Fairfax County Police Watch: National Police Misconduct NewsFeed November 11-15

$71,031,500: This is how much the cops have cost their communities so far in November 2010....and the months not over yet

We need a national conversation about the police, who are now a national problem.

Barberton Ohio has settled a lawsuit for $5,250,000 to a man who claimed police withheld exculpatory evidence that would have prevented him from being wrongfully imprisoned for for 7 years when he was convicted for murdering and raping his mother-in-law and raping his 6-year-old niece. He was freed after DNA evidence showed it was the neighbor’s boyfriend who did it instead.

A Montgomery County Maryland cop was fined $185 for speeding when he hit a 12-year-old kid with his cruiser and left him with severe brain damage and paralyzed from his neck down. That case was also in our recap yesterday as it cost the county $400,000 in a civil suit settlement.

Cook County Illinois has settled a class action lawsuit for a stunning $55,300,000 sum for which the bulk will go to anywhere from 250,000 up to about 400,000 people who were improperly strip searched at jail, many of which were stripped and then verbally degraded by guards and deputies in groups as large as 100 at a time. The current sheriff blames the former for the practice and says he solved it by using the same scanners the TSA uses to see through the clothes of airline passengers… welcome to prison-air.

Denver Colorado has settled a lawsuit for $140,000 to a mother and her three children who were injured when a cop hit their car with a police cruiser he was speeding in without his lights or siren activated.

Roswell New Mexico has settled a lawsuit for $1,000,000 to the family of a man who died from positional asphyxia after being tasered and peppersprayed when police took him into custody for an involuntary mental health evaluation

Wichita Kansas has settled a lawsuit for $925,000 to a man who had to be hospitalized for 6 weeks due to internal bleeding and respiratory failure after a cop threw him onto the trunk of a car for questioning the arrest of another man.

Ventura County California has settled suit for $87,500 to a man who was cleaning a county building when he was injured by a police dog that picked up his scent while it was being trained at the same time in that building.

Whitley County KY has lost a $6.28 million jury award to a man who was pistol whipped & beaten by a deputy for buying a gun the deputy’s son stole from him.

Cuyahoga County OH has settled suit for $1.5 million to a man who was shot in the face when he opened his door at the same time as a SWAT team was preparing to raid his home.

Moss Point MS has settled a lawsuit filed by the ACLU for $50k to a man & his sister who were beaten, tasered & peppersprayed during a warrantless search of their home.

Riverside County CA settled a lawsuit filed by the ACLU for $99k to black barbers who claimed that deputies used code enforcement checks as a pretext to perform illegal searches of their shops and that it was a form of racial profiling since other salons weren’t targetted.

Morrogh finds cop he doesn’t love. In other news, hell freezes.

Probe of fatal police shooting goes to federal authorities

By Justin Jouvenal/Post

The Fairfax County prosecutor has turned over the investigation of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Springfield man to federal authorities, citing complications with the five-month-old case.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has agreed to continue the probe into the death of 46-year-old John Geer, who was shot during a standoff with Fairfax County police in August. No one has been charged in the incident.

“There is a conflict of interest that has arisen in the case,” Morrogh said Thursday. “And there is a second potential conflict of interest that has arisen out of my office. . . . This is the prudent thing to do.”

Morrogh declined to describe the nature of the conflicts because the investigation is ongoing. The U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday that it could not confirm or deny any investigation or comment on pending investigations.

Police went to Geer’s Pebble Brook Court home on Aug. 29 because of a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer’s father, Don Geer, said his son was upset because his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had decided to leave him.

John Geer had thrown his girlfriend’s belongings in the front yard. She called police and told them that Geer had a firearm. Police said they tried for about 50 minutes to persuade Geer to leave the home, but he refused.

Don Geer said he watched the climax of the encounter. He said that he could not hear what officers were saying to his son but that he saw him standing with empty hands resting on top of a screen door at the home’s entrance.

At some point, John Geer began to slowly lower his hands and an officer opened fire, hitting Geer in the chest, his father said. Geer retreated inside and closed the door. A SWAT team eventually entered the home and found Geer dead.

Don Geer said detectives later told him that his son did not have a gun on him at the time of the shooting but that there was a holstered handgun a couple of steps from the front door.

Don Geer said it appeared to him that the shooting was unjustified, but he was unsure what to make of the probe being turned over to federal authorities.

“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad — if I had a better idea of why they are doing it, I could form an opinion,” he said.

Geer and friends of his son have been critical of how long the investigation has taken, but Morrogh said police and prosecutors were working to explore all the evidence. He did not think federal prosecutors would have to start from scratch.

“No one wants these things to linger on,” Morrogh said.

Our ink will outlast his career

Under the reign of former Chief of Police Rhorer the Fairfax County Police arrested a man for not wearing clothes in his house while he made coffee, set up an eye doctor on a gambling charge and then used the SWAT team to kill him. An investigation into the charge that the Doctor’s primary clients were cops has never been investigated. The police gunned down an emotionally unstable man because cop who shot him wrongly assumed the man was trying to escape. He wasn’t. The cops also shot dead four other citizens under highly questionable circumstances. The department under Rhorer was sued multiple times by citizens. So did they fire Rhorer? Naw they promoted him. According to news reports Rhorer draws a salary of $191,168 per year as Deputy Fairfax County Executive as well as a concurrent pension from the Fairfax County police of $173000 per year.

Occupation by force

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, nearly one in five Fairfax residents (17.5 percent) is of Asian descent while Hispanics make up nearly 16 percent of Fairfax’s overall population. Those numbers drop considerably when applied to the Fairfax County Police Department, where only 4.3 percent of officers are Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. White officers make up 84 percent of Fairfax County’s 1,360-member police department, significantly higher than the county’s general population (54 percent white). Almost 90% of the force lives outside the county.