Fairfax County Police Watch: Cops finally pay for murdering a dog

Detroit police to pay $100,000 for shooting a dog

John Wisely, Detroit Free Press

The City of Detroit will pay a pet owner $100,000 after a police officer shot his dog dead while it was chained up beside his home.

Babycakes, a Dogue de Bordeaux, was on a 10-foot leash beside Darryl Lindsay's home in the 11600 block of Strathmoor in January 2015 when Detroit police surrounded the house. They were there to question Lindsay, though he was never charged with a crime, according to his lawsuit filed last year in U.S. District Court.

Officer Darrell Dawson killed the dog in a shooting captured on police video, according to the lawsuit.

"Dash camera video shows Defendant Dawson walk toward Babycakes in her driveway to a position just beyond the reach of Babycakes’ steel cable leash, pause, aim and shoot her twice with his department-issued ... 40-caliber handgun, striking Babycakes in the chest area," according to the suit.

The dog died of the injuries. Dawson also can be heard on audio recordings notifying dispatchers that he was going to "take the dog down."

Dawson was attempting to enter the back yard of the home when he encountered the dog, but other officers were able to get there by simply hopping the fence on the other side of the house, according to the suit. Lindsay asked officers if it he could bring the dog inside before it was shot.

"Defendant’s dash cam audio recordings reflect a female police officer remarking that 'that dog got shot and had nothing to do with it!'" the suit said.

"On top of that, police never saw or could even describe the person that they were looking for that day," said Lindsay's lawyer, Chris Olsen of Royal Oak.

It's unclear if Dawson was disciplined by the department for the shooting, though records Olsen obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Dawson described seeing a "large brown dog" and that he "was verbally counseled ... regarding other avenues of approach one can take when entering private property for exterior searches.”

The city agreed to the settlement in November. Olsen said he expects his client to get paid in the next month to six weeks.

The city did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement.

Contact John Wisely: 313-222-6825 or jwisely@freepress.com. On Twitter @jwisely.

wait for it....wait for 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.