Obese police have nothing to lose.
Unlike firefighters, who undergo annual fitness tests, there is nothing to thwart the Finest’s fattest because cops are required to be checked for fitness only in the Academy, sources said yesterday.
For corpulent cops like 500-pound retiree Paul Soto, who, as The Post reported yesterday, tried and failed to increase his pension by 50 percent, there is no reason to diet or work out.
Soto did fail to convince a judge that his career ended because of an on-the-job injury and not his 78.3 body-mass index (35 is obese). But experts say the full weight of the law is on the side of cops.
Efforts to institute biannual weigh-ins in the 1970s and tougher fitness standards in the 1990s both failed.
They were derailed by a combination of collective bargaining, new laws like the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and fears that obese cops removed from duty could claim disability benefits and a full pension, a source close to the NYPD said.
Firefighters who fail a fitness test are removed from active duty and given the chance to improve, an FDNY spokesman said.
In 1994, when then-Police Commissioner William Bratton was disturbed by videos of the fitness test in which recruits could barely scale a 5-foot wall, officials noted that some 18,000 officers had been hired with virtually no testing.
Yet since then, the fitness test has gotten easier, sources said.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne argued that when Commissioner Ray Kelly returned to the position in 2002, “physical and academic requirements to enter the Police Academy were toughened.”
He said that included the reinstatement of a 1.6-mile run that must be completed in 14 minutes.
“A morbidly overweight person could not be hired,” Browne said. “Anyone significantly overweight would not be able to pass all the physical requirements, and would not be hired.”
Browne did not address the fact that the NYPD tests only recruits and not veteran officers, as the FDNY does.
Legal experts say that anti-discrimination laws like the ADA have made it harder for organizations to set weight, height or fitness standards.
“The courts really frown upon discrimination against obesity,” said labor lawyer Robert Nobile.
So employers like airlines and hospitals now employ height-to-weight ratios such as the body-mass index for flight attendants and nurses.
But like the Fire Department, the NYPD would probably have little trouble proving fitness is vital to the job, Nobile said.
Police brass are extremely concerned that unfit cops are a danger to themselves and the public, a source said.
“If you are physically fit, you might be able to defend yourself, but if you’re not, you are more likely to draw your weapon and resort to deadly force,” the source said.