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Police Hero in 1994 Is Now a Bitter Retiree
By:
Joseph P. Fried
It has been a hard fall from acclaim. In 1994, Police Officer Arlene Beckles, off duty and a patron in a Brooklyn beauty salon, shot three gunmen, one fatally, who came in to rob the place. With her gun emptied, she escaped death when one of the wounded men put his gun to her head and pulled the trigger twice. Each time, the gun jammed. Amid headlines, Officer Beckles was promoted to detective, and days later Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani officiated at her wedding. But in 1996, she was suspended from duty. The Police Department said she was a malingerer, calling in sick too often. Detective Beckles said persistent pain from back and knee injuries from the 1994 encounter had led to the sick days. Later, she said that severe anxiety and depression stemming from the trauma of the confrontation had left her unable to do police work. In 2000, she retired with an ordinary disability pension: half the amount of her $55,000-a-year salary, subject to taxes. She had been refused a line-of-duty disability pension — three-quarters of salary, nontaxable — which she had sought based on her mental condition. These days, Ms. Beckles, 38, is still fighting for the larger pension. Her lawyer, Jeffrey L. Goldberg, is appealing a court ruling in April that said that despite conflicting psychiatric evidence, there were no grounds to overturn the rejection of her line-of-duty pension application by the police medical and pension boards. The medical board had attributed her "depressive syndrome" to stresses like her faltering marriage, which has since ended in divorce. Ms. Beckles said recently that it was hard to swallow that "guns placed to your head, nightmares, flashbacks did not have anything to do with it." She expressed bitterness at the malingering accusation, saying pain from her injuries still kept her from holding a job. "I just cannot understand why they would decide to treat me that way," she said. Of her future, she said, "I take it one day at a time." A police spokesman, Detective Walter Burnes, said the department had no comment. Big Plans for Island Wind Up in Court Each side accuses the other of angling to cut competition. New York City has developed a plan to significantly upgrade Randalls Island, in the East River, long a sports and entertainment center. The deteriorated Downing Stadium, home over the years to events like concerts and professional soccer, was recently razed, and the plan includes a new 19,000-seat, $35 million amphitheater. But on June 14, that project hit a roadblock. A judge upheld a claim that bidding to select a builder and operator had to be reopened because the project had substantially changed, including a doubling in size, after the city had selected Quincunx, an affiliate of the entertainment management company Q Prime, for both roles. The claim was in a lawsuit by another company, Clear Channel Entertainment, which argued that the city had failed to "afford others the opportunity to submit competitive proposals" for what had become a "new project." The city's parks and recreation commissioner, Adrian Benepe, said last week that the court ruling would be appealed. Richard J. Davis, chairman of the Randalls Island Sports Foundation, contended that Clear Channel wanted to stop a project that would compete with two of its own sites, the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, N.Y., and the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J. FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Action on Aging distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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