Officers in Trouble on Job Often Get Stress Pensions : Police: Many accused of misconduct win disability retirement when they say they can’t handle the pressure.

In 17 years as a Los Angeles police officer, Norman Nelson took part in seven shootings. He was tried three times on charges of raping a woman while on duty. When he recently strode into a hearing of the city’s pension board, wearing black boots and a big Bronco belt buckle, he looked every bit the renegade, cowboy cop.

Then he sat down, and he cried.

“I had all this rage in me,” he said.

Nelson, who was never convicted, today lives alone in remote Arizona mountains. He refuses to take medicine for his nerves “because I don’t like the way it makes me feel.” Asked why he once mistakenly shot and paralyzed a South-Central Los Angeles gas station attendant, he blurted out: “I shot him; that’s the way it is.”

Then the pension board, as it does with most police stress disability retirement petitions, granted Nelson a tax-free pension of 50% of his salary, or about $20,000 a year.

Throughout Southern California, many police officers accused of misconduct are being awarded pensions for stress-related injuries they say are caused by job suspensions and threatened terminations, criminal charges filed against them, and negative media publicity.

Already, four Los Angeles Police Department officers at the scene of the Rodney G. King police beating last month are claiming medical illnesses--a precursor for a stress pension application.

In the “39th and Dalton” case, where three department officers are on trial and dozens of others are being disciplined, city pension board officials expect a number of stress disability claims to follow.

In Long Beach, two former police officers now being tried for assaulting black activist Don Jackson were granted stress pensions late last year. And Jackson, then a Hawthorne police officer, was awarded a stress retirement after he claimed emotional problems stemming from the assault.

With a public outcry that many police officers appear to be benefiting from their own misconduct, a state Assembly committee held hearings last week in Long Beach to plan reform legislation.

“We’re rewarding people who do these kinds of things,” said committee Chairman Dave Elder (D-San Pedro). “It’s like we’re telling police officers that if you really want to get out of here, screw up real big and you’re gone. But that is not the message we want to give our employees.”

The assemblyman suggested that along with pension reform, local police agencies need to improve their hiring procedures to “find out what’s going on with these people’s lives” before they’re sworn in as police officers.

“You hand somebody a gun, and give him a uniform and a badge, and they are supposed to keep the peace,” Elder said. “But who are these people? What do we really know about them?”

Others defend the system. They say police work by its very nature is strenuous, and they argue that many officers get into trouble only when they believe there is no other way to relieve the stress and strain inherent in such a dangerous job.

Michael Mantell, a San Diego psychologist who built a sizable practice treating officers with emotional problems in Southern California, said officers claiming a stress disability undergo a rigorous investigative process lasting an average of two years. Seldom, he said, are troubled cops trying to cheat the system.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of people going to the bank laughing,” Mantell said. “There’s not a lot of money involved for them, considering how long it takes and what they have to go through to get it.”

Michael T. Roberts, an attorney who specializes in representing police officers on disability claims before the Los Angeles Board of Pension Commissioners, agreed.

“You can’t really profit from your own wrongdoing,” he said. “The staff here is very good at investigating claims. And this board is very good at weeding out those who are just trying to salvage something out of being fired.”

The Los Angeles pension board hearings, held each Thursday, are unique in that there is perhaps no other public setting where police officers accused of brutality, racism, neglect of duty and other misconduct speak openly and candidly of the dark side of enforcing the law.

They describe incidents where they perhaps shot an innocent person, or froze at the trigger when they should have killed an armed suspect. They describe grand jury investigations, interrogations by the police Internal Affairs Division, job suspensions and terminations, intense media pressure, the breakup of friendships at work and, for many of them, divorce and long hours spent contemplating suicide.

They describe frayed nerves, hypertension, headaches and depression. One officer told how the hair on his head and hands fell out. Another described purple splotches that broke out on his face. Several suddenly gained weight--30 and 40 pounds--and still couldn’t stop pulling into fast-food restaurants.

Few if any of them make it through the pension hearing without reaching for the box of Kleenex at the witness table.

“If there’s a strong discipline case against an officer, then there’s a strong chance the guy’s going to come over here for a disability pension,” said Gary Mattingly, general manager of the Los Angeles pension board.

“He knows he’s not going to get another promotion or a better assignment. He might feel his career is ruined and he’s embarrassed. He might realize the only alternative is to get out.”

Police agencies throughout Southern California have different approaches to handling stress claims.

In San Diego, the City Council voted in 1982 to no longer offer stress retirements to new police officers. At that time, San Diego was experiencing a high number of police officers being shot in the line of duty, and a growing number of stress pension claims was threatening an already-tight city budget.

Lawrence Grissom, the city’s retirement director, said that since 1982, San Diego has seen a 50% to 75% reduction in stress claims. He said police recruits hired since that time are advised of the change from the outset.

“We tell them that at orientation, right out there at the training academy,” he said. “I run through their benefits and I emphasize the fact that there is no stress disability for San Diego police officers.”

Grissom also noted that many officers who win stress pensions go on to find work elsewhere.

“One guy is a chief of security for a private firm,” he said. “Another is a contractor. Another’s a truck driver.”

Other police officers blame their stress problems on feelings of betrayal by their colleagues and superiors.

Sgt. Charles Mattingly was awarded a stress pension after he was disciplined for shooting a San Diego drug suspect with an electric stun gun in 1987. The suspect later died, and the San Diego Police Department, under a barrage of negative media coverage, blamed Mattingly.

In the end, the sergeant took his stress retirement money, quit the police force and returned home to Colorado.

His San Diego attorney, James Gattey, said Mattingly suffered depression, anxiety and insomnia, not out of guilt for using the stun gun, but because he felt rejected by his “police family.”

“It became a case where the family caved in on him,” Gattey said.

In Orange County, former Stanton Officer Anthony Sperl formed a California Police Stress Institute and traveled the country holding training seminars for police recruits. Sperl brought to the counseling group a bit of firsthand expertise--he retired on a stress pension himself after mistaking a toy gun for a real weapon and fatally shooting a 5-year-old boy in 1983.

“I’ve seen cases where one guy, who was living with me, was so stressed out he woke up in the morning drinking and he was drunk by 8 a.m.,” Sperl recalled. “He worked a high-crime area for 20 years and couldn’t take it any longer. He’s out in Iowa now playing Joe Farmer.

“But I’ve seen other cases of guys who are marginal, guys who are having problems with the LAPD, say, and they want to take the heat off them. There’s a real fine line here. Oftentimes, it’s just the notoriety that ruins you as a police officer.”

Stacy Picascia was chief of police in Seal Beach when he took a stress retirement in 1987 after developing high-blood pressure. Although his desk job never called on him to chase criminals through city streets, he found the work of appeasing the City Council and various community factions--and his own police officers--stressful nonetheless.

“My fingers were numb,” he said. “I’d get headaches across the forehead. I was eating and drinking bottles of Maalox I kept in my desk. I had rolls of Rolaids in my car.

“Sometimes I had numbness in my arm. I felt pains across my chest. It’s scary. You don’t really know what is happening to you.”

Similar stories are heard by the Los Angeles pension board, which by far handles the most stress pension applications for police officers in this region. In fiscal year 1990, the board granted 56 disability pensions, 14 of which were stress-related. The 1990 figures reflect an increase in stress pensions since the mid-1980s, when a large number of psychiatric-related petitions prompted city officials to tighten the rules.

Lt. Ken Staggs, who serves as the LAPD’s representative on the board, said the panel seldom has any choice but to grant a pension when the Police Department states it no longer has a position available for an officer.

If a state worker’s compensation judge has already ruled in favor of an applicant, the pension board almost always follows suit and grants a pension for the work-related injury, Staggs said. And, he pointed out, an applicant can always find one or more psychiatrists to conclude that he is no longer capable of being a police officer.

Should the board be tougher?

“That’s a difficult question,” Staggs said. “That’s really difficult to answer. But if an L.A. police officer in a blue uniform comes before this board and tells me he’s been out in that patrol car and has never had a break for 20 years, and tells me he’s stressed out, I wouldn’t even question him.”

When a police officer receives a stress pension, any pending administrative discipline is immediately dropped because he retires. At the same time, many officers seek stress pensions after being disciplined or demoted because they are concerned that their careers are in jeopardy.

Each time they appear before the board, they tell their stories in hopes of winning a tax-free pension.

* Officer Jon Pearce shot and seriously wounded an elderly man he spotted waving a shotgun on his front porch in Southwest Los Angeles. But it turned out the man was actually trying to scare drug dealers away.

In 1989, a jury ordered the city to pay $2.2 million in what was hailed by attorneys as the largest police brutality and false arrest judgment in Los Angeles history.

“I just feel very hostile,” Pearce told the pension board in November, ending his seven-year police career. “I don’t feel interested in having any kind of social intercourse with anybody. Just the problems I have around the house seem to be enough without adding to them.”

Pearce was awarded 70% of his salary, or $2,553.12 a month.

* Unlike Pearce, Sgt. Antonio Garcia broke down after he was unable to pull the trigger. He froze at the very moment he drew a bead on a suspect running through the streets armed with a machine gun.

“I endangered everybody,” Garcia said, weeping uncontrollably during a board hearing in December.

Asked to explain why he crumbled emotionally after 18 years of duty, Garcia groped for words.

“Sir, I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know because that’s when I had my . . . I had a serious nervous disorder. I had a complete breakdown. And I don’t know what happened.”

Garcia was awarded 50% of his salary, or $2,381.42 a month.

* Sgt. Spencer Lynn, an LAPD internal affairs investigator, received a stress pension.

In his 18-year police career, he was convicted of theft, participated in several police shootings, was pinned down by 90 minutes of gunfire during the Symbionese Liberation Army shoot-out in the 1970s, and once held a fellow police officer as he died in his arms.

“I had nightmares for years,” he told the pension board in November, “particularly over observing the murders of at least three officers during my career and the constant thought of being involved in another one any day.”

Lynn received 60% of his salary, or $2,781.22 a month.

* Sgt. David D. Wiltrout, another LAPD internal affairs investigator, became distraught and admitted to his supervisors that he had lied on the witness stand during the police misconduct trial of a fellow officer. He said he was also stressed out after handling a number of high-profile police misconduct cases as an internal affairs investigator, and feared he was going to be fired or transferred to a light-duty position after 22 years on the force.

He turned to the pension board for help in 1989 and received 50% of his salary, or $2,262 a month.

“They’re going to put me in a rubber-gun assignment and stick me in some room doing nothing,” he told the pension commissioners. “That’s just as bad as anything, if not worse.”