Fairfax County Police Watch: Police reform may be progressing, but not police diversity

• Dec 27, 2016

Dear Editor,

If you’ve not been following the Fairfax County Supervisors’ actions to implement the recommendations from the Ad Hoc Commission on Police Practices for the last 14 months, let’s briefly catch you up.

The Commission, consisting of 36 members including 10 active or retired police, submitted its final report to the Fairfax County Supervisors in October 2015. The report contained 202 unanimous, transformational recommendations to restore accountability and public trust in the Fairfax County Police Department.

To date, the FCPD and other county offices have implemented, or “implemented with modifications” over sixty per cent of the recommendations. Another 25 per cent were approved in principle, with details, some critical, still to be finalized. Ten per cent more complicated or contentious ones are still under review. Four percent were not implemented.

In sum, this is better progress than many of us expected. Supervisors deserve credit for pushing ahead in the face of often strong resistance from three unions.

Recommendations “implemented with modifications” include some major changes from Commission proposals. For example, the “independent police auditor” lost some independence and had its role in criminal investigations restricted. Proposed reforms calling for more transparency and accountability to the public face stiffest opposition and delay. Examples include proposals to require prompt disclosure of names of officers killing citizens and, to adopt body cameras for all officers. The former was finally approved but with lots of wiggle room, and the latter is still awaiting even a limited pilot test, perhaps in 2017.

A recommendation to encourage the use of less lethal force by requiring all officers to carry Tasers (in addition to guns) is still being debated. While overall percentages look good, a closer look reveals critical, not cosmetic, exceptions.

There is one area where I believe the Commission failed to deliver recommendations likely to lead to change. The Commission was charged with reviewing the composition of the force and making recommendations to improve its diversity. The force is a bastion of white males in a diverse county. Women and minorities are grossly underrepresented, a situation which has not improved in the last several years.

Whites make up only 63 % of the county population, but 83 % of the force (only 1 in 8 of are women); blacks make up 9 % of the population, but only about 7 % of the force; Latinos are 16 % of the population, but are just under 5 % of the force; and Asian Americans make up over 10% of the population, but only 4 % of the force.

The Commission’s subcommittee on Recruitment and Diversity offered only two recommendations to improve diversity:

1) establish a diversity goal for each (of 8) commanders; and,

2) educate and train recruiting and selecting officers about implicit bias.

That’s it, nothing more. The supervisors adopted both verbatim, thus apparently deferring action toward a force composition reflecting the community they serve. Perhaps the board’s number one New Year’s resolution should be to formulate and implement some serious affirmative action in the FCPD.

To see the Commission’s recommendations and implementation progress to date, go to www.fairfaxcountypolicecommission and scroll down to “progress report”.

Happy New Year to all!

John Lovaas

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.