that those in the media would actually READ such reports before putting details in their papers. Mind you, they don't do so well reporting on our Armed Forces either so I'm not surprised really. After all, the truth doesn't sell papers quite so well does it.

it says tom winsors review at the top

The Nationally agreed level in order to achieve entrance in terms of fitness into the Police is 5.6

http://www.policeoracle.com/careers/how_to_become_a_police_officer_the_police_fitness_test.html

http://www.npia.police.uk/en/16305.htm

interesting fitness levels, 10.5 for dynamic intervention (hostage rescue), slightly less painful physically than the hills and jungle not to mention sere

http://www.statewatch.org/news/2005/jul/acpo-firearms-2003.pdf

I know it does, but the papers must not have read it as the facts & figures don't correspond to the Winsor review.

i know, but at the end of the day its referenced, and its up to the reader to double check, like you did and couldnt be arsed doing before i posted it

Fifty years ago this country didn't have to worry about its bobbies being overweight and unfit...the courts were the real deterrent to its criminal classes. You only have to look at the massive increases in wanton violence and drunken and drugged behaviour of some of its feral youth to realize that. I fully realize that there is huge unemployment in this part of the country and further afield, but that doesn't excuse the sort of behaviour we read of every week in our local press, never mind the national press. The way things are going...there won't be room left for burglars in our prisons soon, due to them being overcrowded with lifers.
All these government initiatives are merely gimmicks and smoke screens to cover up their useless ineffective policies.

DO you think that T Windsor actually spent any time out with the Bobbies: you know things like dealing with drunks on a friday night, telling a family a loved one has died in a accident, attended a murder scene etc etc etc...I doubt it

You only need to take one look at him to recognize that he is a chinless wonder from a stuffed shirt background who would be found hiding under the nearest table, in a bank, leaving some old age pensioner to tackle a masked armed robber if one were taking place in his presence. That's the type I believe him to be.