LA Mayor Signals Lowering Standards for New Police Recruits

[Trooper224]

A lot of us do...but adult decisions, adult situations, adults adult.

The job, the stress, the wierd work times mitigate against healthy choices. Work 16 hours straight under stress, even once a month or so, in addition to your regular shifts. Go to court, or administrative hearings, meetings or training as required, or assigned on your "time off". Yes we get paid, well in some circumstances, to do this. BUT it takes a toll physically.

Many of my current health issues can be traced to over 20 years of wierd schedules. Night Court ain't a thing everywhere. FTO meetings and staff meetings are outside of when I work, and interrupt sleep. Food when I worked over the last 20+ years was take more time from sleep to pack a lunch, or eat fast food/truck stop food/ convenience store food. Truck stop food dried up here over a decade ago and Covid killed the rest (cue The Buggles...) McDonalds was free for a whole lotta years...I'm not saying, I'm just sayin...

I HATE the physical shape I find myself in at the 25 year point of my career. So much so that I think the 75 Hard Challenge is a good idea. I am having new, wierd manifestations of asthma...A hard core workout plan should probably be blessed by my physician. Getting old SUCKS, but for the alternative.

And I understand that as a cop I may be in the minority. Other cops have whole different priorities than I do. And living those priorities...I have worked with Ironman Triathletes on their third marriage, and had coworkers working out daily die of massive heart attacks, I have more coworkers who have had heart attacks still on duty. Where do you take decisions, and will those decisions help? No way to know.

We are (and should be) valued for our experience, even if our capabilities suffer. We have new guys to provide the capabilities. And we lead and teach them to confer the experience.

pat

I always tried to keep in shape during my career. Except for a few years in my 30s, where a traumatic injury limited my workout abilities, I did a pretty good job of it. Now, I'm edging up on 60 and put on some weight during the last four, post retirement years. I still work out every morning at work before I go on duty, but it hasn't seemed to keep the weight under control. I hadn't gained any more, but I couldn't seem to lose it either.

I decided to change things up and started to take the stairs at work instead of the elevator. When I'm not in court or standing a post I'm roving the building. It's a century old building with steep flights of stairs and five floors. Up and down, along with a turn outside the building takes about 20-30 minutes and i do that three times a day on average, along with my morning workout. In shape or not I'm a big guy. In shape or not, with my body armor and other gear I'm edging up on 300 pounds. The first few times I felt like I was summiting Everest. 😀 (Or Shute climbing the bleachers with a telephone pole. Pop quiz: movie reference?)

It's been two months and I'm having to tighten my belt and my legs are feeling much better, as I was getting routine leg cramps at night which have disappeared. We just have to do what we can when we can and try to maintain a semblance of life balance.

[Coyotesfan97]

I always tried to keep in shape during my career. Except for a few years in my 30s, where a traumatic injury limited my workout abilities, I did a pretty good job of it. Now, I'm edging up on 60 and put on some weight during the last four, post retirement years. I still work out every morning at work before I go on duty, but it hasn't seemed to keep the weight under control. I hadn't gained any more, but I couldn't seem to lose it either.

I decided to change things up and started to take the stairs at work instead of the elevator. When I'm not in court or standing a post I'm roving the building. It's a century old building with steep flights of stairs and five floors. Up and down, along with a turn outside the building takes about 20-30 minutes and i do that three times a day on average, along with my morning workout. In shape or not I'm a big guy. In shape or not, with my body armor and other gear I'm edging up on 300 pounds. The first few times I felt like I was summiting Everest. 😀 (Or Shoop climbing the bleachers with a telephone pole. Pop quiz: movie reference?)

It's been two months and I'm having to tighten my belt and my legs are feeling much better, as I was getting routine leg cramps at night which have disappeared. We just have to do what we can when we can and try to maintain a semblance of life balance.

Vision Quest!

[TGS]

We pick up his adult daughter. We give a list of questions to the poligrapher. He says, "these questions are no good. they are way too broad." We want to know more about questions. He says that broad "fishing" questions are never going to give good results. Things like " have you ever stolen anything from work?" will not give a good result. A specific question like "on March 12 of 2021, $573 was taken from the petty cash drawer in the front office. Did you take the $573 dollars?" will give a much more accurate reading on the test. We mentioned that our pre employment poly as nothing but fishing questions. He shrugged, laughed and said "yeah, those tests are useless"... So there you have it. our own agency poly graph guy said our pre employment tests are BS.

We have a small polygrapher unit that is used solely for counter-terror vetting in a specific niche/place...and this is exactly how they've described it.

Their opinion of the CBP polygraphers in particular can basically be summed up as, "hackjobs".

[Joe S]

@UNM1136, I don't think it was snarky, I think it was to the point and revealing the complexity of the issue. I have always thought, and continue to think, that there are a number of ways we could be taking care of the "essential" workers in our society, including first responders, military and emergency medical people. Most of it would cost little. I mean, we mostly already pay them poorly, treat them like crap, charge them with dealing with hardest aspects of human life/civilization. We could at least give them more consistent scheduling and maybe a nontaxable per diem food allowance, or hire an outside company to deliver some salads and sandwiches twice daily.

Again, just my ignorant opinion from the outside.

[Trooper224]

Vision Quest!

Winner, winner chicken dinner with Linda Fiorentino!

[UNM1136]

I always tried to keep in shape during my career. Except for a few years in my 30s, where a traumatic injury limited my workout abilities, I did a pretty good job of it. Now, I'm edging up on 60 and put on some weight during the last four, post retirement years. I still work out every morning at work before I go on duty, but it hasn't seemed to keep the weight under control. I hadn't gained any more, but I couldn't seem to lose it either.

I decided to change things up and started to take the stairs at work instead of the elevator. When I'm not in court or standing a post I'm roving the building. It's a century old building with steep flights of stairs and five floors. Up and down, along with a turn outside the building takes about 20-30 minutes and i do that three times a day on average, along with my morning workout. In shape or not I'm a big guy. In shape or not, with my body armor and other gear I'm edging up on 300 pounds. The first few times I felt like I was summiting Everest. 😀 (Or Shute climbing the bleachers with a telephone pole. Pop quiz: movie reference?)

It's been two months and I'm having to tighten my belt and my legs are feeling much better, as I was getting routine leg cramps at night which have disappeared. We just have to do what we can when we can and try to maintain a semblance of life balance.

Yeah. I have used many, many lunch times over the last decade to work out. Done two half marathons and a full. Maybe that is my problem. My priorities have been wife and three kids, in private school. I shoehorned fitness in when I could, but did not make it a priority... while my wife was in nursing school I was essentially a single parent of three kids, two under 5. I have never been found wanting in a scrap, but the last decade...it became much harder to hold on to what I have...and where I have ended up is NOT where I wanted to be, despite good effort.

Priorities. Adult Decisions. Working on it now...

pat