Fairfax County Police Watch: National Police Misconduct NewsFeed Daily Recap 12-10-10

Its time to have a national conversation about the national police problem

Today's idiot behavior report is brought to you by Chief Roarererer who wants to remind you "If it concerns us and what we do.....Its a secret"

Our leader

The whole drunk/drugged up cop issue...which really is the cause of all these problems

A Flathead County MT deputy who was accused of hitting a man while he was backing out of a VFW parking lot has pled no contest to a DUI charge that came about when he was stopped later that night.

A New Orleans LA cop was sentenced to probation and has resigned in a plea deal for DUI and battery charges. The officer also gave a public apology to the arresting officer for spitting in his face while being arrested.

A Kern County CA deputy has accepted a plea deal for being under influence of meth while in possession of firearm… apparently because he was doing the meth while on-duty.

A Providence RI narcotics detective has pled guilty to conspiracy and other charges in a drug case involving 4 other officers and 20 other people.

A Sunset Hills MO cop has pled guilty to 4 counts of involuntary manslaughter and a felony assault charge over a fatal DUI accident that killed four teens.

A Dallas TX cop has been placed on administrative leave after being arrested on a drunk driving charge while off-duty.

A Cleveland OH cop has been charged with two drunk driving charges after crashing into another drunk driver while off-duty. Not quite sure how he got two charges over one incident though.

A New Haven CT cop remains on duty after being arrested on drunk driving charges when he was stopped for running a red light.

Murder

Wilmington DE has settled a lawsuit for an unspecified sum to the widow of a man who was shot to death by a cop because he wouldn’t remove his hands from his pockets during a raid… the suit alleged that he was unable to comply because he was already incapacitated by a taser at the time.

Three of the five New Orleans Louisiana cops on trial for their roles in the shooting death of Henry Glover have been found guilty. Glover was unarmed when he was shot at a distance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Officers subsequently covered-up that death by burning a car he was transported in with his body inside and then falsified reports to hide what happened.

An Orange County FL deputy has been cited for failing to use due care and failing to use emergency lights & siren in a crash that left one person dead.

A Washoe County NV deputy has been charged with vehicular manslaughter for fatally striking a bicyclist with his patrol SUV while responding to a call without lights or sirens.

Attempted Murder

A Clackamas County OR deputy is the subject of a lawsuit alleging that he used excessive force when he tasered a mentally ill man in the chest then failed to assist him when he stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest due to the shock, causing him to suffer brain damage due to lack of oxygen.

Standard white trash-cop behavior

A Reedsburg WI cop has been cited for disorderly conduct after an investigation into his role in an off-duty bar fight.

A Houston TX cop has been suspended for 10 days without pay for posting on Facebook that she was going to arrest the next Honduran that she caught looking at her the wrong way and other apparently inflammatory content.

A Rhode Island State trooper has been sentenced to time served and must not try to regain employment as an officer in a plea deal for assaulting his neighbor twice in one day back in 2004.

A Sarasota FL cop has been fired on allegations that he misused police databases when he looked up information on a man who was involved in an ongoing dispute with the officer’s cousin and that the information he found was then used as part of a violent home invasion assault on that man. The complaint goes on to allege that the officer then lied about what he did when confronted by investigators looking into that home invasion.

A Volusia County FL sheriff’s captain has retired rather than face an investigation into why he drove his son away from a fatal accident that he caused while it was under investigation, which prevented his son from being tested for alcohol use.

Salt Lake City UT police are accused of falsely arresting a woman for hitting traffic cop. She claims the evidence shows she couldn’t have hit anyone due to the way her SUV was parked and the positioning of the police vehicles there. Apparently the traffic cop has a history of trying to file bad disability claims and she filed one over the alleged incident here too.

A Bossier Parish LA deputy has been suspended for 1 week without pay using her status as an officer to force a merchant into giving a relative a refund on an appliance that was bought at his shop, then giving him a fake name when he asked for it.

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.