Something More Weighty, Please?

It’s hard to decide who got the most carried away--veteran Los Angeles Police Department Officer Johnneen Jones, who raised a ruckus over a “No Fat Cops” poster in her captain’s office, or her Western Division supervisors who suspended her for doing so.

Technically, they didn’t suspend Jones for speaking out against the poster--or, for that matter, for being overweight, which Jones considers herself to be. They suspended her for refusing to obey a detective’s order to leave the captain’s office, where she’d been photographing the poster to show to a sergeant in another division.

The poster itself is pretty innocuous. We’re not talking about a Playboy centerfold but a cartoon depicting an overweight man with a towel around his waist, breaking a scale, and a police uniform hanging nearby. Across the top is written “Fat Grows on You.”

The National Assn. for Advancement of Fat Acceptance, which is supporting Jones in appealing her suspension, may see the poster as creating a hostile work environment for overweight people or hurting their self-esteem. But it looks like a straightforward public health promotion to us. Obesity is, after all, a public health problem.

That such a nonissue could rise to the level that it has is a sign that weight may not be a problem in the Western Division, but something is. Jones’ father, retired LAPD veteran Gerald Jones, is right when he calls this “a battle between two families.” It’s wound up before the police Board of Rights; it belongs in a workshop on how to communicate.

With an upsurge in gang violence, not to mention the unfolding Rampart scandal, surely police officers have far more weighty issues to address?