A retirement rant

In CNN this morning I was reading about a wave of retirements from the New York Police Department. It was called "troubling." I'm trying to just look at the headlines a couple times a day, but this one captured my attention.

"Of course, cops are retiring at a higher rate," Chris Monahan, president of the Captains Endowment Association, told CNN Wednesday night. "We've been abandoned by the NYPD and elected officials."

Other reasons for the wave of retirements include "No one wants to come to work every day and be demoralized and vilified as they risk their lives to protect people." and "New Yorkers are losing their most experienced crime fighters because of continued violence in the city and the apathy of misguided elected officials," DiGiacomo said.

And here we go. Naturally the demographic information isn't presented. The fundamental question around retirement are the rules around age and years of service. For the City of Calgary, it's 85. Age plus years of service adding to 85 gets you an unreduced pension, though you have to be 55 to collect it. I don't know what the number is for NYPD.

There's more to it than just that. Some people actually like their jobs and don't want to retire. Some people cannot afford to retire and it doesn't matter if it's from bad luck or bad planning. Some are afraid of the change. Some are driven to retire for medical reasons whether they want to or not. It's one of the more complicated decisions in a person's life, and typically there is no do over. No mulligans.

Having watched Linda go through it, the process is pretty complicated. Someone has to review all the payroll information to ensure it's complete, correct, and everything is fully accounted for, in order to calculate the actual pension amount. Everybody's situation is a bit different, so it's no wonder figuring out takes time. One of my co-workers had pension calculations starting at HBOG, which was bought by Dome Petroleum, which was bought by Amoco, which was bought by BP. The pension people couldn't wait for him to retire and let them retire all the associated records.

Back to the NYPD. I'm suspecting that age is a big driver of the change. Plus, all the changes coming out of COVID make working lots tougher. It's even tougher if you think the changes are overkill, or a limit on your freedoms, or just for the weak or elderly. Once the thought of "you know, I could live on what I get from pensions" starts bouncing around your brain, it's hard to turn it off. The tougher the job gets in comparison to how you feel, the tougher it is to turn off that thought.

And then there are the changes to the way police are viewed now, and the phrase, "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." I grew up in a time and places where if you got into trouble you went to the police, which is a measure of the privilege I was born to. Now, for many people, involving the police even when you're innocent is a bad idea, potentially a fatal one. For these people, "policing" is an expression of dominance, the police expressing their vision of the world with force if necessary. An overwhelmingly white male vision of the world.

It used to be that sort of stuff didn't disappear, it never appeared in the first place. Police knew about the brutality, of course. They protected one another. A whole culture of solidarity grew up around it. An us and them mentality. Police or chaos. Take control of the situation or die.

Hints of it seeped out, but were ignored. How many of you remember the video of the Rodney King beating in 1991? For many that was the first actual video evidence of police brutality. And the officers involved mostly evaded punishment. It wouldn't be the last. It happens again and again, and not just in New York. Here in Canada as well. Robert Dziekański was tazed to death in the Vancouver airport, and the RCMP lied to cover it up, except there was video evidence.

Now cops are being called to be accountable for excess force. There used to be lots of leeway, and cops being given the benefit of the doubt, but we're seeing that cops abuse that time and again. That phrase I used, equality feels like oppression? Oversight and accountability is looking like oppression. When I hear cops complaining about civilian oversight, and how we don't understand their jobs and all the dangers they face, I think boo-hoo. You created that world.

Calls to defund the police are growing, and it has the police establishment horrified. They see the world as one of ever increased budgets and lack of oversight as compared to no police and chaos. The situation is more nuanced than that, of course. There is a place for police, but they have to be part of the community, not an armed gang preying on it.

I think the expression "demilitarize" the police is better. They should be embedded with people trained in de-escalating situations, and how to deal with mentally ill people, and the police should not be in charge of that unit. They should be a resource drawn on only if necessary.

Unfortunately, I don't see how we can get from here to there. The police establishment is deeply entrenched. Bringing in more women, more minorities just gives the bullies more targets, and the culture usually ends up chewing them thoroughly then spitting them out. Sometimes the solution is not to renovate the house, but to tear it down and build another one. A complicated problem, to be sure, with lots of nuance and shades of grey.

Which leads me to a digression. For photographers, black and white images can be wonderfully evocative with all the tones and shades bringing life to the subject. There's a reason many portraits are done in black and white. Calgary recently started getting police vehicles in black and white instead of blue and white, and I was horrified. It's a blatant expression of the cops view of the world. Black and White. Us and them. Our way or else. It's a bad image to project.

Back to the retirement thing again. It shouldn't be any surprise that people that can retire, do. After all, why would you spend your time doing what other people tell you to do, when you can do what you want to do? Well, maybe you can't take a round the world cruise on the Queen Mary II cruise ship, not that many people want to do that these days, floating disease incubating petrie dishes that they are.

But many people are waking up to the idea that they don't really need to be making as much money as they do now, and that they don't really need to be buying all the stuff that they do now. They can figure out what they enjoy doing, and people now have no end of choices of things to try. Many of them need not be expensive.

Do not get me started on 'gold-plated pensions.' Just don't. Been there, done that, several times.

In many ways, life as a retiree is simpler. You can find your own patterns of life, going to bed when tired, waking up when you're ready to get out of bed, eating when you're hungry, napping in the afternoon if you want, and generally doing the things you enjoy doing. Maybe that's a hobby like painting, or volunteering for a cause you support, spending time with your family or friends, travelling (on hold, hopefully temporarily), or whatever. The whatever is limited to your own imagination.

Is all these people retiring a problem for their organizations? It shouldn't be. There's a saying that progress in the sciences happens one death at a time. Organizational change seems to happen one retirement at a time. The demographic information is obvious; personnel departments have known for years this wave of retirements was going to happen. If the organizations have problems from lack of planning, that's their problem; they deserve to be swept away in all the changes happening in the world.

No photos today, just the usual suspects.

Of the Day
Michelle

Curtis

Flowers

Driftwood

Ribbon Creek

Me