Frank Borelli
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
I'll apologize in advance to anyone I aggravate with this blog entry but a situation was brought to my attention yesterday and it has simmered... and now I realize how frustrated I am with it. I know of a law enforcement agency currently being sued by several former employees. The former employees maintain that they were fired in retaliation for calling out wrong-doing in the agency administration and they have filed a lawsuit for millions of dollars.
My first challenge with this situation is that, as I understand it, the termination of all of the officers in question was completely legal. Mind you I didn't say moral or ethical: I said
legal. In the state where this is occurring, officers can be terminated during their probationary period without cause. That was the case for several of them. In other cases the officers themselves submitted resignations prior to facing administrative or disciplinary charges within the agency. In those cases the officers weren't even terminated; they resigned of their own free will. In all cases but one, that I know of, the officers were all hired by other agencies shortly after being terminated or leaving the agency in question - because they weren't "black-listed" or "flagged" as not employable by a law enforcement agency in that state. In other words, the maximum they lost was a few months of pay at most. Additionally, all of the alleged "wrong doing" on the part of the agency leadership was independently investigated by county, state or federal officials and virtually every member of the agency leadership was cleared (to the best of my knowledge).
But the "victim" officers are suing for
MILLIONS - and they'll collect
something too. Why? Because the insurance companies that defend agencies against such allegations care more about math and profit than they do about defending the people who are right. Let me give you an example...
A person is hired by the sheriff's office, attends the academy, fails the physical portion and is terminated. Said individual then goes and hires a lawyer to sue the Sheriff's Office for wrongful termination, sexual prejudice (if it's a female) and a few other things. The lawsuit is asking $2 million in damages and another $2 million in punitive dollars (to teach that agency they'd better never do that again). The insurance company lawyers who will have to defend the Sheriff's Office look at the case and see that it has no merit,
BUT they also project that it will take about two to three week of actual court time plus a couple months of research and preparation time to defeat the suit. Adding all that up the insurance company figures that it will cost about $750 thousand in labor and other expenses / fees. So, simply to save money, they offer the "victim" $300 thousand in settlement.
The moment the insurance company offers that settlement, the "victim" is viewed as having won the case. Whether or not the Sheriff's Office did anything illegal, immoral or unethical won't matter at that point. The minute the insurance company tries to "settle out" then the agency is viewed as having admitted wrong-doing.
This irks me. Defending an agency's integrity and honor should not be about dollars and cents. Defending an officer's integrity from accusations of unprofessional, immoral or unethical behavior definitely shouldn't be about dollars and cents. How do you put a price on an officer's integrity?
In the case that brought all this home for me I'd be willing to bet that the insurance company will do exactly that: settle out to save money in the defense. Those suing will probably collect several thousand dollars (more or less) each and the lawyer who represents them will take (I'd guess) a minium of $150 thousand on top of any retainer the "victims" had to pay. I'd venture to guess that each of these "victim" officers was fully aware of this going into the lawsuit and are filing the lawsuit purely to chase the dollars
even though they know they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
In the mean time, an agency's name, integrity and honor will be smeared along with that of it's leadership - all in the name of saving money for an insurance company.
Your thoughts?
