Fairfax County Police Watch: Civil Rights Groups Press Virginia Supremes On Plate Readers

Virginia Supreme Court takes written arguments from civil rights groups against the use of license plate cameras.

Civil rights groups made their case to the Virginia Supreme Court, urging the justices last week to find that the police use of automated license plate readers (ALPR, also known as ANPR) violates state privacy laws. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and Rutherford Institute each filed petitions in their case against the Fairfax County Police Department that claimed the use of cameras to gather intelligence on motorists not suspected of any crime violated Virginia's Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act.

Last year, a Fairfax County judge rejected the argument (view ruling), even though a 2013 state attorney general opinion agreed with the ACLU and EFF (view opinion). The groups insist that the law seeks to protect private information about drivers, and that the lower court judge was construing the term 'personal information' too narrowly.

"ALPR data clearly fits within the types of personal data of concern to the General Assembly because it allows the government to monitor patterns of movements associated with identified vehicles, and to easily link that data to 'personal activities' of specific Virginia residents using data readily available through intercommunicating databases," EFF attorney Matthew J. Erausquin wrote. "In the past few years, as it has become clear how easy it is to aggregate seemingly innocuous and isolated pieces of data from disparate sources to create a full and revealing picture of an individual, agencies and organizations that work on privacy issues have broadened their definition of personally identifying information."

The group cited the Federal Trade Commission's updated definition of personally identifiable information to include cases where the information can be "reasonably linked" to a particular person using various identifiers. For its part, the ACLU blasted the lower-court judge for dismissing the attorney general's opinion in a footnote.

"Nothing in the [judge's] letter opinion... explain or support a conclusion that the instant case 'differs from the situation reviewed by the attorney general,'" ACLU attorney Edward S. Rosenthal wrote. "Since no trial was held and no admissions of fact were made by [our client] to support such a conclusion, it is difficult to ascertain what the trial court based this remark upon."

Virginia law requires courts to give "due consideration" to the points made in a formal ruling of the attorney general.

"We're on the losing end of a technological revolution that has already taken hostage our computers, our phones, our finances, our entertainment, our shopping, our appliances, and now, it's focused its sights on our cars," Rutherford Institute president John W. Whitehead said in a statement. "By subjecting Americans to surveillance without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the data for later use, the government has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, there is no such thing as innocent until proven guilty."

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.