Fairfax County Police Watch: Dallas Cop Arrested for Sexually Assaulting Prostitute

By Stephen Young

Sunday morning, Dallas police officer David Kattner was arrested for allegedly using his authority to coerce a woman into having sex with him while he was in uniform. An arrest affidavit obtained by The Dallas Morning News says Kattner called a woman and told her to follow him to the 9700 block of Webb Chapel Road in North Dallas. Once there, he allegedly forced her to have oral sex with him in his marked police car. He kept one of his hands on his gun throughout the assault, the affidavit says.

Detectives in the area saw Kattner and the woman, according to police, and stopped the woman when she got out of the car. She told the detectives that the Sunday morning attack was the third time Kattner assaulted her. According to the News, the affidavit does not identify the alleged victim as a prostitute specifically, but says Kattner contacted "known female prostitutes" in order to force them to have sex with him while he was working a second job. The woman, police say, said Kattner showed her her outstanding warrants and threatened to harm the woman's daughter if the woman didn't do what Kattner wanted.

Kattner is the second Dallas cop in the last two years arrested for illegal activity with sex workers.

Jose Luis Bedoy, a former Dallas vice cop, resigned in 2013 after being arrested for trading police information for sex. When he was caught, he told the woman he gave information to that she should leave town and get rid of her cell phone. He was convicted of obstructing a federal grand jury investigation in October.

In 2010, rookie police officer Jeffrey Thorn was fired for allegedly forcing two prostitutes to have sex with him during the same shift so they could avoid arrest.

It's worth noting the Kattner was part of a group of five police officers who sued D Magazine for defamation after a 2007 article that accused them of issuing tickets to prostitutes and the homeless for offenses that didn't happen so the cops could later pick them up on the felony charge of not paying misdemeanor tickets. The cops lost the lawsuit.

Kattner has been placed on administrative leave pending the result of the investigation. He is assigned to the Northeast Patrol Division and is 26-year DPD veteran.

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.