Apropos the story about the police officer and football player, one aspect that always troubles me in cases like this is that the police officer has been put on temporary leave with pay. In other cases, cops have been accused of wrongdoing–including questionable shooting of a suspect, yet they receive pay while on temporary leave (i.e, they are getting paid, yet are doing no work for it).

My question is this: Why are these suspended/under suspicion cops receiving any pay when they are not working? Shouldn’t the proper procedure be that they don’t receive pay and then, if they are later found innocent, they receive the lost pay retroactively?

By the way, if they are ultimately found guilty, do they get to keep the pay that they earned while they were not working, but before they were found guilty?