Peter Pringle's America: New York's finest fatties

UNTIL recently anyone could be a New York cop, even really fat people. Then the new Police Commissioner, William Bratton, came down from Boston with his stoical northerness and discovered there were cops in the ranks of New York's 'finest' who were so physically impaired by their obesity that their fat fingers could not pull the triggers of their service revolvers. Nor could they hoist their lard-bellies in blue over a five-foot wall in pursuit of an imaginary criminal.

Commissioner Bratton ordered a complete review of the almost non-existent physical requirements for cops. He discovered that for 15 years the New York Police Department has been accepting recruits who failed to meet even minimum requirements of physical fitness. After viewing a videotape of recruits desperately trying to hurl themselves over the exercise wall, he ordered them to the hospital for fat tests.

Now, before filling in the application for Bratton's police department you have to complete 38 sit-ups in one minute (32 for women), and run one and a half miles in 12.51 minutes (one and a quarter miles in 15.2 minutes for women). This is hardly a force of Rambos, even so. Impaired by age and too much fast food, or whatever, I passed a self- supervised version with relative ease.

But bringing back the physical tests puts the police department in a position where it expects to be sued by those who do not pass. Increasingly, obese people are no longer putting up with being turned down for jobs - or anything - because they are overweight.

Rental car companies in the United States are facing discrimination suits for turning away fat people on the basis that obese drivers are so overweight the springs of the cars would not survive. In Tennessee, a cinema is about to settle out of court a claim by a woman who weighs 25st 10lb. She went to the cinema to see Jurassic Park and claims she was yelled at and humiliated by the cinema manager when she tried to place a folding chair for herself in the wheelchair section of the theatre.

Until recently fat people had an even harder time. In the Sixties, parking meter attendants and air stewardesses were dismissed for being overweight; and as the cult of slimness took hold in the Seventies and Eighties, fat people were regularly ridiculed as clowns, slobs and couch potatoes. The 30 million overweight Americans - or one in 10 of the population - started using new federal laws to fight discrimination.

In 1990, Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, a federal law that forbids discrimination in public accommodations against people because of their physical or mental disabilities. Certain ailments, such as cancer, heart disease, being HIV positive, drug addiction and alcoholism, are clearly defined, but the law is silent on obesity, ugliness and shortness. Generally, those people have to fend for themselves.

In California, fat people formed their own organisation, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which has 4,000 members. The group members are far from shy about their problem. They are proud to be called fat and even distinguish between really fat, moderately fat and 'non-fat' heavies.

In a recent survey, the group found that 50 per cent of fat people have problems getting jobs, are usually not promoted as easily as non-fat people, or are underemployed when they do find a job. The group's research has noted that fat women suffer more than fat men.

Independent research concurs. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine last year found that fat women have a 20 per cent lower chance of getting married, that their household incomes are lower and they are likely to be less educated. Some fat people get so upset by the discrimination against them that they are driven to 'fat activism'. They write 'not applicable' on application forms that ask for their weight.

Cases involving fat people are still only a tiny proportion (about 2 per cent) of the total 30,000 brought each year by people with all types of handicaps, but the number is growing. So far, the states have been slow to react to the federal law, and only Michigan has a local edict that specifically includes obesity in a list of handicaps.

Fat people claim that at least 90 per cent of jobs should not require any physical standards, but obviously the ones that should include policemen, firemen and ambulance workers - or any others who encounter emergency, life- threatening situations.

Of all the disabled in this country, I have to say the fat-impaired are the hardest to feel sorry for, especially after watching Americans eat. Some people may be overweight as a result of an uncontrollable medical problem and deserve special treatment; the others simply eat too much.

Here in the land of plenty, people who are fat from overeating should be ensured of a job by law, but once in the job should be required to lose weight. So let oversized cops stay on the force, but make a few hours in the gym each week a compulsory activity.