Police Stress Disabilities Are Rare in Several Major Cities

Although stress pensions have risen dramatically in the Los Angeles Police Department during the last five years, they are rare in many other major law enforcement agencies outside California.

In New York, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Miami and Philadelphia, police officers work under increasing stress, experts say, but the pension systems there have not been hit hard by stress claims.

Among the 24,000 sworn officers in New York City, only two received pensions last year because of psychological stress from the job, a department spokesman said. Sixteen more got reduced pensions for psychological problems, such as alcoholism, that are not job-related.

The spokesman said stress is not considered a disabling injury in New York.

New York City Police Department psychiatrist Dr. Martin Symonds said that to win a psychological disability pension, an officer must show that he has suffered from “a demonstrable threat to life” and is not “just fed up with the job.”

In Miami’s Metro-Dade Police Department, with 2,100 sworn officers, administrator Peter Forrest said, “there’s no such thing here as a stress disability pension.”

He said that if a Miami officer cracks, he is sent to a department psychologist, who may refer him to an outside doctor. He is treated while on sick leave and, when that runs out, the officer receives workers’ compensation benefits, but no pension.

At the Houston Police Department, with 4,500 sworn members, officials said that in the last 15 years only two stress pension claims have been filed, and both were denied.

Asked whether police officers in Houston ever suffer mental breakdowns, a pension official said: “We’ve had some. So far, the department has just fired them.

“State law is rigid here,” explained the Houston official, Gene Attebery. To get a pension, he said, an applicant must get a doctor’s report saying that the disabling stress was “the direct result of his employment” rather than a peripheral cause. “So far, we haven’t had any doctors that will say that.”

In Philadelphia, officers seeking service-connected disability pensions must show that their illness is 100% job-related. (By comparison, Los Angeles police officers need only show that their stress is job-related to a slight degree.)

In Philadelphia’s 7,000-member force, “no more than four or five” officers have been awarded stress-related pensions in the last seven years, said Anthony Witlin, head of the Philadelphia pension board.

In Kansas City, with 1,150 officers, only one stress-related pension has been granted during the last eight years, a retirement board official said. “To be frank, I don’t know why we’re so fortunate in that area,” said Maj. Michael Boyle, in charge of police personnel.

In Chicago, a pension administrator said stress claims are rare in the city’s 12,000-officer Police Department.

“I’ve been here 26 years and I have not had anybody--oh, maybe one or two--come in and apply for a stress pension,” said Richard Jones, executive director of the Chicago Police Retirement Board.

He acknowledged that officers do have mental breakdowns and said it is the department’s doctor who decides whether an officer has a meritorious pension claim.

Among Denver’s 1,300 police officers, stress pensions also are uncommon.

Sgt. Bob Cribbs, who works in the police personnel division in Denver, said: “I can think of only two cases that have been given in the last two years for a mental disability.”

Of the nine pension systems surveyed by The Times, only the state of Washington and the city of Detroit reported discernible upswings in police stress pensions.

In Washington, with 5,000 law enforcement personnel, retirement officials reported 90 mental-related disabilities between 1980 and February of 1984--nearly doubling the system’s percentage of mental disabilities.

In Detroit, which has suffered massive police layoffs since 1980, reducing the force from 5,000 officers to 3,000, city officials called stress claims “a problem.”

Between 1980 and 1984, police officials said, 51 job-connected stress disability pensions have been awarded and about a dozen are pending. Officers there get two-thirds of their pay for a job-connected disability pension and, if they have pensions, are not allowed to make more in other jobs than they could have made on the police force.

There is “no real hard explanation” for the increase, said Detroit police medical section inspector Ferdinand Kuchinski.

He added that part of the problem may be caused by the department’s dramatic change in personnel over the last few years, with more minorities and women hired than ever before. “Some officers can’t accept women or blacks,” Kuchinski said, adding that there have been cases where officers won pensions by proving that their stress was caused by their inability to work with these new hirees.

Kuchinski also attributed the upswing in stress claims partly to aggressive doctors who have found a way to make money off the system. “Psychologists and psychiatrists . . . are milking it for everything they can,” Kuchinski said.