Fairfax County Police Watch: Boston Cop Allegedly Grabbed Phone From Person Recording Arrest

In Massachusetts, filming the police in action isn’t illegal.

By Steve Annear | Boston Daily |

A motorist traveling through the city who happened upon an arrest in progress alleges a Boston Police officer took away his phone and damaged it after the cop caught him recording the incident. In Massachusetts, it’s legal to record officers in public.

According to a YouTube user—he was identified as “Max Bickford” on the site “Photography Is Not a Crime”—who uploaded the footage on October 15, after the arresting officer allegedly “slammed” the suspect into the street “right in front” of him, he approached Bickford and snatched his phone from his hands, claiming that it contained “evidence of a crime.”

At that point, the video stops recording, but the confrontation with the officer reportedly continued.

“Then the officer refused to give my phone or his name to me. He threw my phone back at me resulting in damage to my property. He also wiped his blood on me on purpose. I was then detained illegally,” Bickford claimed in the details posted to YouTube about the interaction with the policeman.

In the video, a suspect can be seen on the ground, near the spilt where drivers can gain access to the Pike or Interstate 93, with his shirt pulled over his head. The context and reason for the suspect’s apprehension is unclear, but in the footage the officer repeatedly says to Bickford, who stopped his moped in the middle of traffic to record the situation, “thanks for your help” in a sarcastic tone. After moving the suspect to the curb, the officer then confronts Bickford.

A call made to the Boston Police about the incident with Bickford was not immediately returned. Bickford also didn’t return a request for comment when reached through his YouTube account on Wednesday.

However, recording the police in a public setting, when a phone or other device is in full view, is not illegal in Massachusetts, and the law is on the side of the person behind the lens.

According to the state’s wiretap statute, secretly recording any oral communication is frowned upon, but a court recently ruled that people have a constitutional right to openly use a device to film incidents such as a police activity in a public area, so long as they aren’t interfering with an officer’s duties.

That constitutional right was made apparent following a settlement reached in 2012 between a lawyer and the Boston Police Department. At that time, the city was told to pay Simon Glik $170,000 after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that Glik did not violate the law when he pulled out his phone on Boston Common five years prior to record officers in a scuffle with a suspect in the park. The court said it was Glik’s constitutional right to capture the incident, setting a precedent for similar instances in the future.

“Under the First Circuit’s Glik [versus] Cunniffe decision, whose holding was just again reaffirmed this year in Gericke [versus] Weare, individuals have ‘a constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public,’” said Christopher Ott, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the organization that backed Glik after he was charged for violating the state’s wiretapping laws. “This encompasses the ‘peaceful recording of an arrest in a public space that does not interfere with the police officers’ performance of their duties.’ As the court held, this right ‘is a basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment.'”

The video of the recent altercation between Bickford and police can be seen below:

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.