Fairfax County Police Watch: Fifty years too late, the FBI finally joins the fight to clean up the Police in the US

Federal Bureau of Investigation to Launch New System Counting People Killed by Police

Phil Peters

The Washington Post and The Guardian began compiling data on violent law enforcement encounters earlier this year.

More than 900 civilians were fatally shot by police so far this year, according to The Post's own analysis, while the Guardianhas put the tally at 1,058 deaths.

David Klinger, a former police officer and professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, who has advocated for better data for more than a decade, said he was pleased to hear of the new system but skeptical about its implementation. The program only collects data on the number of so-called "justifiable homicides" reported by police, as well as information about the felonious killing and assault of law enforcement officers.

The Post's database has also motivated the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS,) another Justice Department agency, to change the way it tracks police-related deaths. The program will still rely on voluntary reporting, however, because the agency doesn't have the authority to compel local police departments to comply with its requests for data.

The proposal has not yet been signed off by FBI Director James Comey pending the agency's legal review.

This is why they are starting a project on tracking not only fatal shootings, but also any type of incident in which a police officer causes a civilian serious injury, regardless of the means, whether they use pepper spray or stun guns or their fists. "People want to know what police are doing, and they want to know why they are using force". It is now the highest priority, " he added. The Guardian reports that "Officials said statisticians were intending to count deadly incidents involving physical force, Tasers and blunt weapons used by officers as well as firearms and that they planned to begin gradually publishing some more information about fatal incidents as soon as 2016".

In a statement provided to the Guardian, the Federal Bureau of Investigation explained that there was an obvious need for "robust and complete information about encounters between law enforcement officers and citizens that result in a use of force".

Morris said the leaders of the nation's largest police organizations have agreed for the first time to lobby local departments to produce the data.

Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr., a member of the advisory board, said police organizations "will be taking a leadership role to use peer pressure to get all departments to report on this".

"For a lot of departments, it's not like they were actively against [releasing data], they just didn't really know how to do it", Clarence Wardell, a Presidential Innovation Fellow who works on the White House's Police Data Initiative said at an event at Harvard's Kennedy School in November.

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.