Criminal Cops Cashing In
When law enforcement employees break the law -- and get convicted -- you'd think their pensions would not be paid. Think again.

Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken write at CNN that tens of millions of dollars in pensions are flowing into the bank accounts of retired police officers who were convicted of breaking the laws they were sworn to uphold:

They have been found guilty of sexual and violent crimes, including murder and rape, or other serious job-related offenses, such as bribery and embezzlement. Some have admitted to molesting young children. Others have used their badges to enrich themselves or wield power over vulnerable members of their communities. Many are still sitting in prison cells. Yet the checks keep coming and will for the rest of their lives -- all as taxpayers help foot the bill.

The promise of these unlimited monthly retirement checks is one of the biggest perks of going into the physically demanding and dangerous field of law enforcement. It is only in rare cases that governments strip disgraced officers of these benefits, using a harsh penalty known as pension forfeiture.

Now, in the face of growing calls for police reform, some lawmakers, academics and police reform advocates say forfeiture of these coveted police retirement packages could be used as a tool to discourage the worst behavior. Recent research backs this up, suggesting that states with strict pension forfeiture laws have experienced lower levels of police misconduct.

Nationally, however, there is no consensus on when and if pensions should be taken away. Laws, if they exist at all, vary widely from state to state and don't always target the same crimes -- meaning that whether convicted cops are able to keep their benefits largely depends on the state where they worked.

More than 350 officers convicted of felony crimes have already received pension payments or are eligible in the future, according to a CNN analysis. Reporters identified the officers using individual member pension data from more than 70 funds obtained through records requests, retirement vesting schedules, and data on convicted officers arrested between 2005 and 2015 from Bowling Green State University's Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database. Officers convicted of sexual and violent felonies, as well as felony crimes committed within an officer's "official capacity," were included in the analysis. And this is just a snapshot of those eligible for taxpayer funded payments in part because pension data is kept confidential in more than 15 states and not all funds queried by CNN responded to requests.

Of the officers identified by CNN, more than 200 have already received benefits and collectively taken in roughly $70 million, the analysis of pension data shows. Current retirees will take in more than $8 million this year alone -- not including payments from states where pension amounts are confidential. They stand to receive hundreds of millions of dollars during the course of their retirements.

"There's got to be a way to hold their feet to the fire," said D. Bruce Johnsen, a George Mason University law professor emeritus who has studied pension forfeiture specifically for police officers. "If you have more serious penalties for misconduct, you're going to have less misconduct."

As you'll see from the rest of the piece at the link, criminal cops victimize the most vulnerable and unable to complain. It's simply obscene that they get to get a nice, cushy pension after failing to "serve and protect" the interests beyond their own -- in obscenely criminal ways. (I follow sex workers on Twitter and rape by cop seems sickeningly common.)

A sick local example of how huge some of these payments can be:

Ousted Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca currently receives nearly 14 times that amount, around $250,000 a year (not including additional benefits that go to his ex-wife), from his federal prison cell. Baca stepped down in 2014 and was ultimately convicted of helping to orchestrate a widespread cover-up of inmate beatings and other abuses at the county jail that included lying to federal investigators and threatening an FBI agent with arrest.

He had already received around $1.4 million by the time he began his three-year prison sentence last year.