The Disabled Police Officers Counseling Center, Inc. (DPOCC) and the Disabled Police Officers of America, Inc.(DPOA) Joint Report on a National Police Disability Study

 

Reason for the National Study

My name is Terry Morrison and I am President of the two organizations listed above that initiated and sponsored this study. Both are non-profit 501(c) (3) charitable organizations.

Through these two organizations I have been playing a role in helping disabled police officers around this country for over 16 years.  Helping them cope with the emotional scars that can develop as a result of a disabling injury and a subsequent forced retirement from an occupation that was their life as much as it was their job. Providing scholarship assistance to them so that they could afford to attend colleges or technical training institutes to better support themselves and their families after a disability retirement. Helping them to pay their necessary living expenses such as rent, medicines, car payments or other basic items that they may have fallen behind on.  To perform these services of charitable assistance it is my responsibility to secure necessary funding. Whenever I reach out to the community, to the corporate sector or to Congress for help I am asked a key question, “How many Disabled Retired Police Officers are there in America?”

I would say to anyone asking me the question that I had been searching for that data but wasn’t able to come up with any concrete numbers. I could speculate for them that just based on the total number of law enforcement officers there are at any one time in America and considering the average number of assaults that occur on police officers on a yearly basis that the number would have to be very large.  That kind of answer is vague, undocumented and not very helpful to the disabled police officers of America who so genuinely deserve their country’s support.

In pursuit of a better answer to this question I decided to do a nation wide study. Over a three year period I wrote to over a thousand Chiefs of Police, Sheriffs, State Police Superintendents and Governors from every state in the country asking them for data they had on disability retirements. The results of that effort are detailed later in this report. In addition to asking county, municipal and state law enforcement departments, I contacted federal agencies such as the Departments of Justice, Labor Statistics, and the Social Security Administration. I was more than a little surprised to find out that none of them kept this kind of information and didn’t know who might.

It is important to acknowledge that our federal government does know exactly how many disabled military veterans we have, what their disabilities are and what benefits they receive in connection with those disabilities. The government should know that information as those individuals served their country well and in the process became disabled. In order to provide disabled military veterans with the type and level of support they need it is critical to know how many there are, what their disabilities are, where they are and who they are. To accomplish this task the government created a number of agencies to gather the requisite data, manage it, and help to ensure that the appropriate benefits and support services are provided to our disabled military veterans. This is how it should be.

It is my sincerest belief that the American nation owes no less to the men and women in the law enforcement communities who have served and protected their fellow citizens on a daily basis and who may have also become disabled in the process. By and large this group of individuals is forgotten. They are, as we have been told by many, forgotten on a local level where they served and certainly on the national level where there is little awareness as to their numbers or their plight.

Desired Outcomes from the DPOCC/DPOA National Study on Police Officers Disabilities

The primary desired outcome of this study would be to create awareness among Americans that disabled police officers exist. They not only exist but do so in large numbers across every state in America and they have special needs and concerns that are not being addressed. One step in creating this awareness would be in having the U.S. Congress showing an interest in the general issue of police disabilities. It is my hope that they could create a Commission of Inquiry that would perform the following tasks:

·        Information gathering – compile a database at a national level that will be shared with the states as to the identification of all retired disabled police officers along with their type and degree of disability. 

·        Conduct a Benefits Equity Analysis – look at the issue of whether officers are provided with fair and standard disability benefits across the country, whether they served in state, county or municipal departments?

·        Appropriate Federal Funds – Provide funding to States to allow them to have their state/county and municipal personnel/retirement system agencies participate in this fact finding study. Provide funding and expertise in establishing a state managed infrastructure to administer a fair and equitable program of benefits and services to disabled police officers everywhere.

·        Recommend Creation of a National Memorial dedicated solely to the Disabled Law Enforcement Officer.

Results of National Police Disability Study

Background: The first step we took in conducting this study was to look for any hard data that dealt with police injuries and subsequent disability retirements. There was no information or publication that we could find on those subjects. But we did come across a publication produced by the Department of Justice entitled, “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA)” for 2004. This publication provided our first “hard” statistic on injuries to police officers.

The LEOKA for 2004 contains data collected from 10,459 law enforcement agencies that employed 499,396 officers concerning assaults and injuries. Of these 59,373 officers were assaulted while performing their duties and these assaults resulted in 16,563 injuries to the officers. This information is unfortunately only a piece of the puzzle. The LEOKA report does not include data on the many other ways in which an officer can be injured nor more importantly any data on the number of disability retirements resulting even from the 16,563 reported assaults.

Conducting the study - Our next step was to go to the source of the disability retirements themselves. Over a 3 year period the DPOCC and the DPOA wrote 889 letters to Governors, State Police Superintendents, Chiefs of Police and Sheriffs from ever sector of the country. In these letters we asked the individual agencies to provide us with the total number of retirements their departments experienced over a defined 5 year period. Secondly we asked them to break out from that total number the number of disability retirements. Below is a table providing summary level data from their responses.

STATE POLICE SURVEY RESULTS

COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL DEPARTMENTS SURVEY RESULTS

Conclusion: The plight of the retired disabled police officer in many cases is not a good one. Many feel disconnected from the jobs they loved and the communities they served. Many experience emotion and financial hardship. Many, if not most, feel they have no one to turn to for hope and help. Yes, there are a number of organizations that do provide financial assistance and recognition to the families of officers who have died in the line of duty. That is admirable and certainly appropriate. But there seems to be little help for the disabled officer. Some get decent pensions, many do not. Some have good medical benefits but many do not. Some are able to re-integrate back into society but many can not.

One primary reason that is keeping these individuals from receiving the help they need is a lack of awareness by Americans in general of their plight. Little is printed in the papers or covered by TV specials about the trauma these individuals face in carrying on with their lives after a disability retirement. Many are struggling with severe emotional and financial repercussions. A second reason for keeping things from getting any better for the retired disabled police officer is that because there are no centralized reporting mechanisms in place to even tabulate how many disable law enforcement officers we have in America. There are NO NUMBERS. We just don’t realize what a truly significant number of people in this category are out there. I suspect that they are in the millions.

The DPOCC/DPOA study is a just a beginning. These two organizations don’t have the funding it would take to conduct a scientifically valid study that would support the need for action. Of the 889 letters we sent out to the 50 states from 2003-2005 we heard back from some departments in 72% of the states. However the response total was only 14% of the agencies that were requested to supply information on disability retirements. The data from the 2003 inquiries showed that of the respondents 17,370 retirements for the time period in question 1,703 or 9.8%were due to a disability. The data from the 2005 inquiries, which were from different departments than written to in the 2003 inquiries,  there were 13,889 total retirements with 2,378 due to a disability or 17%. Combining the total inquiries from Municipal departments from 2003 to 2005 gives you 31,459 total retirements with 4,081 of them being disability related for a combined percentage of 13% disability retirements.

13% of 1.5 million officers is 195,000. While this is a very considerable number of itself we feel strongly that it is more than likely way below the actual figure. That is because of the way that departments report or in many cases don’t report disability retirements

Unlike the retired disabled military veteran there is no central government agency in place to ensure disabled retired police officers all receive fair and equitable treatment. No one person or agency is responsible to see that they are provided with fair compensation for their sacrifices and those of their families. This is a difficult problem and it involves Federal and State political issues. I’m not a politician and I don’t have a detailed plan for how America needs to solve this problem. But what it is my hope is that the Federal and State governments can work together and at least look at the results of this National study. They together have at hand the resources to initiate a detailed, professional and scientifically valid study to look at this problem. The question is how do we get them to commit to that effort?