Fairfax County Police Watch: Predator Policing

This is what happens when you give the cops to much money......predator policing... we already pay beat cops to handle DWI.

FCPD launches DWI Enforcement Squad; out there now looking for holiday partiers

· By Angela Woolsey/Fairfax County Times

Drinking and driving is never a good idea, but it might be especially ill-advised this holiday season, as the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) has dedicated personnel and resources specifically toward tackling this issue.

FCPD’s driving while intoxicated (DWI) enforcement squad launched out of the department’s operations support bureau in Annandale on Dec. 1.

Paid and equipped through a federal grant administered by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the new unit will exclusively handle incidents and cases involving people who operate a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol and other drugs.

“The value of the work that you will be doing will literally prevent folks from being killed,” Captain Bob Blakley, who commands the traffic division of FCPD’s operations support bureau, told the squad during a pre-patrol briefing. “You all will be the front lines, the tip of the spear for the police department to curb this behavior.”

According to Robert Weakley, Fairfax district program manager for the Virginia DMV’s highway safety office, FCPD’s DWI Enforcement Squad is the third such unit in the state, which is in the second year of a pilot program that has also started in the Tidewater and Roanoke regions.

The overall frequency of alcohol-related crashes in Fairfax County has declined in recent years, and the police department hopes its new enforcement squad will help continue that downward trend.

Fairfax County had 523 alcohol-related crashes in 2015, compared to 600 in 2013, according to Blakley.

FCPD’s 2015 annual report found that, of the 22 fatal crashes in the county last year, seven of them involved alcohol, the same number as in 2013, when there were 26 fatal crashes in all. The county had eight alcohol-related fatal crashes out of 23 total incidents in 2014.

“We’ve seen a decline, and we want to keep it that way. We’re working towards zero deaths,” Weakley said.

The squad has nine officers, including a supervisor, who were selected based in part on their records for enforcing highway safety.

Sporting a collective average of 241 DWI arrests annually over the past seven years, the eight patrol officers on the squad will work from 7:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. in four-day rotations, focusing on areas around the county that the department’s crime analysis unit has found to be hot spots for impaired driving.

During its first patrol, the squad was assigned to work the Mason and West Springfield districts.

The DWI Enforcement Squad will mark a change in approach for the appointed officers, who normally have to respond to all calls for service.

“Without having to deal with a patrol area and having other calls come out that you have to be dispatched to, you’re primarily dealing with [impaired drivers], so you’re not being diverted,” Pfc. Nicolas Pyzowski, one of the squad members, said.

Formerly a midnight patrol officer at FCPD’s Mount Vernon station, Pyzowski says that he has always concentrated a lot of his efforts on addressing drunk or impaired drivers, in part because those were the kinds of calls he frequently encountered on the night shift.

So, when he heard the department was forming a new team solely for this purpose, he immediately applied. He found out that he’d been accepted shortly after an interview in October.

DWI arrests can be time-consuming, requiring extensive paperwork, and they can sometimes be confrontational, though Pyzowski says they’re generally not more dangerous than any other encounters police officers might have.

Despite these challenges, Pyzowski sees enforcing impaired driving laws as a crucial part of his duty as a public safety officer.

“I felt it was very important to make a good impact on the community to get those drunk drivers off the road to save their lives and anyone else they could put in harm’s way,” the patrolman said.

Virginia law states that anyone driving with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08 percent or higher is considered legally to be driving under the influence, but drivers can still be arrested with a lower BAC if their ability to operate their vehicle is impaired, according to the Virginia DMV.

Driving under the influence of drugs incurs the same penalties as driving under the influence of alcohol.

Along with increasing its enforcement efforts, Fairfax County emphasizes that prevention is an important factor in addressing impaired driving.

“We back this up with a heavy education media outreach type program, but we know that education alone, it has to work hand-in-hand with enforcement,” Weakley said. “If someone gets stopped, they [will] feel safer knowing their police is out there trying to prevent fatalities and serious injuries.”

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.