“It’s like going from a prop plane to a fighter jet, from horseback to a Toyota Highlander. It’s a robust retirement plan with near-term benefits for line of duty deaths and injury, and (officers’) families taken care of for life,” Wabaunsee County Sheriff Eric Kirsch said.
He was still riding the high from achieving a goal he set before he took office in a rural Kansas county: moving his small force of deputies from a weaker KPERS retirement system that sorted them into the same bucket as teachers and collections clerks, into the much more generous (and costly) system designed just for public safety employees called Kansas Police & Fire.
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The caste system in law enforcement
One of the ugly little secrets of law enforcement in the US is that there’s a caste system, where haves and have nots are divided by access to resources. Officers who work for larger, better funded departments tend to have earlier retirement ages, more generous payouts, and well-structured, well-funded disability plans when they get hurt. The public assumes those plans are the norm but for the tens of thousands of officers serving smaller communities, those kinds of benefits are as exotic as unicorns, and nearly as hard to find. Law enforcement agencies are generally required to enroll officers in a public retirement system, but in many places the employers get to pick which kind. Usually, it’s whichever is cheapest.
When Kirsch discovered that all sheriffs are eligible to enroll in Kansas Police & Fire (KP&F) within 60 days of election even if their deputies aren’t, he found the disparity disturbing. “I made it a theme at every (county) commission meeting, for months. It was my ONLY request. Every time,” he told me by phone.
It wasn’t solely a fairness issue. It was a practical one, too, since deputies who work for a department with KP&F rarely leave; retaining seasoned officers protects institutional knowledge and keeps costs down. A Marine veteran with multiple combat deployments, Kirsch said bluntly, “I don’t need James Bond s- - -, I need to take care of my people.” Eventually, the county commissioners agreed to take on the additional costs to move Wabaunsee County deputies into the stronger retirement plan.
When benefits depend on the budget, not the risk
Odd as it seemed to me that a retirement system named “Police & Fire” excluded thousands of first responders, it’s not the weirdest find in the police benefits world. That dubious honor (so far) goes to Kentucky, where instead of choosing from among tiers of retirement benefits, employers decide whether to classify law enforcement agencies as “hazardous” or “non hazardous” depending on cost, not risk. When cops lead every other industry in work-related injuries with assaults as the primary cause, the option to define any law enforcement agency as “non hazardous” is bizarre.
That choice, forced upon his agency by grim budget constraints, strikes Sheriff John Hunt as unjust, even insulting, yet his hands are tied. According to Jessica Hall, who manages HR for the Floyd County, Kentucky sheriff’s office, moving deputies from non-hazardous to hazardous retirement would be so costly they would have to cut half their patrol positions to make up for it.
When cops lead every other industry in work-related injuries with assaults as the primary cause, the option to define any LE agency as “non hazardous” is bizarre.
The disparity is very personal to Hunt, who retired from Kentucky State Police before running for sheriff. One of his deputies was killed in a brutal ambush in 2022; another survived at the cost of his leg. Two Prestonsburg police officers and a K-9 were also killed and multiple others wounded. The small agencies were devastated, not just by the deaths but also by the realization that the resources available for surviving officers were profoundly inadequate.
Hunt said his benefits with KSP were stellar, even better than local departments can offer with a hazardous retirement. “I thought our deputies would have similar benefits,” he said. “To be honest, I didn’t understand it — that they would have to work for 60 months even to qualify for disability benefits. It is not fair. If you are doing a hazardous job, you should get the hazardous benefit.”
The medieval math behind modern policing
Hunt explained how his small law enforcement agency arrived at this dismal juncture. It turns out that, at least for departments operating in counties with a population of less than 70,000 residents, funding and budgeting in Kentucky are literal medieval artifacts: the sheriff, like historic England’s royally-appointed shire reeve, is a tax collector. There is no annual budget, or predictable revenue stream. The department’s resources consist of commissions from the taxes and fees they collect, which fluctuate constantly.
Each year, any remaining funds default to the county general fund (which precipitates a flurry of panic buying at each year’s end) and the budget resets to zero. Hunt has no authority to save for a lean year, plan for major purchases, or take on large, ongoing obligations like, for instance, higher retirement contributions. I asked how they purchase fuel for patrol vehicles, with no income at the beginning of each year. “We charge it,” he said. “And vendors have to wait to get paid till our commissions begin to come in with the next tax installments.”
Now the Kentucky legislature is considering changes to the structure of LEO retirement, although the proposed changes are minimal and there is resistance to the idea that any county could be “forced to pay for” a hazardous-retirement system. Hunt hopes that they succeed in improving the current system, especially mitigating the meager disability benefits and the obstacles to accessing them. “Obviously they (the deputies) deserve more,” he said. “The deputies should not be punished because we can’t afford (hazardous retirement), when they do the same job.”
And they indisputably do the same job, with the same risks as any other cop in any other place. Location and population size have little bearing on the hazards of law enforcement. So far this year, half of the officers killed by felonious gunfire have been in places with fewer than 30,000 residents. In the week while I was writing this — from November 12 through November 19 — there were 14 officers shot in eight incidents. Four of them were shot in a single incident in rural Kansas. In fact, only two of the officers worked in urban settings. The rest, including the only fatality (and one vest save) were attacked in places with populations from just over 100 people to just under 3000. This lines up with data I’ve been keeping and writing about since 2019; it’s not unusual, just part of a routine cycle of crime that somehow never makes national news.
Location and population size have little bearing on the hazards of law enforcement.
It’s not unusual that cops from different agencies are treated so differently despite facing the same hazards, but it’s wrong. Kansas and Kentucky aren’t alone in this mess, and it’s not a “rich state, poor state” problem. Game wardens and law enforcement park rangers — all sworn and certified state officers — in New York and California have been battling for retirement and disability parity with other state LEOs for years. I wrote about that nearly three years ago, and nothing has improved since then.
The extraordinary crazy quilt of law enforcement agencies, definitions and standards across the US all but guarantees that, without structural change, second-class cops are here to stay. It should be an embarrassment in the 21st century, in the richest nation in the world, to let officers struggle because of funding models from the Middle Ages.
A path toward fair retirement and disability systems
In the aftermath of the 1997 Colebrook murders, New Hampshire Fish & Game overhauled policy gaps that left a wounded warden adrift and unpaid during a long recovery, ensuring it would never happen again. Broken systems can be fixed.
Acknowledge the disparities and their negative impacts on morale, recruiting and retention. Find models in other places that work better, and adapt them, even if that means giving up some local control through consolidation of resources. That could mean each state creating a single retirement system for all first responders no matter where they work, spreading both the risk and expense over a wider pool. It could mean consolidating small localities and sharing costs. (Does Kentucky really need 120 counties? Really?)
It will also require intense advocacy from police leadership, unions and elected representatives of affected officers. “Never miss an opportunity to do the most possible for your coworkers as a leader. Meaningful pay and benefits are part of that. Take care of your people, and they will take care of the mission,” Kirsch said.
If the mission is safer communities, taking better care of our officers is one step forward.
| READ MORE FROM KATHLEEN DIAS: The overlooked reality of violence in rural policing
