Torn Between Serving and Protecting : Officer Grapples With Questions of Keeping HIV Secret, Need to Tell Co-Workers

As his HIV gradually asserts itself, so does a sense of inevitability. There will come a time, this Los Angeles policeman knows, when he develops AIDS. And there will come a time when he cannot hide that fact.

HIV has been his secret, at first so fiercely guarded that he barely acknowledged it to himself.

He was at work, surrounded by fellow officers, when a doctor’s voice on the telephone informed him he had the AIDS virus.

“All I could think of was, pull it together,” he recalls. “You can’t let these people know. . . . If they find out, you’re history. This department doesn’t like gays let alone somebody like this.”

That was in the 1980s. Police officers in Los Angeles and departments up and down the state have since died of AIDS complications. There are enough HIV-positive officers on New York City’s huge force to start an off-hours support group. There are laws forbidding discrimination against people with the disease.

Yet the issue of HIV-infected officers remains largely underground, more whispered about than openly acknowledged.

A sensitive subject in any workplace, AIDS is doubly so in police circles. Not only does the nature of the work raise the possibility of on-the-job transmission of HIV, but the disease is identified with the twin law enforcement taboos of male homosexuality and drug use.

The Los Angeles officer, who is gay, continues to worry that if word gets around that he has the human immunodeficiency virus, his patrol job will be jeopardized and other officers will refuse to get in a squad car with him.

In the years since his condition was diagnosed, he has thought of revelation as a form of self-destruction, secrecy as a matter of self-preservation.

So although he has lately begun to confide in a few carefully chosen colleagues, he has not informed his patrol partners that he has a lethal, blood-borne disease.

It is a decision, he acknowledges, that raises difficult ethical questions--ones he does not always know how to answer.

“Police officers are supposed to protect people, not hurt people. It’s a real moral issue,” he mused at one point in a long interview. “I sometimes avoid the moral issue by just trying not to think about it.”

Experts say the risk of work-related HIV transmission is extremely low for police. Although there have been instances in which officers won disability claims that they were infected on the job, federal health officials say there are no confirmed cases of occupational transmission in law enforcement.

Moreover, police, like all emergency workers, are supposed to practice “universal precautions.” That is, they are to assume anyone could be infected with the AIDS virus and automatically don protective gear whenever they encounter blood, whether it be a suspect’s or a partner’s.

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Still, the patrolman knows that if he is shot, his partner’s first reaction will probably be to help, not put on rubber gloves.

He attempts to reconcile these conflicts of loyalty and self-interest, official policy and day-to-day reality, with a plan: “If I’m down, I’m hurt and I can utter the words and I see that partner coming towards me, I’m going to tell ‘em.”

In choosing silence over disclosure, the patrolman is supported by federal and local law, as well as Los Angeles Police Department regulations, which treat HIV and AIDS as confidential matters. As long as someone is capable of doing his or her job, the officer may retain the position, whether it’s a field or desk assignment.

Similarly, Cliff Ruff, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, expressed no qualms about HIV-positive officers working patrol, so long as they are physically able. As for telling their partners, Ruff believes they should if injured. Otherwise, he said, HIV is “that person’s private business.”

Some officers he represents have another opinion.

“I think it would be reasonable for me to know that--in the event that one of the two of us is [injured],” said Det. Paul Marks.

Det. Roger Ramirez, who works in a narcotics unit in the San Fernando Valley, agreed: “Blood splattering is what everybody thinks about. . . . You ought to tell the partner.”

Ramirez and another officer nonetheless said they could understand why a partner would keep HIV a secret.

“I don’t see how I could hold it against him. I know how it is--you mention that and you’re treated like an outcast,” said the second officer, who declined to give his name. “It’s hard for someone who doesn’t have it to tell them what they should do.”

For years, the patrolman ignored his diagnosis. He had no symptoms and told himself the test results were wrong. He guiltily remembers how he stayed away when an officer he knew died of AIDS complications. It wasn’t until a couple of other officers on the force developed the disease that his thick wall of denial began to crumble.

This time, he helped. After their deaths, he started paying attention to his health.

But his sense of isolation lingers, along with resentment that he cannot engage in the casual, affirmative exchanges that someone with cancer might. He does not tell his sergeants that his medication is giving him headaches or that he has to rush home to take the pills he dare not bring to work.

On the other side of the country, Jack Lambe has tried to do something about that isolation. More than a year ago, Lambe, a retired New York City police officer with AIDS, started a support group for HIV-positive police on that force.

“Officers are very apprehensive to speak to anyone who may be related to the job,” said Lambe, who did not reveal his condition until he applied for retirement. Only one or two of the group’s approximately 25 members--about half of whom are heterosexual, including several women--are open about their diagnosis to any degree.

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Officers call him anonymously, terrified they will lose their jobs. “Most cases have absolutely no information as to what to do and where to find a doctor,” he said.

Lambe left the force in 1994, nine years after he learned he had the AIDS virus. He says he worried constantly about the possibility of infecting others if he was hurt and bleeding. On those occasions when he went to an emergency room, he quietly told medical workers he had HIV, out of the earshot of fellow officers.

But the incident that he recalls the most vividly involved his failing strength, not an injury.

He was helping his partner lug heavy equipment to the roof of an apartment building during a hostage situation. With every step, he became more exhausted. On the roof, Lambe had to grasp his partner’s belt as the man leaned over, peering into the apartment below.

His partner, the father of four, had just been widowed. All Lambe could think of was that he was going to drop the man and orphan his children. He didn’t. He tied him to a chimney.

He decided it was time to get out of the field and two months later, got his chance. He was promoted to an administrative position.

“Cops are their job,” he says, explaining why he clung to his police work. “It’s very hard to become you again. You’re always fighting that.”

Indeed, the Los Angeles patrolman sees a desk job as a kind of suicide.

“I need this job in more than one way,” he says quietly. “I need it to keep my medical benefits. I know that I need it for my own mental health. . . . I’m going to stay in that damn black-and-white until my doctor orders me out or until I can physically no longer do it. Because to me that is my lifeblood. . . . That’s what makes me happy. That’s what keeps me healthy.”

The few colleagues he has thus far confided in have offered support. But he knows that is not the only response AIDS elicits in the LAPD.

Ruff says he has gotten calls from policemen wondering if they had the right to refuse to work with gay officers who they feared might have AIDS. (The answer is no. Nor can they refuse to work with someone who has HIV.)

If an infected officer’s condition became widely known, Ruff said, ostracism would follow. The person, Ruff said, “might have difficulties finding officers willing to work with” him or her.

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Officials at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles say that in 1994, an officer called to restrain an unruly AIDS patient at one of their hospices refused to touch the patient. Staff members had to handcuff the man themselves. He was later taken away by other officers.

Instruction about HIV and universal precautions is a routine part of Police Academy training and has been the subject of handouts to in-service officers, LAPD officials say. But they concede that when it comes to formal AIDS training of all but academy recruits, the department has been slow and inconsistent--something they are now trying to rectify.

As for the infection risk, Linda Martin, director of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health’s HIV unit at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says there have been no confirmed cases of police officers contracting the AIDS virus on the job.

Police in various departments have won pension claims that they contracted HIV while working, including two Los Angeles officers who said they were accidentally infected by needle pricks while searching suspects. But pension rulings are not the same as medical documentation.

Even if someone is splashed with infected blood, it has to directly enter the body, through, for example, an open wound or mucous membrane to pose a threat. And then the risk of infection is still extremely small.

All that rolls through the patrolman’s mind as he tries to plot his course, propelled by bravado and fear.

From his papers he plucks the official department death notice of the man he was too scared to help. There is nothing about AIDS. Kidney failure is listed as the cause. One of the officers he did help was said to have died of leukemia.

He does not want to go like that. Instead he thinks of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Bruce Boland, whose survivors listed AIDS as the cause of death in his paid obituary in The Times last year.

His funeral was attended by row after row of uniformed deputies. Boland’s father, Thomas E. Boland, took the flag he had just been presented and gave it to his son’s lover.

“It was the only way,” Thomas Boland says, “that I could show [him] . . . and all the rest of the gays in the assemblage that I was willing to accept the fact that Bruce was gay and I was willing to do something in the fight against AIDS.”

The Los Angeles patrolman does not expect the same response from his family. But he doesn’t want his AIDS secrets to be buried with him.

“If it hasn’t been said. I want it said. I want these people to know that yes, somebody they knew, somebody they liked . . . died of AIDS.”