Fairfax County Police Watch: Elected leaders

Today, Radley Balko asked his readers an interesting question as to whether appointing or electing law enforcement leadership had anything to do with police misconduct. It was an interesting question so I decided to run some analysis on our data and see if there were any correlations between misconduct rates and leadership selection types.
The results were sort of interesting.
First, just looking at overall misconduct per capita rates the results appear to indicate that agencies with elected leaders have less misconduct. Our 2009 Annual Report indicated that the national police misconduct rate was a projected 980.64 officers per 100,000. When we segment that into local Police Departments and Sheriff’s Offices we find that Police departments where leaders are appointed had a misconduct rate of 990.09 per 100,000 while Sheriffs offices where leaders are elected had a misconduct rate of 644.14 per 100,000.
Our 2010 data is somewhat similar in the breakdown. While the overall misconduct rate was 977.98 per 100,000, police departments had a misconduct rate of 1082.04 per 100,000 and sheriff’s agencies had a misconduct rate of 706.74 per 100,000.
So, it would seem that elected officials do better than appointed officials. However, when we look at the number of agencies and leaders implicated in misconduct we see something different.
In 2009 our data indicated that 10.8% of police agencies had officers involved in police misconduct while 7.8% of sheriff’s departments had officers implicated in acts of misconduct. But, in 2010 14% of police agencies had officers implicated in misconduct and 18% of sheriff’s departments had officers implicated in misconduct. Additionally, in 2010, 2.5% of police chiefs were implicated in acts of misconduct while 3.5% of sheriffs were implicated in misconduct. So, when we examine the numbers by agency the picture is a bit more muddled.
However, I personally think that, more importantly than how law enforcement leaders are selected, the laws and policies that govern those leaders and the people they lead are at least as equally important, if not more so. After all, even if you have a good leader in place, what good is it if state laws and local union agreements make it impossible for that leader to hold officers accountable for acts of misconduct?

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.