By the time Roy Potter was 5, he knew his life’s calling. “I wanted to be a police officer, and I loved dogs,” he tells me. “So I would be a police officer with a dog.”
Potter joined the Metropolitan Police Department 18 years ago when he was 25. After four years on patrol, he became a K-9 officer. Midnight was his first dog.
“I loved every day of it,” he says. “I couldn’t believe I got paid to do this job.”
His plan was to get a few years under his belt and return home to be a K-9 cop in Ashland, Ky. “But I fell in love with a Fauquier County girl,” he says. Four children later, he’s a Washingtonian, with nearly two decades of policing in D.C.
Along the way he’s won a slew of awards, including a medal of valor for using his dog to track down a bad guy who had been terrorizing a Southwest neighborhood. But his knee took a beating, too.
The first injury came on an icy January day in 2006. Potter and his dog responded to a call about a burglar. The dog caught a scent and pulled Potter across an icy patch. He slipped and tore cartilage in his left knee. Doctors gave him the option of surgery or physical therapy. He chose therapy to get back on the job.
About a year later, he and his dog were chasing a carjacking suspect through the woods. His knee went out again. He opted for a cortisone shot and went back to full duty. In training he wrecked it again, had surgery, returned to work. But in June 2010, he reinjured the knee. Racked with pain, he couldn’t go back on duty.
“I was devastated,” he says.
Three doctors recommended Potter undergo total knee replacement. In August, a doctor with the Police & Fire Clinic told Potter to return in a month for “pre-op.” But when Potter tried to schedule the operation, he was told the clinic would not authorize the procedure and had recommended he be retired.
“I was totally shocked,” Potter tells me. “I wanted to keep working.”
At a retirement board hearing on Sept. 8, clinic Dr. Roxana Diba testified that a PFC panel meets to determine whether to approve treatment for officers and “takes into account the costs of the recommended procedure,” according to Potter’s attorney. Since replacing Potter’s knee was a “quality of life” matter, and he might not be able to return to duty, the procedure was not cost-effective, Diba explained.
The hearing on whether Potter will be forced to retire is scheduled to continue later this month.
“What’s next?” asks Potter’s lawyer, Anthony Conti, “a death panel?”
Conti has asked Chief Cathy Lanier to intervene. “Nothing should be too costly for an officer that has sacrificed his health for the Department,” he wrote.
Conti also asked Inspector General Charles Willoughby to investigate, arguing that D.C. law mandates treatment for cops with job-related injuries.
Potter faces a grim future without MPD support. He would bear the cost of surgery, lose many months of work during recovery and be forced to hit the job market to provide for his family.
His desire? “Have surgery and get back to work.”
Who needs a panel to know that’s a just result?
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
