Fairfax County Police Watch: Criminal case reveals new racist texts sent by more SFPD officers

By Jonah Owen Lamb

New allegations of racism among officers in the San Francisco Police Department have emerged from a criminal case, the San Francisco Examiner has learned.

“We were in the middle of an investigation and we discovered new racist and homophobic text messages that were being used,” District Attorney George Gascon told the Examiner on Thursday of the text messages.

Gascon said there were at least five officers involved, but the names of the officers and the content of the text messages were not immediately available. The text messages, however, apparently mocked the public outcry around an earlier text message scandal.

Last year, a group of San Francisco police officers were shown to have sent racist, bigoted and homophobic text messages to one another from 2011 to 2012. The texts emerged out of a federal police corruption trial and resulted in Chief Greg Suhr recommending that eight officers be fired and the rest be punished.

The new allegations come from a review of roughly 5,000 pages of text messages that are part of a criminal case, which Gascon did not name. The texts were sent from 2014 to 2015 by five officers who were not party to the scandal surrounding the earlier racist texts.

“The N word was used many times. They are of the same nature…as what we saw last year,” said Gascon, who was notified about the discovery this week. “These officers are completely unconnected with the 14 we saw last year.”

Gascon told Chief Greg Suhr about the new racist texts Wednesday so that the officers involved can be removed from public contact while an investigation is underway.

The Police Department did not immediately return a call for comment.

The District Attorney’s Office is also planning to notify defense counsel in cases involving the five officers.

“We still don’t know the full scope of the messages,” Gascon said.

While Gascon would not reveal many details in the ongoing investigation, he did say the phones were private. Whether they were used on duty is unclear.

The allegations call into question claims made by some that the department has no issues with race, and come amid numerous police reform efforts, some of which were spurred directly as a result of previous revelations of bigotry in the ranks.

“No one can say with a straight face now with these new text message that they are isolated,” said Gascon.

Gascon and a Blue Ribbon Panel he formed last year to look into police bias have been under attack from the Police Officers Association, which has said there are no issues of widespread racial bias in the department.

Most recently, POA leaders gave statements to their lawyers that they heard Gascon allegedly make racist remarks while he was police chief, the job he held prior to becoming district attorney.

Gascon called that claim “a lie.”

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.