We Never Imagined This

Editor's note: Meet Dan who served the citizens of Dallas for 32 years. Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, the city of Dallas and the bogus group called Taxpayers For A Fair Pension want you to believe he is greedy, self-serving and overpaid. The truth is entirely different.

“Of all the perils that we withstood, we never imagined that this would be one of them."

From an early age, all Dan wanted to be was a police officer. In fact, his mom still has the letter he wrote for a school assignment about his dream job: to be the police chief of the small town where he grew up.

Dan was not quite 21 years old when he hired on the Dallas Police Department in 1979. After serving for a time in patrol as a rookie, he and a female officer were tapped to be undercover officers in a Dallas high school.  It was the first operation in Dallas of its kind and tensions were high. The two young officers did an outstanding job, making quite a few arrests along the way.

Not long after that assignment, Dan became a member of the undercover world again, this time on the streets in narcotics.

“This is a position that isolates you from your friends and family,” said his wife Diane. “You don’t look like yourself and cannot act like yourself.  If you aren’t careful, it can eat away at you. He could not always go home, but instead stayed in an undercover apartment.”

“There is no normal home life,” his wife said. “When you do see your family, they don’t know who you are anymore. The chances of a deal going bad and someone getting hurt are really high. It is an assignment that takes a toll. “

Dan’s career continued and he made patrol sergeant.

“He loved working in patrol. It was his first love,” she said. “He wanted to make sure that citizens weren’t afraid. He wanted to chase bad guys.”

In his 32 year career, Dan  established the K9 bomb dog unit at Love Field.  A unit that, while he was its supervisor, never failed a TSA evaluation. He mentored many young officers along the way. He also created FIT (field intelligence teams) that supported the patrol units during major events.

He retired in June of 2011. 

“I made a decent living, so we deferred most of his salary to the DROP account, thinking we would need that money more in our later years,” Diane said. “About a year after he retired, I was diagnosed with cancer. Thank God he was retired, because he did everything and I do mean everything.  Every appointment, every surgery, every day, he was there for me.  Just like he was there for his troops and for the citizens of Dallas.”

And now, after all that,  she said, “We are being told that all the money we had saved --which is absolutely not millions --will be taken. That the pension that he thought he has secured for his family may not be there after all.”

Dan like his fellow officers isn’t eligible for Social Security.

And like many of his fellow officers,  Dan “is too beat up from the rigors of the job to even contemplate getting a new one now,” his wife said. “And why should he need to? He gave it all to the City of Dallas. It’s time for the city to stand up, man up, and stand by their police and firefighters.”

Citizens need to learn the true facts and not be misled by the propaganda being disseminated  by the Taxpayers For A Fair Pension and those who helped create this disaster, she said.

Dan and Diane's situation remains tenuous.

“Like many of our colleagues, the plan at the end of the year was to take what we needed to pay property and income tax from the pension in a lump sum withdrawal--except that option wasn’t available to us this year,” Diane said. “So, we scrambled and are scrambling to make payments, cover bills, make ends meet.”

If Diane were not still working, she said, they may have lost their home. Her plans to retire in the next five years have been put on hold.

"Frighteningly, that prospect is not off the table," she said. "What an insulting way to treat those who put their very lives on the line every day for decades.”

#PoundOfFlesh, #savethepension, #backtheblue