Police Stress : Malingerers Dark Side of the Force

A plainclothes police sergeant recently has begun attending meetings of the Los Angeles Board of Pension Commissioners, trudging into the stuffy conference room in City Hall South with a bulging blue binder under his arm.

Stenciled sardonically on the binder’s cover is the title: “The Dark Side of the Force.”

This is no “Star Wars” movie script. It is a compendium of questionable pension claims filed by officers under investigation by a Los Angeles Police Department task force that was set up in May.

“We felt we owed it to the taxpayers,” said Police Cmdr. Matthew Hunt, who recommended formation of the task force after he conducted a study of what he called a “disturbing” upward trend in stress disability pensions.

Pension department statistics show that 175 officers won early retirement pensions for job stress disorders during the last five years--almost half of all the disability pensions granted. Last year alone, 48 officers won them, the department reported.

Now, Chief Daryl F. Gates hopes that the department’s new task force will discourage malingerers. He noted that in its first nine months, the unit scrutinized 57 disability claims, resulting in nine officers losing their pension bids for an estimated savings of $7 million to the city.

But some believe that more drastic action is needed: restructuring the pension system to eliminate the potential for profiteering.

‘Con the System’

Lucrative pension benefits are “guaranteed to make people either con the system or exaggerate the problems they have,” said Katherine Ellison, a New Jersey psychology professor and consultant to police departments across the country.

In Los Angeles, where 80% of the stress disability claims were approved last year, officers hired before July, 1980, are entitled to between 50% and 90% of their salaries, plus cost-of-living increases. They also are free to get other jobs without having their pension checks reduced; in other cities, their benefits would be cut.

Assuming that a pensioner lives to the age of 72, he will receive an average $823,000 in current dollars, up to $2.7 million if anticipated cost-of-living increases are included. Under the Internal Revenue Code, these job disability benefits are tax-free.

Pension benefits have been reduced somewhat by two amendments to the City Charter during the last four years, but some city officials argue that the changes do not go far enough.

A few years ago, voters amended the charter to place a 3% cap on cost-of-living increases for a pensioner’s years of service after July, 1982. City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie pointed out that cost-of-living adjustments had skyrocketed during the 1970s--one year jumping 17%.

“It literally was just bankrupting the city,” Comrie recalled.

The cap has saved the city about $150 million since 1982, but the police and firefighters’ unions have sued to lift the cap and get the money back.

Under another charter change, officers hired since 1980 may get pensions amounting to 30% of their top salaries. Before the change, they were guaranteed at least 50%.

Pension officials say it will take years for the city to feel these cost-saving measures.

Concerned that the changes do not go far enough, Comrie recommended in 1983 that the pension board be allowed to award benefits as low as 10% of an officer’s salary if the officer is capable of working elsewhere.

“This change, which will require a charter amendment, will provide the Board of Pension Commissioners with full discretion,” Comrie wrote in his report.

Supporting this change, Gary Mattingly, pension department general manager, said it would take the profit out of the pension process.

“The major problem won’t be solved until the financial incentive is removed,” he said.

As the system exists, Mattingly said, an officer would have to spend 30 years on the force to retire on the same money that an officer with only one day on the job could get through a tax-free disability pension.

No Stand Taken

The pension commissioners, however, did not take a stand on Comrie’s report.

Even today, they are divided on the politically sensitive issue.

Pension board President David Bow Woo favors Comrie’s plan. Commissioner Sam Diannitto from the Fire Department conceded that the move would “eliminate bogus stress claims” but likened the action to “shooting a dog to kill its fleas.” And Commissioner Bert Cohen said the issue is simply “too political” for the board.

Gates acknowledged that some pension applicants, helped by their attorneys and doctors, have found a way to beat the pension system. The way to stop this, he said, is not to reduce benefits, as some have suggested, but to “get at the cheats, the thieves, and prosecute the hell out of them.

“I don’t want the thieves in this world to take away from the good people that are deserving,” Gates said. “I don’t think that’s right. That’s often what’s wrong with our system today. Rather than going out to deal with the culprits, we want everyone to pay.”

The chief said he favors a law that would prevent officers convicted of misconduct at police trial boards from winning stress pensions.

Meanwhile, Comrie’s report has become mired in City Council committees.

Originally approved by the Police, Fire and Public Safety Committee, the report was forwarded to the council, which sent it to the Charter and Elections Committee. That committee, in turn, set up another committee--the Committee for the Prevention of Psychological Disabilities--which is still studying the matter.

“There wasn’t much interest in the council,” Comrie said.

“The unions were very opposed to it. I think they worked very hard to prevent anything like that from going on the ballot.”

Councilman Ernani Bernardi, an outspoken critic of the police pension benefits, said the report was shuffled off to a committee because the council is not interested in dealing with tough problems.

Bernardi said the pension system is “much more generous than it has to be under state law.”

Aggressive leadership by the mayor and council, Bernardi said, is needed to counter the politically influential police and fire unions, which have resisted pension changes.

Councilman Marvin Braude, a member of the committee now studying the report, said a big problem with stress disability cases is that “the state of the art does not allow us to draw a fine line between the malingerer and the person who is really suffering from psychological stress.”

He said he favors the Comrie proposal to award benefits as low as 10% of an officer’s salary because the half-pay minimum is “not reasonable or rational” in every case.

Since the late 1970s, top city administrators have studied ways to curb runaway pension costs.

In 1978, Mayor Tom Bradley appointed an advisory committee that recommended, for example, that officers incapable of performing “the full rigorous duties of a safety employee” should be placed in civilian jobs in other areas of the city instead of being given disability pensions.

“The committee feels that retraining partially disabled sworn employees in city service rather than thrusting them into society at large with a disability pension poses several benefits for the city and the employee,” the mayor’s advisory report stated.

Although the city cannot force a sworn officer to transfer to a civilian job in the city, voluntary transfers are permissible under the City Charter. But the pension department’s Mattingly said transfers are virtually non-existent, mainly because police officers find that disability pensions offer more money than other city jobs.

Ken Sakiyama of the Personnel Department said that he has placed injured municipal maintenance workers, warehousemen and sanitation collectors in other city jobs. But, he said, “I’ve never had a police officer come to me for possible (relocation) assistance.”

Union Opposition

Ron Clem, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said he opposes the idea of putting police officers to work in other city departments.

“I don’t like it,” Clem said. “These guys (officers) did not go through the Police Academy to end up working for the DWP (Department of Water & Power).”

Clem said he does not even like the idea of assigning disabled officers to light-duty jobs within the Police Department, such as counting bail money, handing out equipment or writing up reports.

“It’s demeaning,” he said.

Nevertheless, various police departments are looking closely at light-duty jobs within their ranks and assigning injured officers to work there as a way of stopping their manpower drain.

Anaheim, for example, has done this. Risk Manager Tom Vance said that about 20 officers a year used to file disability claims, with about one-quarter arising from stress disorders. But since greater use has been made of light-duty posts, disability claims have dropped 80%, down to four last year.

Throughout the state, publicly supported pension systems are straining to control escalating law enforcement pension costs, increasingly fueled by stress-related disability claims.

Hearing Officers Assigned

In San Francisco, where fiscal experts warned that runaway disability pension costs were driving the city toward bankruptcy, the pension board was stripped of its authority to give benefits, and professional hearing officers were assigned the task.

In addition, for all newly hired officers, the city enacted an “income offset rule,” which reduces disability benefits for those who retire and then get other jobs.

San Jose, which has had such a rule for some time, does not have a problem with rising stress disability claims, city officials said. They said 16 stress pensions have been granted in the 900-member police force during the last 11 years.

Nowhere, perhaps, have changes been as drastic as in San Diego.

Voters there abolished disability pensions for officers hired after Sept. 3, 1982. Instead of police pensions, disabled officers receive less generous workers’ compensation benefits and city disability benefits.

San Diego retirement Administrator Robert Logan said that the problem of rising disability costs coincided with a surge in stress pension applications filed by police officers in the wake of the 1978 PSA jet crash that killed 144 people.

Some of the San Diego police officers who responded to the ghastly scene later filed for stress pensions, claiming that they had recurring nightmares about the crash and suffered other effects. One said he could no longer eat red meat.

“We had quite a problem as a result of the PSA crash,” Logan said. “There might have been 14 or 15 (stress claims) primarily as a result of that. . . . From 1973 to the time of the PSA crash, I . . . think we had two or three.”

Although few have implemented changes as drastic as San Diego, the County Supervisors Assn. of California has formed a task force that has concluded that there is a need for “tightening up the criteria for awarding questionable injuries, particularly stress cases.”

An intensive study of the state Public Employees Retirement System has recommended overhaul of the $24-billion system governing pensions for 29,000 law enforcement personnel, including the California Highway Patrol, state correctional officers, state police and officers in small police departments throughout the state.

Bruce Crain of the state Personnel Administration, who headed the study, said that the report was sent to the state Legislature but that no action has been taken because most of the recommendations must first be taken up with unions at the bargaining table.

Among the recommendations was enactment of an “income offset rule”--similar to ones in other states and in San Jose--that would reduce pension benefits to a disabled officer who gets another job.

In a move to tighten up the system, officials in Sacramento recently dispatched a memorandum to the 1,100 agencies under their jurisdiction to periodically re-examine disabled officers and recall those who can work.

The memo was written last summer after the state auditor general examined a sample of pensioners and found that benefits were being paid to some who were no longer disabled.

In a report, auditor general Thomas Hayes accused the state retirement system of “not adequately fulfilling its legal responsibility for reviewing the continuing qualifications of its members to receive disability benefits.” He reported that only two of the 5,800 disabled public safety officers on the pension rolls have been recalled to work since 1980.

Unlike many cities, Pasadena has an aggressive program to monitor pensioners and recall them to work if they have recovered, according to Assistant City Atty. Gary Gillig.

Pasadena recently won a key victory in the state Supreme Court that affirmed the city’s right to call officers back to work.

The 1983 court ruling was made in the case of former Pasadena motorcycle Officer Donald H. Winslow, who had won a disability pension after developing a lung disease and then went to work for the city of Los Angeles coordinating movie location shootings. He served the city as a technical adviser, carried a gun while supervising security personnel, occasionally acted in films and routinely rode his motorcycle to work.

Pasadena was finally able to terminate his pension and order him back to work in a newly created light-duty desk job, but only after Winslow took his fight to the state’s highest court and lost.

‘So Much Resistance’

In Los Angeles, the City Charter states that an officer’s pension “shall cease” and that he must be recalled to duty when he is no longer disabled. But although the pension board has explicit power to check up on pensioners, it does so only sporadically. Pensioners are seldom returned to work.

“It happens rarely,” said Assistant City Atty. Siegfried Hillmer, the board’s veteran legal adviser. “There is so much resistance on the part of the pensioner.”

Hillmer added that he could not recall a single officer retired on a stress disability pension who recovered and was called back to work.

Complicating any recall effort in Los Angeles is a practice that the board used to follow of promising pensioners that they would never be subject to further medical reviews on the theory that they would never recover from their injuries.

To the board’s dismay, some did recover and, in those cases, commissioners found themselves powerless to act.

For example, state’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled last November that the pension board could not recall former motorcycle Officer James P. Woodman, 44, because commissioners had given him a pension and a written promise never to review his case.

Woodman was pensioned off in 1976 with knee and shoulder injuries and said he was going to Colorado to raise pigs. When that venture soured, Woodman became a policeman in 1981 in the tiny Rocky Mountain resort of Breckinridge.

The court’s ruling forced the board to keep Woodman on the pension rolls and even boost his monthly benefits to $1,638--prompting an angry outburst from several commissioners.

‘The Same . . . Job’

“It really incenses me,” said Commissioner Bert Cohen, “that somebody is doing the same God-blessed job (in Colorado) that he could do across the street at Parker Center (police headquarters).”

Because it is so difficult to get officers back to work once they have been pensioned off, the Police Department is focusing on ways to reduce stress as a cause of disability claims.

The department has proposed spending $3.3 million on a comprehensive “wellness” program designed to help officers cope with job tension.

Under the proposal, forwarded in July by the Police Commission to the City Council, most of the funds would be spent rewarding physically fit officers with extra days off.

About $25,000 would be earmarked to move the department psychologist to new quarters outside Parker Center.

Psychologist Martin Reiser said his office in police headquarters is “a real problem” because officers fear that they will be seen. He has been trying to move for more than a decade, he told the pension board recently.

Reiser said he does not know if the officers he treats are the same ones who ultimately apply for stress pensions. He added, “My view of people (he sees) here is that the majority of them seem to have real stress problems and are not malingering.

“That’s not to say I couldn’t be fooled,” Reiser continued, “but I think it would take a Laurence Olivier type-person with several Academy Awards.”

Reiser’s office has instituted a program to train all 750 field sergeants how to recognize “the early warning signs” of psychological problems. He said a small number of old-school supervisors “still don’t believe there’s such a thing as stress.”

At the pension hearings, officers frequently point to harassment by their superiors as a prime cause of their stress. They say light-duty assignments sometimes amount to “freeway therapy” in which they are assigned to desk jobs at stations as far away from their homes as possible.

Attorney Bruce Wolfe of Van Nuys, who has handled police pension cases for two decades, said, “I personally believe they structure some light-duty assignments to make the guy resign.”

For example, Officer Marcus Young, 35, who has a stress pension application pending, told the board that after he injured his knees, he was assigned to a light-duty job at a police warehouse, where his task was to match boxes of locks with their proper keys.

After he finished, Young said, somebody deliberately removed the keys from the locks and mixed them up. He said he was directed “to refit the locks and keys all over again!”

Deputy Chief David Dotson, head of personnel, said he had no knowledge of Young’s case, but he acknowledged, “There are some insensitive managers who screw people around.”

Los Angeles pension attorney Edward Faunce said the department routinely harasses officers over legitimate physical injuries.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the department has taken any number of orthopedic injury cases and, by the way they treat their own people, have turned them into full-blown psychiatric stress cases,” Faunce said.

Pension attorneys contend that overzealous investigators assigned to the Police Department’s pilot task force--the Claims Validation Unit--have created stress by conducting surveillance and harassing genuinely disabled officers.

Dotson, who oversees the task force, said pension applicants have not been harassed intentionally, but he acknowledged that the unit’s sergeants “may bring a certain zeal to their work” because they have a personal stake in the pension system they are protecting.

The investigators have sometimes staked out pension applicants, watching where they go, what they do, who they meet and even what they eat.

‘A Few Untruths’

They followed Valley Traffic Division Officer Larry Rumple, 38, to a bowling alley and Italian restaurant last year to shoot down his claim that hypertension had inhibited his physical activities and caused depression as well as a loss of appetite.

At the bowling alley, Sgt. John Lane told the pension board, he found Rumple--who has been described as a “picture-perfect athlete”--listed on the honor roll of high scorers with a 191 average.

At the restaurant, Lane told the pension board, he watched Rumple order and eat a large pizza.

“I noticed the large pizza plate was totally empty . . . and he was ordering coffee, which does not seem to be consistent with someone concerned with hypertension,” Lane testified.

“The guy testified . . . that I had a healthy appetite. You have to eat,” Rumple later told The Times.

He was denied a stress pension and sent back to a light-duty job that he described as “a piece of cake.”

Attorney Mary Ann Healy said the Police Department should spend less time trying to debunk applicants’ claims and more time providing better psychological support to officers, improving personnel practices and screening police applicants more carefully.

Healy is representing a former city medical director who claims that the city lowered hiring standards for police officers in its rush to get more officers on the streets in the early 1980s.

In his lawsuit, Dr. John Ong Jr. contends that he was unjustly fired in 1981 for speaking out against hiring police recruits who failed their pre-entrance physicals or psychological exams.

‘Obvious Inability’

Psychologist Stuart Shaffer, who worked for Ong and quit in 1982, said, “It got to the point where we did not disqualify people unless there was an obvious inability to cope with stress, like they started to cry or swear or be obviously aggressive during the interview.”

But Deputy City Atty. Byron Boeckman denied any improprieties, saying, “No one (in the city) was in the business of trying to hire unqualified individuals.”

Police officials said hiring standards have been broadened, but not lowered, to comply with federal hiring directives.

To help guide hiring in the future, they said, the department has instituted a program to evaluate officers and measure their personality changes in an effort to figure out what kind of person is least susceptible to stress.

The City’s Proposals

1978. Mayor Tom Bradley appoints advisory committee that recommends various ways to curb rising disability pension costs. One suggestion is that officers incapable of performing “the full rigorous duties of a safety employee” should be placed in civilian jobs in other areas of the city, instead of receiving disability pensions. But few such transfers have occurred.

1980. Voters pass Proposition G amending the Los Angeles City Charter to provide new pension benefits for police officers hired after Dec. 8, 1980. Changes included lowering minimum pension awards from 50% to 30% of salary for newly hired officers who become disabled. A 3% cap was placed on cost-of-living increases. The standard of proof for winning disability pensions was strengthened to require that these officers show “clear and convincing evidence that the discharge of . . . duty is the predominant cause of the incapacity.”

1982. Voters pass Proposition H amending the charter to place a 3% cap on cost-of-living increases for all pensioners’ years of service after July 2, 1982. This move has saved the city $150 million in pension costs so far, but the Police Protective League has sued to lift the cap and get the money back. The charter amendment also allowed police and fire pension members to get refunds of their contributions to the pension system if they quit before becoming eligible for retirement.

1983. City administrative officer issues report studying dramatically increasing psychological disability pensions. Recommendations include giving the Board of Pension Commissioners greater discretion in awarding disability benefits, based upon the future employment capacity of the disabled employee. The key change would be lowering the minimum pension award to 10% of an officer’s salary, but the report has become bogged down in City Council committees.

1984. Los Angeles Police Department creates a six-man Claims Validation Unit to scrutinize questionable disbility pension claims. The unit has looked into 57 claims, resulting in nine officers losing their pension bids, at an estimated savings of $7 million to the city.