Representative Andy Barr introduced a bill to Congress earlier this week that would expand the federal Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program.
The program gives cash benefits to families of police officers, firefighters and other first responders who are killed or disabled while on the job. The Chief Herbert D. Proffitt Act would expand the program to also include certain officers killed after retirement.
That includes those whose deaths came from attacks related to arrests they made during their career.
A release from Barr’s office says the bill was named after a former Tompkinsville Police Department Chief who was killed in retaliation for an arrest made a decade earlier.
Barr, a Republican, reintroduced the bill to Congress alongside Dan Goldman, a Democratic Representative from New York. He previously filed a similar bill last year.
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