Why They’re Not Fuming Over Smoking Ban

I don’t smoke and never have, unless you count one crazy moonlit night in Mazatlan in 1982 when I thought it would be cool to smoke an entire pack in a disco.

The point being, not smoking is just fine with me. Workplace smoking bans are A-OK. But I’m trying to imagine how I’d take it if my boss told me that, at the risk of losing my job, I was forbidden to smoke anywhere--not at home, not in my car, not in an open field, not even in the smoking room of a cigar club.

I’d probably throw one of my tantrums.

And if a cupcake like me would bridle at that infringement on my private time, just imagine how cops would react. Nobody pushes those people around.

Fullerton is one of a small number of Orange County cities that prohibits new hires in its police and fire departments from smoking. A prospective hire must attest that he or she hasn’t smoked for at least a year. After being hired, the new employee is prohibited from smoking, period. If the city discovers otherwise, it can discipline the employee, including firing.

You think cops will put up with that?

Guess what? They don’t care. Neither did the firefighters. The clause was the city’s idea, but police Sgt. David Miller, the union president, said accepting it was a “no-brainer.”

“When I joined the department 17 years ago, I smoked,” Miller says. “Geez, quite a few of the officers and employees smoked. But it’s a different era, a different time. The public and ourselves [in the department] have become more aware of the dangers regarding smoking.”

Those dangers led the city to ask for the nonsmoking clause. The impetus, personnel director Mark Flannery says, is a state law that “presumes” various ailments incurred by police and firefighters, including lung cancer and pneumonia, are job-related and, therefore, subject to disability claims against the city. That legal presumption can be challenged, Flannery notes, but it’s an “uphill scenario” for the city.

So, the city proposed the smoking ban in the hope of reducing the number of such ailments. “We’re just trying to save money for the taxpayers,” Flannery says.

Isn’t it asking too much, I ask Flannery, for the city to control what individuals do on their own time, especially considering that smoking isn’t illegal?

“No, I don’t think it’s asking too much,” Flannery says. “It seems like the wise thing to do on behalf of the taxpayers.”

Stephen Silver, an attorney who represented the unions at the bargaining table, said a smattering of officers thought they were giving up “their constitutional right to smoke. I said, ‘Show me in the Constitution where it says you have a right to smoke.’ ”

A reformed smoker who has “very little sympathy for smokers’ rights,” Silver says the clause was part of the give-and-take of bargaining and wouldn’t have been acceptable if the city hadn’t conceded other points. Plus, he says, the new policy isn’t retroactive to employees hired before April 1997.

The Fullerton City Council signed off, 5-0, on the smoking ban. Councilman Chris Norby concedes that residents who have complained about its sweeping nature have a point. “I think it’s a legitimate concern, I really do,” he says. “You have a slippery slope on anything like this. There are a lot of things people do that are not healthy--alcohol, too much salt, skiing, skydiving--so you don’t want to descend down that slope . . . It’s a gray area. I voted for it, but I can understand the concerns.”

I asked Sgt. Miller why the union didn’t think it was giving away an important personal right. “I’ll tell you what it is,” he says. “Over the years, it has become physically more demanding to be a police officer. There’s a lot more violence and resistance on the street. More people are willing to engage officers in physical confrontations. I think it got to the point where the rank-and-file officers knew they had to be physically fit to take on these aggressors. Nowadays, the breed of officers are much healthier that when I came to the department.”

Because not smoking translates to better health, Miller says, officers didn’t see the ban as surrendering a personal right.

If the Fullerton cops don’t care, maybe I shouldn’t, either.

But there’s something unsettling about a city proscribing employees from engaging in legal behavior on their own time, even if the motivation is benign and the ultimate goal is laudable.

Fullerton businessman Jim Foreman is one of the residents critical of the clause. Besides possibly reducing the pool of applicants to the city’s police and fire departments, the clause violates people’s rights, he says.

In-house support for the clause, he says, reminds him of racial policies of a bygone era where people “closed ranks” and excluded blacks.

What I learned from all this is: I don’t know cops very well. Miller says there are fewer than 10 smokers in Fullerton’s combined police and fire work forces.

That shocked me, but not a veteran cop in another Orange County department. “As a smoker over 50,” he says, “the world has changed considerably for me.”

He couldn’t even build outrage over Fullerton’s policy. “It’s kind of a lost cause,” he sighs. “Smokers are the only people left you can pick on legally in the ‘90s. You’ve always got some group you can stone. I guess smokers are the one for the ‘90s.

“When I came on 25 years ago, more than half the cops smoked. We’d be drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and eating doughnuts in the roll-call room. Now, in my section, out of about 90 people, three smoke.”

And the Fullerton policy: “It seems like a needless surrender of rights,” he says. “But that’s what democracy is all about--stupid people making decisions for each other.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons at (714) 966-7821, or at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or at dana.parsons@latimes.com