Fairfax County Police Watch: D.C. group offers support to Fairfax police watchdogs

By Tom Jackman

The District's Office of Police Complaints, a civilian agency which handles complaints about police conduct in Washington, has offered its assistance to Fairfax County as it considers whether to launch a similar entity in Virginia's largest county.

A citizens group which formed in Fairfax last year, the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability, has been lobbying for an independent agency to monitor the Fairfax police in the wake of fatal shootings and traffic accidents involving Fairfax officers. After the group actively pushed the county's Board of Supervisors to consider the idea, the board turned to Fairfax Police Chief David M. Rohrer for his thoughts. The chief said last May he would look into a process for how such a review mechanism might be structured and report back to the board.

While the coalition was waiting for that, its founder Nicholas Beltrante, a retired Metropolitan Police Department officer, contacted the District's Office of Police Complaints for its best practices materials, as well as information on how other citizen review agencies work. The OPC's executive director, Philip K. Eure, is the immediate past president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, and said that Fairfax was one of the largest jurisdictions in the country without any form of independent police review.

Eure said Fairfax police have not contacted him, though he has extensive knowledge of how such agencies work nationwide. He has been consulted regularly by groups throughout the United States and abroad seeking to create or improve citizen oversight of police.

"The District of Columbia government and our agency," Eure said in a news release, "are ready and willing to also provide information about independent police review to Fairfax County government and police officials. As we've learned, there's a steep learning curve in this field and the District has greatly benefited from reaching out to other citizen review agencies over the years."

Merni Fitzgerald, the chief spokeswoman for Fairfax County, said Friday that County Executive Anthony Griffin was expected to make a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors about forming such an entity at one of the board's two meetings in March.

Beltrante said he didn't know Eure had offered his assistance to Fairfax, and said he welcomed it heartily. Beltrante pointed to two seven-figure dollar settlements paid by Fairfax in the last year, to settle lawsuits filed by the families of people killed by Fairfax officers, as evidence that officers' misconduct imposes financial costs on county residents.

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.