Can I Still Outrun a Cop?
From VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, June 2002
Log on to the website of the Vancouver Police Department these days and the first thing you see is a fairly in-your-face challenge: “Do you have what it takes to be one of Vancouver’s Finest?” The force is in heavy recruitment mode. It aims to put 120 more uniforms on the street in time for the opening of the Olympics in January. And so it has been advertising across Canada, talking up the merits of a job that, while under the public microscope right now, still holds appeal to a certain kind of person. It’s virtually recession-proof. Starting pay’s decent and the starting happens quickly: you can go from a schlub with some college credits to a badge-brandishing flatfoot in eight brief months.
Turns out there are a lot of hoops to jump through to become a cop, including a written exam, a polygraph and a background check in which 30 references must vouch for your good character. But the hurdle that looms most psychologically menacing to many is the physical exam called the POPAT – the Police Officer’s Physical Ability Test.
Anyone can take the POPAT. It used to be offered every few weeks and cost $25, but recently the VPD has been running the test every Wednesday night to civilian drop-ins, for free. This has had the desired effect of weekly attracting the maximum of 20 men and women, from serious would-be recruits to tire-kickers who are there to satisfy a personal curiosity many indulge in but few get a chance to test: Can I outrun a cop?
It isn’t a trivial question. It shapes the confidence you have in the people assigned to protect you, and even the way you feel about yourself. Police are forbidden by law to shoot at someone who’s running from them unless they have good reason to suspect that person has committed a major crime or poses a serious threat to society. (And in truth, shooting is so far down the list of available options that it doesn’t even enter most police officers’ minds, even as they’re in a full-T.J. Hooker sprint.) So in a pinch, if you can outrun a cop, you’re in the clear, with your minor transgression your own secret forever. On the other hand, knowing just how fit the average beat cop actually is may make you think twice. Either way, it’s good information to have.
In jogging shoes and swim trunks that double as shorts, I showed up at the police station on Cordova Street one recent Wednesday. Clayton Cross, the VPD’s fitness co-ordinator, crossed my name off on his clipboard. He had extremely good posture and a vaguely Lou Gossett Jr.-ish air about him, even as he smiled. He wore a little armband that said “King of Pain.” (On official test day, potential recruits would already be a bit knackered at this point, having run a mile and a half as fast as they could on the seawall an hour ago. You have to do it in under twelve minutes or your day is finished even before you get here.)
Cross led everyone into the police gym. We lined up along a wall, under a banner that read: “The more you sweat in here, the less you sweat our there.”
The POPAT is basically an obstacle course, with both strength and endurance components. It’s designed to simulate the sorts of things a police officer might encounter on the street. That was the brainwave of POPAT creator Doug Farenholtz, a retired Vancouver RCMP constable who was hired in the mid-1980s by the Justice Institute to co-ordinate the physical fitness of the officers. Farenholtz revamped the old standard military fitness test to make it more job-specific (and fairer to women: the old system rewarded recruits by the number of situps and pushups and pull-ups they could grind out.) The POPAT runs recruits through a figure-eight-shaped circuit. You juke around some cones, jump a six-foot mat that simulates a ditch, beetle up and down stairs, vault over a succession of hurdles that simulate garbage cans a perp might throw in your path as he flees. (“Clayton likes to use that example but it’s a bit Hollywood,” recruiting director Heidi Shoenberger told me later, “More likely you’re going to be jumping over a concrete barrier.”) Six times you repeat the circuit, and then it’s directly into the “push-pull machine,” which simulates a fight, and then to a burpee/high-jump station, which simulates leaping over a wall after being knocked to the ground. (After the test tonight, everyone will pitch in to take apart the rubber floor mats and stack them for storage – which, I guess, simulates paperwork.)
“I won’t lie to you,” Cross said, as he explained the jumping-over-the-wall part. “You’re not going to feel very good at this point. If you do need to puke, please use the washrooms down the hall rather than here on the gym floor.”
From his research, Farenholtz determined that police foot-chases tend to average a little over four minutes—so he calibrated the course accordingly. “Four minutes 14 seconds is a pass,” Cross explained. “Four minutes 15 seconds is a fail.” Farenholtz, who tested the POPAT on inmates at a medium-security prison in BC, concluded that four minutes of flat-out effort was indeed strenuous enough to separate the genuinely fit from folks relying on attitude and maybe a couple of cups of coffee.
“The bad guys can run for two minutes full-out – cause it’s fight or flight, right?” says Schoenberger, a 16-year-veteran of the force, and of many a foot chase. “But they have zero fitness so after that they crash and burn. If you can just keep them in sight you’re okay.”
Cross punched a stopwatch and the first of the guinea pigs entered the course. A few off-duty VPD cops poked their heads out of the weight room to watch, with grins on their faces. There was a tremendous amount of camaraderous cheering among the newbies as each left the starting block. Four or five minutes later, doubled over and panting, many began coughing. Coughs became part of the soundtrack of the evening. (“We call it POPAT lung,” Cross said later. “Everybody gets it. You’ll have it tonight, and you’ll probably have it tomorrow.”)
A guy built like a furnace charged through the first few circuits and then began to flag. By the last station as he threw himself over the wall he had no strength left to brace himself for landing. He just slammed down, over and over. It sounded like an octopus being tenderized on a dock.
Full disclosure: I am a little bit too old for this. I am at the age where you factor into the daily energy budget the possibility that you might drop something and have to pick it up. I have been in tussles where the four-year-old has locked up my arms while the one-year-old rifles my pants pockets. Realistically, I’m not a very good candidate for the force. “We did hire a 42-year-old last year, but, you know, there’s a higher chance of injury,” Schoenberger would say, later.
Cross nodded me into the course.
It’s surprising how tiring it actually is, in middle age, to jump over things. Cross’s pre-game warnings were mostly theatrics, I think, but he was right in the generalities: this is way harder than it looks. Something about the combination of aerobics and anaerobics not only depletes your muscles, it addles your brain. The superdogs can keep straight what they’re supposed to be doing on these race-courses, but I couldn’t. Was that five or six circuits? Was it a pushup on this side of the wall or a situp? Eleven, twelve, jesusgod. “Again,” Cross said, as I messed up and had to repeat. “Now stand up, man. Stand up!”
He peered at his watch, and then at me. I recognized that look. I last saw it 30 years ago. Mr. Belmont, my high-school gym teacher, was overseeing the Participation fitness test that every schoolkid had to take when the government learned we were all less fit than a 60-year-old Swede. It was my third and last chance at the flexed-arm hang. You had to get 72 seconds. I’d very quickly started shaking like an old Maytag, and as I melted down from the bar, done, I caught Belmont’s complicated expression. He was weighing the spirit-crushing truth against the white lie that would release a young man into the world with confidence out of proportion to his actual abilities. The kind of confidence we need to keep industry humming, the trains running, the laws enforced. “Seventy-three,” Belmont had said.
“And so?”
Clayton Cross smiled.
“Four-ten,” he said.
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