Fairfax County Police Watch: September 2019

Fairfax County Police Body Camera Program To Begin In Phases

NOBODY trusts these hoods .If you’re a young person considering working with the Fairfax County Police Department, stop and think about that. EVEN THEIR EMPLOYER DOESN’T TRUST THEM. Do you really want to spend twenty years of your life around people like this? You can do better.

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a body camera program for police officers.

By Emily Leayman, Patch Staff

MOUNT VERNON, VA — The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a permanent body camera program for police officers on Tuesday. The program is set to begin in May 2020 and will be implemented in phases over three years.

The approval follows a 2018 pilot program involving the Reston, Mason and Mount Vernon police district stations. These will be the first three stations implementing the permanent program. All district stations and other key operational staff will receive body cameras.

According to the implementation plan, 416 body cameras will be issued in fiscal year 2020, followed by 338 in 2021 and 456 in 2022. Positions will be added to the Fairfax County Police Department, Office of the Commonwealth's Attorney and Department of Information Technology.

Once the program is fully phased in, it will give officers 1,210 body cameras and require $6.65 million in baseline funding. One-time funding was included in the fiscal year 2020 budget, and baseline funding will come in the 2021 budget and future years as needed. The $4.3 million in funding for this year was available from the Reserve for Ad-Hoc Police Practices Review Commission.

Fairfax County Police

Feedback on body cameras came from an American University research team's survey during the pilot program, which ran from March 3, 2018 to Sept. 1, 2018. The researchers surveyed 603 residents who had an interaction with an officer during the pilot program as well as two squads of officers before and after the program. Results saw overwhelming support for body cameras from residents. Opinions among officers were mixed; one squad's perception of body cameras became more negative after the program, while the other's became slightly more positive.

A loon is a loon is loon

There was an article, produced by NBC News entitled “How this police department is fighting for its officers’ mental health after suicides” which focused on the Fairfax County Police department and police suicides in general.

That’s peachy keen but the article completely failed to mention other research that showed that police isn’t so much the cause of suicide as is the fact that our society doesn’t vet the people we hire to do police work. In other words, these guys are disturbed human being and would consider suicide if they were cops or plumbers or lawyers.

Don’t think its true?

Spend some time with a Fairfax County Cop and then let me know what you think.

You're damn right they should be on camera

McLean group supports countywide police-body-cam effort

by BRIAN TROMPETER, Sun Gazette Newspapers

Fairfax County officials should move ahead with implementing a body-worn-camera program for the county’s police force, according to a resolution passed Sept. 4 by the McLean Citizens Association’s board of directors.

“Body-worn cameras are a win for all of us, members of our community, the police and the criminal-justice system,” said MCA president Dale Stein. “What they record can be reliable evidence for investigations and prosecutions, a deterrent against unjustified complaints, and pluses for transparency and accountability.”

As of last year, more than 80 percent of large U.S. police forces were using such cameras or planning to do so, the resolution noted.

If implemented countywide, the Fairfax County Police Department’s camera program would cost an estimated $30 million over five years.

County police conducted a pilot program at the department’s Mason, Mount Vernon and Reston district stations between March and August 2018, with half of the officers at each station being assigned cameras and half not.

A report on the pilot program, released in July this year, found county residents overwhelmingly supported widespread adoption of the camera program. Police agreed the program would improve evidence-gathering efforts, increase departmental transparency and help settle complaints against officers.

MCA’s resolution asks the county to begin implementing the body-worn-camera program as soon as possible this fiscal year. MCA board members noted they would not have supported the program if it would have competed budgetarily with officers’ salaries.

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.