Article 15 Disability Retirement: Fill & Download for Free

The Pretenders!I will give you a breakdown in my department, but then I will educate you on the biggest scam in police work, which will shock and anger most of you.My statistical review is of the one urban, inner city department I worked for which was in an economically depressed area. During my last year, I worked at the department, I located a roster of departmental personnel. I was able to put all the officers who had left into one of four categories.Resigned at time of regular retirement 50%Resigned for other employment 15%Resigned or terminated for cause 5%Resigned due to permanent injury 30+%Here’s what I found in our department:Of all the officers hired, just under 50% retired from our department with a full 25-year career.About 15% left our department and completed a lateral transfer to another agency where they retired from or continue to work.About 5% of our officers were either arrested or given the choice to resign or be charged. These were mostly newer officers who should never have been hired in the first place.About 30% or one in three officers retired with a disability retirement. Some were justifiable in my mind, but many others were not. As long as you had five years in the pension system, and were injured or involved in a critical incident (shooting) you could get a lawyer and apply for disability retirement.MEET THE PRETENDERS!If an officer completed 25 years of service, they would receive 65% of their last year's salary. If an officer had at least five years of service and was injured they could hire a lawyer and apply for a disability retirement which is 66 2/3% of their salary at the time of the injury (TAX-FREE). Yes, that's right, its considered a settlement award. The wording reads permanently and totally disabled, but that part’s a joke.Now some officers are badly injured in a car crash or have to take a life in the line of duty and retire. I have no problem with them.Then you have the pretenders: These are the cops who were simply present during a critical incident and claim psychological stress, or get slightly injured and get a lifelong pension.I'll give you a couple of examples. One officer tried to punch a suspect while arresting him and punched his own car instead. It broke a small bone in the back of the officer's hand. Because his gun hand was injured, he applied for and received a full disability pension.He ran a home improvement business on the side and about a month after retirement I saw him climb a ladder and use a hammer with his injured hand working on the side of a house. Clearly a pretender!Next example; We had a critical incident where a murder occurred and the suspect was armed with a machine gun. Multiple officers chased the offender down. As he was carjacking a car, several officers engaged the offender using only handguns while taking fire. Also on the scene was one of our newer officers who was part of our rifle team and had deployed his military-styled .223 rifle with a combat sighting system.He was the only officer who did not engage the suspect or shoot, and the only officer who left the department on a psychological disability pension as a result. I would note that he was, at the time, in the Army reserve, and after retiring, he continued to be in the Army reserve. Permanently and totally disabled, my butt. This pretender has been sucking money out of our pension system for the past twenty years.It got so bad, police officers are getting disability retirements in one state and going to another state and getting hired as police officers, and no one is checking this. At the bottom is an article where an NYPD officer retired on disability and was hired as a police officer in Florida.This practice appears to be happening all over the country and it would be so easy to stop. Each state pension system could require any officer receiving a disability pension to yearly certify that they are still “Permanently and totally disabled.” If they were working at another job, this would have to be disclosed.If they are gainfully employed, pension benefits would only be paid up to the difference between their current salary and their disability award. State pensions across the country are going bankrupt while “Pretenders” continue to collect disability payments. They hold down full-time employment, robbing both taxpayers and the pension funds.If you take the time to read the link on New Jersey cops below, you will see why New Jersey is the most corrupt state in the country.“Once you have your pension in hand, you’re golden,” said Sierchio, a Bloomfield police detective who has served on the PFRS board of trustees since 2002. “You can do whatever you want to do.”NJ cops, others collecting millions in disability benefits . . . and paychecksMayo: How many disabled ex-cops from New York get police jobs in South Florida?

Former drill sergeant here.Seeing as how food in the barracks is contraband and they are counseled on day zero to that fact, they would receive an article 15. When they were found guilty they'd get a loss of pay, possible reduction of rank, and extra duty.Because rank doesn't much matter in basic and trainees haven't quite learned to appreciate it yet, and because basic training is pretty much all extra duty anyways, the real consequence is the loss of pay.It's not all bad though. The lost pay goes to the Armed Forces Retirement Home.Edit: due to some disrespectful comments by a select few, since deleted, I have disabled comments on this answer.

Thank you Jake for the A2A!My experience retiring from the US Air Force was long, involved and started in Iraq, half a world away from the Pentagon where I was stationed.Fortunately, most of the checklists were on-line so it didn't matter. Did I mention there were checklists? There were checklists.Checklists for this, checklists for that, checklists for everybody and their mother ... there were literally checklists of checklists, all crammed full of acronyms.Schedule your Transition Assistance Program (TAP) briefing!Get outbriefed on never talking about TOP SECRET - Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS-SCI)! (Edward Snowden apparently missed this item on his checklist).Get a post-deployment screening for possible traumatic brain injury (TBI)!Schedule your final permanent change of station (PCS) shipment!Turn in your base library card! (okay, this one didn't have an acronym)Sign sign sign everything everything everything in in in triplicate triplicate triplicate!!!Of course every single agency that had a checklist insisted that each and every item had to be signed off and verified or you wouldn't be allowed to retire.This, of course, was b.s.There were three and only three things in the entire retirement process that genuinely affected retirement benefits:1) Setting up the retirement pay allotment. This was quick and easy, but required that I enlist in the Selected Ready Reserve for three years followed by three more years in the Individual Ready Reserve. (Or was it the other way around?)2) Submitting the Veterans Administration disability claim. This was the most labor-intensive process by orders of magnitude. First the Air Force makes you get medical exams on everything, then after retiring the Veterans Administration pays to have them all done again by a civilian medical facility. I started the process five months before retiring and finally got my claim approved 21 months later.3) Shipping the car and household goods to Hawai'i. I didn't really feel retired until dropping my car off at the port in Oakland. It was a great feeling.That was my personal retirement story, but at one of the bases early in my career there was a contest between two Group Commanders (colonels) to see who could separate their dirtbag Airmen, who'd received non-judicial punishment (Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice), the fastest.Separation from the military following an Article 15 action is a process that normally drags on for weeks. But one of the Group Commanders had gotten one of his dirtbag Airmen separated in less than a week and made a big deal about it at a Friday "Shark Feed" (social gathering at the Officer's Club on base).So his ex-wingman, also a Group Commander, decided to make it a friendly competition. The next time he had a screw-up Airman who earned an Article 15 separation, that Group Commander and his First Sergeant (the senior non-commissioned officer in charge of personnel affairs in his Group) personally scheduled and walked the Airman to each and every one of his required out-processing appointments, collected all his possessions from his barracks room, then escorted him out the main gate of the base.That poor bastard literally went from being an Airman living in the barracks on base to a civilian looking for a hotel room in a single day. Talk about culture shock. It was also an effective 'shape up or ship out' message to the rest of the Airmen on the base.