Last week’s news, from The
Washington Post, that the survivors of a Springfield man have been forced to
sue the Fairfax County government in order to obtain information about the
police shooting that left him dead will come as no particular surprise to
anyone who has tried to pry loose information, even of the most benign nature,
from the county police.
There are two sides to every
story, and there is not enough information related to the August 2013 incident
to say whether the shooting of an unarmed man was justified, or not.
What we do know is that, with
increasing regularity, police across the nation, and in some cases locally,
appear to be taking a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to their
job, often leaving innocent people dead or seriously injured.
Law enforcement is not easy in
an increasingly urban environment like Northern Virginia, but residents have
the right to be concerned about (a) the increasingly paramilitary nature of
law-enforcement training and equipment, and (b) the trait of law-enforcement
agencies in the area to hide behind legalities in refusing to provide a full
accounting when things go awry.
Having watched both of these
tendencies unfold in recent years across Fairfax, we have a simple question:
Where is Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova on this issue, and where
are her board colleagues?
The county’s elected leadership
has the ability to force a change in attitude toward policing, and to address
valid public concerns that what should be a culture of serve-and-protect
appears to be morphing into one of us-vs.-them – and not just in places like
Ferguson, Mo.
Bulova and her nine colleagues
on the Board of Supervisors will be asking voters next year to bring them back
for new terms. Between now and then, they’d better come up with leadership on
the issue of transparency in the county’s public-safety arena. The public is
taking notice of the deficiencies.
