Boston city council member and mayoral candidate Michael Flaherty called the Police Department to criticize the way it handled fitness tests for recruits several weeks after his wife failed to pass the exam. Flaherty reportedly asked that his wife be given another chance to pass the test, but that didn’t occur, says the Boston Globe.
Flaherty said, “The phone call was not to advance or influence my wife’s position.” Instead, he said he called to suggest that the city could save money by administering the fitness test at the beginning of the recruiting process – before background checks, medical tests, and psychological evaluations – and not at the end, as is currently done. Recruits are given two chances to pass the fitness test. If they fail both times, they are eliminated from that pool. The test includes an obstacle course and a dummy pull in which applicants must pull a heavy dummy a certain distance in a set time, among other things.