President Barack Obama is going to have a lot on his plate when he takes the oath of office on January 20 – the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, and health care reform, just for starters. I’d like to talk about two more issues that I hope will receive serious consideration in an Obama administration: disenfranchisement of felons, and sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine.

Here at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept., we are currently experiencing what we consider to be a problem in that the agency is placing negative comments in the personnel files of employees who retire while an internal investigation is being conducted. The agency completes the investigation, and then places a copy of the “findings” along with an Adjudication of Complaint outlining what disciplinary action would have been imposed.

At some point in everyone’s life an inevitable truth becomes a reality. In my case, it was the recent realization that I have celebrated most of my birthdays, and probably don’t have all that many left to come. The many years I’ve spent doing athletic activities and police work have taken a toll on my body – my lower back is racked with arthritis and it takes me at least two hours every morning to reach the point where I can stand up straight; my rotator cuff is shot; two knee operations, and the subsequent arthritis, has made running an impossibility; and a torn Achilles tendon has further limited my mobility.

As a police officer, I was slightly heartened to learn that the recent march in our city, Omaha, Nebraska, organized by the Omahans for Justice Alliance, focused on their disagreements not only with the Omaha Police Department, but also on their concern for the rising tide of gang violence in our community. It would appear that certain activists have come to the realization that one tends to lose credibility with the rest of the community when the police are depicted as an even greater threat to the community than the droves of armed thugs who prey on our city and citizens daily.

Maryland State Police didn’t do their homework before they started spying on peace activists and anti-death-penalty groups. If the amateur spymasters had read up on their Maryland law enforcement history before launching this escapade, they might have had a good laugh and learned a thing or two.

A N.Y. state panel just mandated new, higher pay for rookies still in training which should make it a little easier for the NYPD to overcome its recent recruiting problems. But much of the good work of the pay raise could be undone by the calumnies heaped on the police in the wake of the Sean Bell verdict. New York’s cops have been called trigger-happy, cowboys and murderers; the term “racist” has been thrown around a good bit.

Editor’s note: The author is responding to an article alleging that police officers get too much in the way of benefits when they retire.
Seth Grossman’s commentary, “Cap pension payments to relieve budget burden,” represents the kind of uninformed scare tactic that complicates the debate on the health of New Jersey’s pension system. As president of New Jersey’s largest law enforcement organization, which has more than 33,000 members in service to state, county and local law enforcement agencies, it is necessary to point out several of Grossman’s errors in assumptions and to express why law enforcement officers in the Police and Firemen’s Retirement System (PFRS) need to be excluded from any pension and benefit reforms.

In the 1980s Australian state and territorial governments started slowly eliminating the defined pension benefits for public employees by “selling the unborn.” Employees hired after a certain date would receive less pension benefits than existing employees. While the unions protested, current employees did not want to lose or reduce their pensions to protect future employees. The die was cast and 25 years later there are few defined benefit pension plans open to new employees.