We must protect the protectors

When police officers lay it all on the line and are severely injured while protecting the people of the commonwealth, we owe it to them to come to their aid with the same urgency they showed in coming to ours.

In 2011, Woburn police officer Robert DeNapoli was shot six times during a botched jewelry store robbery. At one point, his service gun was shot out of his hand. He felt the shooter standing behind him. “I felt like he was going to put one more round in my head” he said. Only then did he allow himself to think about his family. As he recounted the moment on Herald Radio last year, his voice trembled and he choked up. He remembered thinking about his loved ones, “I’m not gonna see them anymore.”

Against all odds, DeNapoli survived that day.

But, as the Herald’s Mary Markos reported, though DeNapoli got the medical attention that was needed to keep him alive, he received no such aid in the process of collecting the benefits he and his family would need to survive afterwards.

He felt “betrayed” when he had to fight to get benefits and base pay after being forced to retire because of his injuries, on top of trying to recover and worrying about providing for his loved ones. “It was a slap in the face,” DeNapoli said. “It was a triple stress factor. It was beyond belief. I’ve never gone through such a dark time in my life, to tell you the truth.”

It was the same for former Somerville police officer and ATF Task Force member Mario Oliveira, who was shot multiple times in 2010. He died twice on the operating table. At the time, he had a 3-year-old child and a baby on the way. He went back to work with the Somerville Police and the ATF Task Force after months of recovery, only to have a heart attack related to his injuries eight months later.

“I almost died for my city,” Oliveira told the Herald. “The year-and-a-half I waited, suffered, wondering and worrying hurt me more than getting shot by six bullets.”

DeNapoli and Oliveira went on to co-found the Violently Injured Police Officers organization, which provides support for law enforcement officers who have sustained serious, lasting injuries in the line of duty. They are now pushing a piece of legislation filed by state Sen. Cindy Friedman that would give severely injured police officers 100% of their regular pay until they reach retirement age and then 80% of their pension.

“It’s really unfair,” Friedman said. “If they are no longer able to do that job because, in the process of doing what we expect them to do they get so critically injured that they can’t do that job anymore, then I think it’s fair for us to say, ‘OK, we need to step in here.’ ”

According to Friedman the bill would cover a very narrow scope of situations.

This legislation should certainly be debated, but maybe it can serve as a quick fix to those officers who have been severely injured in the line of duty. This bill, or some alternative, should become the law. We owe law enforcement officers that much.