Fairfax County Police Watch: What we don’t know about police killings

By Washington Post Editorial Board

AFTER 24-YEAR-OLD Albert Jermaine Payton was fatally shot outside his Southeast home by D.C. police officers, the department issued a terse news release. The man, according to the statement, had approached officers brandishing a knife and was shot when he did not comply with their order to drop the weapon.

That was more than two years ago. No other information — the number of shots fired, the type of knife, the race or backgrounds of those involved — has been forthcoming. Investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office is still ongoing, and police said they are constrained from comment as long as that probe is open. Meanwhile, the two unnamed police officers have returned to duty.

Clearly, there is something wrong with a system in which there seems to be no sense of urgency in accounting for a death in which police were involved. Not only is it unfair to those affected — the victim’s family as well as the police officers — but it also undermines the community trust in police that is critical to fighting crime.

How police-involved deaths are handled is under increased nationwide scrutiny because of controversies over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., Tamir Rice in Cleveland and other high-profile cases. The case of Mr. Payton, shot Aug. 24, 2012, was highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal article examining weaknesses in the national collection of data about deaths involving police that make it nearly impossible to know how many people officers kill each year. Among the troubling findings is that there are agencies, including Fairfax County police, that inexplicably don’t consider justifiable homicides by law enforcement officers as events that should be reported.

The situation is unacceptable. Congress, as we have urged, should put in place a system that ensures the collection of accurate information to assess the problem and inform the debate over reform. But there is also, as Mr. Payton’s case demonstrates, a need for local police officials to treat these cases as priorities and with more transparency. To their credit, D.C. police do report all uses of force — both fatal and non-fatal — in publicly available annual reports.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia offered little explanation — other than that a resolution of the case is expected “soon” — about why it has taken so long to get to the bottom of what happened when police responded to a call about family violence on that hot summer day. We hope that when prosecutors conclude this case, they will provide a full accounting of the events. If no criminality is found, that should not be the end of the matter. It will be important to know the results of any administrative review by the department and whether different procedures or actions might have produced a different result.

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.