When the local Fraternal Order of Police lobbied local leaders and the public for a better pension plan to benefit county deputies, members hammered on law enforcement mortality rates.They told commissioners, residents and the media that the average police officer lived to be just age 59. They said the information was based on a report by the U.S. Department of Justice. No one questioned it.
Even today, on law enforcement message boards across the country, commenters continue to cite age 59 as unadulterated fact and with little or no attribution.
The DOJ, however, says it never conducted such a study.
According to decades of research by police unions, actuaries and university professors, there are a number of conflicting reports on just how long the average officer lives.
"You can find studies that argue both," said Brian Moran, a Knoxville police investigator who was the state FOP president in 2007 when the organization successfully campaigned to change the Knox County Sheriff's Office retirement program from a defined contribution plan to defined benefit plan. "There are studies that say police die earlier -- maybe 10 to 12 years earlier than the average person. But recently, in California, there's one that says nowadays the life expectancy isn't a whole lot different."
In 2008, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, which manages the country's largest public pension fund, released a report called "Preparing for Tomorrow" that concluded the average public safety officer retires at 55, about four years earlier than the average worker.
The organization's research, which was conducted in 2004, showed that police officers who retire at age 55 live, on average, to be 81 -- the same age as the typical government worker.
A 2006 report by the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System provided similar results.
It said male officers who retire at age 60 typically live another 22 years and that female officers who retire at 60 live on average another 25 years.
Others, though, still stick with the age 59 mortality rate.
At Vanderbilt University, some professors teach "The Police: An Introduction" by Michael Lyman, who states, "(The) overall mean age of death for police officers in the United States is 59."
Lyman cites a United States Public Health Service Vital Statistics Special Report published in 1963 that studied causes of death in 1950 among only men ages 20 to 64, according to the textbook's footnotes.
But, Steven Greenhut, in his book, "Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation," disagrees.
"If that were so, there would be no unfunded liability problem because of pension benefits. Police officers would retire at 50-55, then lives a few years at best," he writes.
Today, Knox County's retirement plan assumes most officers will retire at age 65 and die "a little more than 15 years after retirement," said Bob Cross, southeast president of USI Consulting Group, the Knox County Retirement and Pension Board's actuary.
"It reflects the conservative nature of our process," he said, indicating that workers on the UOPP plan would live, on average, to be 80.
Multiple reports
Although officials at the Department of Justice told the News Sentinel they never conducted their own report, Albert Irion, a content specialist with the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, which is administered by the DOJ and acts as an information warehouse for crime and justice-related research, provided four published reports it had on hand.
Three were spearheaded by a team led by John Violanti, a former New York state trooper and now a research associate professor at the State University of New York-Buffalo in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine. His studies put the average officer's life span at around age 66.
In a 1986 report titled "Mortality of a Municipal Cohort," the team studied 2,376 male officers who retired from January 1950 through October 1979. The group also relied on the decades-old information that Vanderbilt teaches.
In another 1986 report, titled "Disease Risk and Mortality Among Police Officers: New Evidence and Contributing Factors" and published in the Journal of Police Science and Administration, the group says officers have a higher rate of heart disease, diabetes, suicide and cancer compared with those of the general population. The report also reiterates that police work is "very stressful."
In Violanti's third report -- "Mortality of a Police Cohort: 1950-1990," published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine -- he updates his research, adding, "(The) police profession is a job replete with psychological stress, danger, rotating shifts, family disruption and exposure to noxious materials."
The fourth study supplied by the DOJ looked at 732 retirees from the Illinois State Police from 1957 and 1986 that said officers "appear to live as long as other retired state employees." Richard Raub's 1987 report, "Police Officer Retirement: The Beginning of a Long Life," also said similar research conducted for state patrols in Arizona, Kentucky and Ohio reached the same conclusion, with law enforcement officers living into their 70s.
"I really haven't researched it much since we did it for the UOPP," said Stan McCroskey, a retired Knoxville Police Department investigator, former county court security officer and president of the local FOP. "I think now it's about 68 or 69 -- somewhere in that area."
"But people don't realize the stress these officers go through," he added. "You go to work one day and you don't know if you're going home that night. It's physically demanding and mentally challenging work."
Copyright 2011 - The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Tenn.
