Fairfax County Police Watch: Members of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, including president Martin Halloran, fourth from right, stand in solidarity at a Jan. 20 Police Commission meeting

. (Ekevara Kitpowsong/Special to S.F. Examiner)

By Jonah Owen Lamb on March 30, 2016 5:30 pm

The San Francisco police union’s ongoing effort to discredit a panel on police bias has now taken aim at the body for seemingly not allowing several hand-picked black officers from testifying and countering negative characterizations of the department.

But the Police Officers Association’s misinformation campaign is getting old, says the body’s head.

“This is indicative of the game playing and waste of time the POA has been playing since the beginning,” Anand Subramanian, head of the Blue Ribbon Panel, told the San Francisco Examiner on Wednesday. “The way they operate, the tactics they use…shows they cannot be taken seriously.”

Since its inception last year, the panel –- created by District Attorney George Gascon after news emerged of the racist text messages that were sent by 14 officers — has been under fire from the politically powerful POA.

The union’s latest missive claims that panel officials denied the union’s request to let several black officers speak.

“How can you really hold your Panel out to be fair and impartial if you refuse to allow the testimony of Sgt. Tracy McCray, Inspector Clifford Cook, and Former Cmdr. Leroy Lindo, three African American officers who dispute Sgt. [Yulanda] Williams’s skewed views about the Police Department?”

Williams, the president of Officers for Justice, a black officers association, testified that the San Francisco police culture has demonstrated its racial biases as was seen in a series of racist text messages uncovered last year.

The union subsequently attacked Williams for her statement in a letter distributed to all its roughly 2,200 members.

Subramanian said the union’s latest claims are simply untrue. Martin Halloran, who heads the union, was invited to speak to the panel twice but declined, said Subramanian. What’s more, the officers mentioned have spoken in closed interviews with the panel as have others.

Subramanian added the panel will not take direction on how it operates from the union.

“The real irony is that the POA blocked our access to officers and is now complaining that they we will not talk to officers in the way that they demand,” Subramanian said, alluding to a letter sent to union members saying officers should come to the POA before talking to the panel.

As part of its latest public relations campaign, the union has blamed Gascon for rising property crimes because of his backing of Prop. 47 and hired a consultant, Nathan Ballard, to head up its efforts opposing police reform in The City. As part of this recent campaign against the DA and the panel, two union leaders said in statements made to their own lawyers that they had seen Gascon make racist remarks himself in a Massachusetts bar several years ago.

The district attorney’s office has denied Gascon made such remarks. Gascon, a former chief of the San Francisco Police Department, has previously said the department is insular and has officers who are racially biased.

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.