Police Death Pay Divides a Family

All families have their disagreements. This one - between Herald columnist Beverly Beckham and her father Lawrence Curtin, a retired MDC Police officer, over a bill now being considered on Beacon Hill - we think is worth sharing with our readers.

April 6, 1994

The Boston Herald

She says:

I never kissed my father goodbye without thinking that it might be the last time I would see him. I always knew his job was dangerous. He once shot out the tires of a robber speeding away. It was written up in a newspaper. My mother saved the clipping, and I used to look at it and wonder what would have happened if the robber had shot back? What would life have been like if my father had been killed then? There would have been no one to take my side in arguments with my mother, no one to teach me how to ride a two-wheeler, play cribbage, take me on the rides at Nantasket, carry me upstairs when I fell asleep in the car. I wouldn't have seen so many movies because we wouldn't have gone to drive-ins without my father, or to Washington, D.C., or even to Echo Lake. I wouldn't have developed a life-long love for fried bologna and Westerns and fish cakes because my mother didn't cook these things.

Small moments, that’s what make up a person's life.  Looking out the window, waiting to see my father walk up the road, posing with him the night of my senior prom, waltzing together the day of my wedding.

None of this has to do with money. If my father had been killed when I was a child, I wouldn't have lost anything financially. My mother would have collected 100 percent of his pay until she remarried or until she died. On the outside our lives would have altered little.

But on the inside, inside our house and inside of us, there would have been an empty space.

What bothers me about the state's proposal to hand out $100,000 in death benefits to the families of police officers, firefighters and correction officers killed in the line of duty is the notion that money is supposed to take the edge off pain. Here's $100,000. Now don't you feel better?

Financial benevolence is not what victims need; justice is. Instead of passing a law that makes the murder of a police officer a little more acceptable, which $100,000 certainly does (Hey, at least his family's set for life), legislators would do well to spend their time working on laws that would mandate the death penalty for all murderers. Instead of passing a law that makes cop killing more socially acceptable, legislators should craft laws that would make criminals terrified to kill a police officer.

But this is too difficult.

This requires not just work but commitment to a moral rule that says murdering an innocent person is wrong and that a life can't be compensated for with money. The easier thing is to accept what is. Police get killed. That's life today. Nothing we can do about it. We'll just pay off the families, so they won't make a scene.

The way we handle problems is to throw money at them.

What's wrong about giving dollars for lives is the mindset that money can ease a death, that if you sweeten the pot enough, burying an officer killed in the line of duty won't seem quite so tragic.

He says:

There is a saying: Do not judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins. I am a retired Metropolitan District Police sergeant. I have known brother officers who died in the line of duty. I have walked too many miles behind slain comrades' coffins.

The horror of sudden, brutal death devastates an officer's friends and family. After the initial shock, the grim reality sets in. The reality for the family is that a wife has lost a husband and children have lost a father, or today, that a husband has lost a wife and children their mother. Future hopes and dreams, plans, all the ordinary things that families look forward to are no longer. It is true that a surviving spouse receives 100 percent of a dead officer's weekly salary. Most will hear this and say that a slain police officer's family is well-provided for. But is this really true?

Police officers risk their lives, and too many give their lives so that everyone else can close their doors at night and go to sleep knowing that they are protected from the elements of crime. Police officers face death every day. Is it not the responsibility and the duty of the state to make certain that one who gives his life in the line of duty - a firefighter, correction officer, police officer, any law enforcement official who puts his life on the line - be fairly compensated?

Three police officers have been killed in this region since Feb. 1, including Boston Police Officer Berisford Wayne Anderson, who was killed while off-duty.nWould Anderson qualify for death benefits in this new bill? He should. A police officer is a police officer 24 hours a day.

Many people will look at $100,000 as if it is a fortune, as if it will last a lifetime. Four years in most colleges costs more that $100,000. A three-bedroom home in the suburbs is difficult to find for $100,000. The average worker makes $100,000 -- in just three years.

When a police officer dies while protecting the public, he sacrifices more than three years. A slain officers' family pays for a death benefit in personal grief and sorrow.