Police-Specific physical performance of men and women with different body heights

Abstract

Worldwide different criteria are used for dealing with body height as an access restriction for the police service, but none of the defined minimum heights is supported by scientific research. Therefore, the objectives of the present work were to analyse tall and short men and women on their police-specific physical performance and their interaction with police-related personal protective equipment (PPE) in police-specific situations. For this purpose, the entire work was divided into four sub-studies, which included both laboratory and field tests. Wearing PPE significantly ( p < 0.05) reduced vertical jump performance independently of body height. Resilience to external forces (impacts) and pulling force in different grip heights were significantly ( p < 0.05) reduced for shorter subjects. Short subjects needed significantly ( p < 0.05) more time for rescuing and recovering a person from a car than tall subjects. These results provide evidence that taller subjects perform superior in police-specific scenarios.