City spends to fight injured officers’ claims

Atlanta legal records show the city has spent more than $171,100 in the past five years fighting the medical claims of five severely injured police officers, claims that were almost always ultimately paid.

The officers —- four in wheelchairs, one brain-damaged —- say the city has systematically challenged and delayed services and treatments they need to survive, especially over the past two years.

“When they decide to fight something, the cost is irrelevant,” said Ryan Phinney, a 43-year-old paraplegic who was injured when his squad car was T-boned in 1989.

The officers have complained that the city —- through the workers’ compensation administrator it has hired —- fights and delays claims until just before the two sides are to appear in workers’ compensation court. Then they are settled.

Phinney said this occurred again this week when the city agreed to pay about $44,000 to make his home handicapped accessible and $6,000 in home health-care costs. The case was due to go to court Tuesday, but the city agreed Monday to pay, he and his attorney said.

Records show the city spent $69,608 on legal fees since March 2007 fighting claims made by Phinney. He said three years of legal bills going back to 2004 were missing. Those records were not made available by the city. It is not clear what is the monetary total of the officers’ claims.

The other four injured officers are: J.J. Biello, a quadriplegic since 1987 when he was shot in a restaurant robbery; retired detective Bob Buffington, shot in the spine in 1977; retired officer Pat Cocciolone, shot point-blank in the head by a man who killed her partner; and Detective Richard Williams, paralyzed 22 years ago when he was shot in the back. Williams still works for Atlanta police in the school system.

The city records were reviewed by police Sgt. Scott Kreher, local president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, who obtained them Tuesday through the state’s Open Records Act. The IBPO made a video about the injured officers’ cases and posted it on its Web site.

Kreher said he was befuddled by the seven-inch stack of the legal invoices he obtained. “It costs thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars to fight these and then the city pays” the claims, he said. “I’m not aware that the city has won a case.”

John Sweet, a lawyer who represents four of the officers, said he cannot remember the city ultimately prevailing in any of these cases. He said the city must balance projecting a hard line to ward off unwarranted cases and agreeing to pay when it should.

“The [city’s] style of chronic denial, which you have seen lately, makes you wonder if that judgment was well executed,” he said.

City officials did not respond to e-mails or phone calls for comment on the legal bills.

Kreher, who went through the records at the city’s legal office Tuesday, is on his third week of paid suspension from the force after saying at a city council hearing that “I want to beat [Mayor Shirley Franklin] in the head with a baseball bat sometimes” because of the city’s treatment of the officers.

Kreher later said he was frustrated and apologized for the statement. He was ordered to take a psychological exam, which he said took 15 minutes and declared him fit for duty. He said he has not heard from his supervisors about what happens next. Mayor Franklin said she felt threatened by the remark and said she would ask state and federal officials to see if any charges were warranted.

The Fulton County district attorney’s office could not be reached for comment Tuesday; the U.S Attorney’s spokesman said the office does not comment even if it receives complaints.

The IBPO has said that Franklin’s statement was a ploy to draw attention away from the disabled officers. A union official brought up a statement Franklin made in 2002 regarding bad publicity caused by her ex-husband, then a contractor at the airport.

“Do I talk to David Franklin? Yes,” she said then. “Do I know him? Yes. [But] I’m clearly on record that for my political career, I’d have been better off to shoot him than to divorce him.”

On Tuesday, Franklin said her comment and Kreher’s were in no way alike.

“I didn’t propose shooting him but rather the campaign rumors and harassment about my relationship with David as a friend and father of our three children suggested to me that people expected me to shoot him,” she said in an e-mail.

“I never suggested that I would or was angry enough with him to shoot or harm him.”