Once again, the Washington Post is the only main line news organization in the area asking the right questions about the police.
We have to disagree with the Post on several points.
Police oversight won’t change a damn thing in Fairfax County. In fact, police oversight, nationally, is a failure and the facts are there to prove it, check it out. The police politicize the boards and within a few years, the oversight commissions are useless.
No, oversight will not fix the national police problem. And that’s what we have, a national police problem. The cops, who have more power than ever before, still live in 1955 and they ain’t changing. ...and here’s the scary part...there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it and they know.
We have a national police problem in America created by thousands of police departments that employee tens of thousands of people of varying degrees of professionalism.
Policing has grown into a multibillion-dollar business that we have no control over and we pay for it. Local governments pay at least one billion dollars a year to settle lawsuits created by blatant, avoidable, acts of stupidity and cruelty by the police. As a result, teachers are laid off, schools suffer, roads go unrepaired, parks are filthy, the uninsured go untreated and homeless and poor go without and the quality of life and the promise of America takes another step backwards.
It doesn’t matter if one of these things happens or if all of them happen, the point is it shouldn’t happen at all. But it does happen, again and again and again and all because some punk with attitude was hired by the local police.
We have no mechanisms in place to check the booming police industry and that’s just foolish because once people and institutions get power, they never give it back. Stop and think about it, do you really think Rohrer has forgotten to look into establishing a review panel?
Our elected officials, fearful of being accused of being soft on crime, are generally too terrified to step in and the US Justice Department is geared to indulging the cops with funding and studies.
In the case of the Fairfax County Police, enjoying a long-standing reputation for professionalism and scandal-free dealings with the public, the Post, in all due respect, is wrong. Read the departments history. The department, which is essentially only fifty years old, has been involved in a series of questionable shootings. Fairfax County cops have caused a race riot once. They raided bars to find drunks and then busted up several saloons. They’ve beaten up children, knocked the teeth out of an elderly janitor’s mouth for no reason, robbed banks, committed incest, arson and murder. They have repeatedly lied in court. To call the racist is to be kind....the facts are all found in past editions of the Washington Post and not at all difficult to find.
Regardless, the Post does a hell of a good job in setting the record straight where the Fairfax County Police are concerned and the paper deserves recognition for that.
What Fairfax County needs is a new police chief who isn’t hired from within the department. The punk attitude that the Fairfax County Police are known for (not only by the citizens but also by other cops from around the area) comes from the top down. The force senses the disrespect and contempt that the brass has for the people and they mimic it.
Fire this guy who is running things...he’s a poopoo head..... and give the new chief a written directive to open the department up to the citizen’s questions about their practices.
Members of the Fairfax County Police SWAT team get down to the wild native beat of the Germanic sound before ending the evening with the traditional shooting of an unarmed citizen
Compelling police accountability
Friday, December 17, 2010
FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE enjoy a long-standing reputation for professionalism and scandal-free dealings with the public they are sworn to protect. However, the department's recent track record for accountability in a few cases involving shootings by police officers suggests there is room for improvement.
In one such case, the county police have remained tight-lipped about the fatal shooting 13 months ago of David Masters, a carpenter and former Army Green Beret with bipolar disease. The police have been conducting an internal investigation into the shooting for a year, and they have yet to release findings. The officer who shot Mr. Masters has remained on the force at full pay, though he is limited to administrative duties.
The department has not adequately explained why the investigation has taken so long. The incident involved just a handful of officers, one of whom fired the shots that killed Mr. Masters as he sat alone and unarmed in his vehicle. Police officials, when asked when they might reach some sort of conclusion, have reacted with what amounts to a shrug. Some of Mr. Masters's loved ones are furious.
A group calling itself the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability, founded by a retired District police detective who lives in Fairfax, has urged the county to establish a citizens board empowered to review questionable incidents involving the police - particularly in cases of lethal force used by officers. The proposal has support from members of the county Board of Supervisors, which asked Fairfax Police Chief David M. Rohrer to look into establishing a review panel.
The next step is unclear, as is the county's approach. Fairfax police have made no effort to contact the national association that serves as a clearinghouse for information about how citizen review boards work. Nor have they contacted the Office of Police Complaints in the District, a 10-year-old body with considerable expertise and resources.
Dozens of police departments nationally, including plenty that are smaller than Fairfax's, have such oversight mechanisms. The most effective ones function independently of the police chain of command and have investigative muscle - even, in the case of the District's office, the power to issue subpoenas.
Judging from the less-than-forthright behavior of the Fairfax police in the Masters case, there is every reason to think that creating an external review body would be helpful, both as a means to shake loose information in response to reasonable allegations of police error, misconduct and abuse, and to encourage accountability.
