Fairfax County Police Watch: Why don't we call the Board of Supervisors Rohers bitches and get it over with?

Supervisors Delay Decision on More Police Oversight

Leader of citizen's group blasts lack of public involvement

Oakton Patch
By Will Sommer
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March 31, 2011

The Board of Supervisors delayed action on a proposal to increase oversight of the Fairfax County Police Department on Tuesday, instead sending the proposal to the Public Safety Committee.

Under the proposal from County Executive Anthony Griffin, citizens who felt unsatisfied with a police investigation of a complaint about an officer or an officer-involved shooting could petition Griffin for a separate investigation by the county's Internal Audit Office.
Currently, most complaints and officer-involved shootings are only investigated internally by FCPD.
“I don’t believe that we have achieved consensus," Supervisor Gerald Hyland (D-Mount Vernon), the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, said, adding that he expected the board to eventually reach agreement.
Sending the proposal to the Public Safety Commitee would allow for more input from citizens and give the supervisors another chance to hear from FCPD Chief David Rohrer, according to Hyland. The board accepted his proposal unanimously.
The drive to provide other avenues for investigation into FCPD comes in the wake of several controversial shootings by FCPD officers, including the January 2006 shooting death of an unarmed man in Fair Oaks and the November 2009 shooting of an unarmed, bipolar man in Fort Hunt.
Nicholas Beltrante, a Mount Vernon resident and former homicide detective in Washington's Metropolitan Police Department, thought there was something wrong with the FCPD internal investigations of the shootings.
"There have been a number of shooting deaths of Fairfax County citizens which I did not feel were justified," he said.
In April 2010, he formed the Virginia Citizens Association for Police Accountability, which advocates for FCPD incidents to be investigated by a review board that includes county residents with no connection to the government, rather than the Internal Audit Office.
On Wednesday, Beltrante criticized how the Board of Supervisors is handling the investigation process.
“There is no citizen participation in the process,” he said. Beltrante said his group will now send letters to each supervisor asking for a meeting, although he says previous requests for a meeting with Hyland have gone unanswered.

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.