Feminism, as a movement, just became responsible for a lot of future deaths by civilians at the hands of cops. Let me explain.

Here is a fact of life – men are different from women. This isn’t a good thing or a bad thing, it is just a thing. I don’t think really that feminists even contest this basic point, they just argue that the differences shouldn’t result in different treatment of women. Generally speaking, this is an idea I can get behind.

However, one of the ways that men are different from women is that men are much stronger than women. The differences are less pronounced but still real in terms of lower body strength, but in terms of upper body strength, the statistically average male is about as strong as elite, olympic-level female athletes. The very strongest non-elite-athlete female would rank in about the 30% percentile of men, in terms of upper body strength:

In addition to being stronger in terms of lifting things, men’s explosiveness and fast-twitch muscle ability tends to be even more disproportionate to that of women – for instance, the 2012 Olympic gold medalist in the women’s 100m dash would have placed 12th that year at the New Jersey State high school track and field meet for boys.

Here is a more important point in some respects than even the actual facts about male versus female body strength – even an average male perceives that he is stronger than almost women, and does not view them as a physical threat to his health and well-being, except under extraordinary circumstances.

Why am I bringing all this up?

Because feminists have decided to make an already bad situation worse, with respect to the police:

Colorado Springs residents had a lot to say after hearing that Colorado Springs police officers will no longer have to take physical fitness tests this year.

“I think it’s a mistake,” Mary Jo Piccin told CBS4’s Tom Mustin. “I think the police need to be able to chase down them criminals.”

Last Friday the Colorado Springs Police Department agreed to the demands of 12 female officers who filed a civil suit claiming the fitness tests are discriminatory. All the officers were over the age of 40.

Listen, we can argue all day long about whether the fitness tests in question are directly related to the job that police actually do. I’m not sure what the right number of pushups and situps is in terms of requirements.

What I do know – and I think most cops would agree with me on this – is that the most important thing a cop can do in terms of protecting his/her own physical safety and the physical safety of the citizenry that he/she interacts with is to prevent physical altercations from occurring. One of the most effective ways to do that is to be in shape. Sure, cops sometimes run into drunk and/or high idiots who will attack anyone or anything but they can go a long way towards reducing violent confrontations by visually being a person that no one wants to mess with.

This cop:

Gets a lot less guff from people he pulls over than these cops:

It’s one of the vital aspects of what cops refer to as “command presence” and its what allows them to control situations just by your appearance and bearing, which is preferable to controlling them with batons, tasers, and guns.

Like it or not, a police officer being a female at the outset is going to constitute a giant waving red cape in front of some criminals, who will not perceive her as a threat and will want to test whether she really will be willing to use lethal force to stop him from either escaping or overpowering her. Dropping fitness tests – for both men and women – will exacerbate the problem.

Because not only is command presence important for the suspect, it’s also important for the cop to feel like s/he is in control of the situation.

One of the things that I have harped upon regularly here is that cops are too quick to pull firearms and even more especially tasers, which they erroneously perceive as being nonlethal (or worse, harmless). The obvious reason for this tendency is that cops don’t feel competent to physically handle situations without resort to use of potentially lethal force because they aren’t as well trained as they often should be in hand-to-hand combat situations. If they also now perceive that they are physically out of shape to boot, that problem can also only be expected to get worse.

This is not just me theorizing on what might happen. This is based on what is already happening. Here are facts:

Increasing the number of women officers under these reduced strength and size standards consistently and significantly increases the number of assaults on police officers. In general, every 1 percent increase in the number of women in a police force results in a 15 to 19 percent increase in the number of assaults on the police, because women tend to be weaker than men.

Why? The more likely that a criminal’s assault on a police officer will be successful, the more likely criminals will do it. The major factor determining success is the relative strengths and sizes of the criminal and officer. The 200-pound Nichols might have decided not to try to escape had his guard been closer to his own size.

My research uncovered another interesting finding. Female officers are more likely to accidentally shoot people. Each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent. Because of their weaker physical strength, female officers have less time to decide on whether to fire their weapon. If a man makes a mistake and waits too long to shoot a suspect who is attacking him, the male officer still has a chance of using his strength to subdue the attacker. Female officers (as was the case in Atlanta) will lose control of the situation at that point.

The end result of this litigation (which is no doubt coming to a town near you) will doubtless be more phsyical confrontations involving cops, and more of those confrontations ending with gunfire and/or tasing. Which is to say, with death.

I think that both men and women should be able to be police officers. But I think both men and women who want the job should be in reasonable physical shape such that they can control situations that don’t require lethal force with methods other than their guns and their tasers. And I think that women who want the job should be able to prove that they are physically capable of doing the job (just like men do), rather than just suing to enforce the patent falsehood that the physical strength differences that exist (on average) between men and women are irrelevant to the job altogether.

How many people will have to die so that we can all go on participating in this charade? I’m not sure, but I do know that feminism just became fatal.