Fairfax County Police Watch: 06/15/14

Every year the Virginia State Patrol releases the comprehensive “Crime in Virginia” which breaks down criminal offenses, state wide, by local law enforcement jurisdiction. The report is the state’s official voice on crime statistics for all state jurisdictions...…..except the Fairfax County Police. They don’t like the way the report makes them look and because of their aversion to releasing the true figures, national (The VSP report incorporated in the FBI’s annual report, “Crime in the United States.”) and state law enforcement officials don’t know the true homicide rate in Fairfax County, the only county in the state their not sure of.

Virtually every governmental body says that Fairfax County had at least 17 murders in 2013. But the Fairfax County Police, whose incredible $400,000,000 budget depends on low crime rates, says there were only 8 murders in the county in 2013.

Obsessively image conscious and terrified of bad press, the Fairfax County Police not only duck the truth, they fabricate it as well. The department has droned on about a drop in the county’s murder rate, claiming it fell 50% from the 16 killings in 2012. Yet in a private report prepared for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the police said that there were actually 17 homicides in the county.

They lie and they get away with it.

They get away with it for two reasons, firstly there is not one person in local government willing to take a stand against them and secondly, unlike all other jurisdictions in the state of Virginia, the Fairfax County cops tabulate their own crime statistics. And no one knows how they compile those figures and they refuse to share the methods used.

Part of the reason that the Fairfax County cops keep their methods secret is that they cook the books by using two methods to compile crime statistics. Meaning that if one method of counting crime (The Unified Crime Reporting) doesn’t work to the cop's advantage, they use a backup method (The Incident-Based Reporting) that is guaranteed to give them the results they want the public to see. If those two methods don’t work to the cop’s advantage they run the numbers again using a third system that calculates the numbers of victims involved with a crime. (while crimes against property and crimes against society are calculated based on the actual number of events.)

It's your government, it's your money. They'll get away with it as long as you let them get away with it.

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.