Fairfax County Police Watch: Princeton parking officer suspended, reassigned after investigation into selective enforcement of meters

PRINCETON – A Princeton parking enforcement officer was suspended without pay for a month and reassigned after improperly dismissing a parking ticket, town administrator Bob Bruschi said today.
John Hughes is the second parking enforcement officer to be punished for not following the town's parking enforcement policy.
Parking enforcement officer Chris Boutote was fired on Monday for what town officials said was a selective enforcement of parking meters in Princeton’s central business district in exchange for certain goods. Boutote, a former borough police officer, collected a $4,400 monthly pension and earned $48,109 a year.
Hughes and Boutote were first suspended last month after the local news website Planet Princeton reported officers were not ticketing vehicles that displayed menus, shopping bags or other items with local store logos on their dashboards.
Planet Princeton reported that over several weeks observers saw vehicles with local store identifications remain at metered parking on streets near the central business district for up to 10 hours at a time without being ticketed, while other vehicles would be ticketed promptly if meters expired.
Virtually all metered parking in that area is for two hours or less, according to a town parking operations map.
Hughes, who earns $44,000 a year, was reassigned to one of the municipality's parking garages as an attendant and any future disciplinary action would result in a termination, Bruschi said in an e-mail.
The internal investigation that led to Hughes’s suspension did not lead to any conduct of selective enforcement, but found he bypassed proper procedure to dismiss a ticket originally issued by Boutote, Bruschi said.
"The ticket was one of the items that helped us gain further information as to what was taking place with parking enforcement officer Boutote and one of the downtown establishments," Bruschi said in the e-mail.
In that case a parking ticket was issued to a local business employee parked at an expired meter. The employee was someone who Boutote knew, Bruschi said.
Proper dismissal procedure requires a form to be filled out explaining the dismissal – in this case it was indicated the parking meter had malfunctioned. The town’s meter department is required to confirm malfunctions before tickets are dismissed, but Hughes allegedly bypassed that step and had the ticket dismissed by the court, Bruschi said. The meter did not malfunction, he added.
“It was a single incident, but we felt that a very strong message had to be sent that our procedures need to be followed by the letter of the law,” Bruschi said in an e-mail.

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.