Fairfax County Police Watch: 01/25/11

A Utah State Trooper repeatedly punched a 53-year-old woman in a car after a police chase has received a lot of play in the news. The trooper is now on paid leave while under investigation over the incident which occurred almost five months ago and the trooper claims he was using “distraction blows” because the woman refused to get out and was still trying to drive away after her car was blocked in and he was too close to use a taser.

A New York NY cop claims he accidentally shot an apparently unarmed 76-year-old man who was the father of the subject of a search warrant during a drug raid at a Queens apartment building, though there haven’t been any details released describing exactly how it was an accidental shooting.

A US Border Patrol agent is the subject of a lawsuit over the fatal cross-border shooting of a 15-year-old boy who was on the Mexican side of the border when he was shot. Border Patrol officials have claimed that the boy was among a group of teens who were throwing rocks at agents as justification for the deadly shooting but at least one alleged 3rd-party witness has contradicted that claim.

Four Lake Station IN cops are the subject of a lawsuit by a man claiming they used excessive force when they broke both of his arms during an arrest… To be honest I’m a bit on the fence about adding this one due to the absence of any details here and may remove it if more information comes out contradicting his claim. If anyone hears more about this one let me know.

An unknown number of Uniontown PA cops are accused of needlessly shooting a family’s dog seven times, six of which with handguns and once with a shotgun, after the owner of the dog called police to report a prowler that the dog apparently chased off.

At least two West Virginia State cops are being sued by a 63-year-old man and his wife who claim that the officers used excessive force on both of them while serving a warrant for the man’s arrest. They claim officers beat the husband on multiple occasions before and after arrest while they also dragged his wheelchair-bound wife across the ground, injuring her too. However, he also claims officers used anti-Semitic slurs against him during the beatings and some of the claims seem a bit questionable even for the problematic WV police. Police claim he was armed with a screwdriver or knife and had barricaded himself in the home and that his wife attacked and clawed at them, which also seems a stretch… It seems likely the truth is somewhere in between the two claims, but seemingly excessive anyway given the pair’s ages and condition.

A North Carolina trooper is still the subject of a criminal investigation eight months after he allegedly detained a woman without explanation in his cruiser during a traffic stop and exposed himself to her before releasing her without charge. The officer resigned after he was notified about the investigation about a month after the incident but details of the incident have only now gone public.

Details about how Chicago IL police arrested a woman for recording internal affairs officers she claims refused to take her complaint about an officer who allegedly raped her because she had violated that state’s wiretap laws by doing so came out this weekend in a report about that state’s laws that make it a felony to record the police. We recorded the passage of that law last year along with another case that will hopefully test that law. Both of the people we’ve tracked so far arrested over that law face up to 15 years in prison for it. While some may not think this is misconduct since it’s perfectly legal for the officers to arrest the woman based on that state’s laws, we do feel that the law in that state is a very serious threat to police accountability and transparency and how police apply that law in cases where it appears they are avoiding accountability by doing so should be tracked.

A Detroit MI cop is accused of refusing to help two women who struggled to detain a car burglar that they detained and tried to take back to the police station after the Detroit police never sent a unit out when they called. Apparently the officer, that the woman spotted while dragging the man in, refused to even get out of his car then took off after a college campus cop stopped to assist. The chief of police insists he’s looking into it.

Cleveland OH police detectives are accused of violating departmental rules and federal laws by improperly clearing 52 rape cases as closed without ever even identifying any suspects in those cases, just to make their case closure statistics look better than they were.

The now-former sheriff of Ramsey County MN is accused of lying when he claimed there were 33 active terrorist organizations in that county. The current sheriff is making the allegations after he tried to locate the studies and reports those claims were allegedly based on and, found nothing at all. It’s being claimed that the sheriff made up the information to secure funding for his anti-terrorism task force which was allegedly nothing more than some highly-paid officers sitting around searching the net and spying on groups such as PETA and the CUAPB (Communities United Against Police Brutality).

A Des Moines IA police lieutenant is on paid leave while he’s the subject of an unspecified investigation being conducted by a regional drug task force.

A Palatka FL cop has resigned after he was arrested on drunk driving charges with a .15BAC when he blew out the tires on his police cruiser after hitting several curbs.

A Washington County WV sheriff’s captain has resigned and filed for retirement benefits after he was placed on leave when medication was found to be missing from the jail where he was assigned as administrator and he was allegedly the only one with access to that medication.

Independence MO police supervisors were ruled to have misled the police chief and manufactured a case against a police sergeant in order to retaliate against him for voicing his concerns about staffing levels.

The sheriff of Osceola County IA is being sued by a former deputy who claims he was wrongfully fired in violation of his First Amendment rights for offering to testify in a civil case against the sheriff’s office in a case where a man was denied a gun permit because of his political views, which was also ruled a fist amendment violation.

The Seattle WA police union is in the news over articles in their newsletter, especially one that criticizes the city’s anti-profiling and anti-discrimination efforts in which city officials are called “the enemy”.

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.