Fairfax County Police Watch: The officer Christian Chamberlain Award for “Fuck you, I’ll get away with it anyway” Fairfax County police . Police brutality

The officer Christian Chamberlain Award for “Fuck you, I’ll get away with it anyway” Fairfax County police . Police brutality

Federal Police Brutality Probe Leads To Wall In Shopping Mall

Meriden, CT, USA

The federal investigation into police brutality allegations against the son of the Meriden police chief has led authorities to a wall in a security office in the Westfield Meriden Square Mall.

Sources told The Courant this part of the investigation stems from a July 2010 case in which officer Evan Cossette arrested of 17-year-old Milan McGarrah on shoplifting charges.

McGarrah was caught by security officers at the Sears department store in the mall stealing three pairs of bluejeans, according to a police report.

Cossette was the first officer to respond to the security office, where McGarrah was being held. In an interview with The Courant this week, McGarrah said that Cossette entered the office and handcuffed him.

McGarrah admitted that he started giving Cossette some verbal abuse at which point, McGarrah said, Cossette slammed him against the wall.

"He threw me against the wall while I was handcuffed and I hit my head,'' McGarrah said. "I was saying stuff to him but nothing that merited getting my head slammed into the wall."

McGarrah said that he had no visible injuries from hitting the wall, although he was dazed. He was eventually charged with shoplifting.

The small security office at Sears contains a desk and three chairs wedged against the wall opposite the desk. On Wednesday, the head of security declined to comment on the case or on whether investigators had taken anything from the office.

The brown office wall did contain a noticeable white square - about three feet by three feet- that had been replastered but not repainted. When asked about the hole in the wall, the security director said he couldn't comment. Sources said investigators removed a piece of the wall.

The police report of McGarrah's arrest, filed by officer Donald Huston, who is listed as the arresting officer paints a different story. The report states that McGarrah was uncooperative, wouldn't sit down and constantly yelled that he would kick "both officer's ass" if they took the handcuffs off.

The police report said that McGarrah fought all the way into the police cruiser and until he was booked at the station.

Ironically Huston is one of the officers who wrote a letter to City Manager Lawrence Kendzoir months later complaining about disparate treatment within the police department and how Evan Cossette wasn't disciplined like other officers because his father, Jeffry Cossette, is the police chief.

Federal and state authorities convened a grand jury in April to investigate brutality allegations against Evan Cossette after that letter was filed and the videotape of an incident between Cossette and arrestee was released.

The grand jury investigation originally focused on a May 2010 video of Evan Cossette pushing a handcuffed inmate backward into a jail cell. The inmate, Pedro Temich, hit his head on a cement bench and passed out on the floor bleeding.

Evan Cossette is shown on the tape walking into the cell several times and moving Temich around before taking his handcuffs off just before ambulance personnel arrived. Evan Cossette was given a letter of reprimand in that case.

Two more brutality claims were later made against him. One case involved Robert Methvin, who Evan Cossette acknowledged kneeing in the face in October 2010 after police had been called to Methvin's home because of a loud argument.

Methvin filed a brutality complaint with internal affairs but Sgt. Leonard Caponigro found the allegations baseless after a six-minute interview with Evan Cossette in which he told the chief's son not to worry because he was "just going through the motions." Caponigro has since retired.

In the third case, Evan Cossette used a Taser to subdue Joseph G. Bryans in the parking lot of the Midstate Medical Center in January after Bryan had walked out of the emergency room angry that he wasn't being treated quickly.

At least two of those men, Bryan and Methvin, have appeared before the grand jury investigation into the police department. McGarrah said he didn't file an internal affairs complaint against Cossette because he just wanted the case to go away.

McGarrah said that he has not gone before the grand jury, but that he was interviewed a few months ago by FBI agents. McGarrah said he received community service.

Had enough? Write to the Speaker of the House, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515 and demand federal hearings into the police problem in America. Demand mandatory body cameras for cops, one strike rule on abuse, and a permanent DOJ office on Police 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

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.

The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits some one else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. Louis D. Brandeis, part of his dissent in the case "Olmstead v. United States", 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928)