June 16, 1987, plainclothes
police actually "infiltrated" high school graduation party in a
private home in Vienna. The hosts' son
was a member of Students Against Drunk Driving.
The parents who gave the party for their son notified those attending
the party with "Please, No Alcohol" signs and brought in at least 25
adults to help monitor the party.
The mistake they made was in
notifying the cops in advance and getting a booklet of party tips from
them. The cops then infiltrated the
party and arrested children and adults for drinking. They also arrested and handcuffed the
hostess, whom they handcuffed and charged with being drunk in public and forced
to spend the night in jail. The hosts,
who did everything right, pleaded no contest to charges of aiding and abetting
the consumption of alcohol by minors.
This actually happened. The cops really did this.
Cops swarmed on to the property
while other cops set up a roadblock. One
partygoer said "My mother walked up to the roadblock with my aunt to see
if any guests were having problems. “ A
cop told her, 'I'm not on your property anymore, you're on my property. Now back off.' My aunt tapped her on the shoulder and said,
'Let's get out of here,' but the cop said, 'She's not going anywhere.’ Then he started giving her sobriety tests,
making her touch her nose, making her lean backward until she was almost flat
on her back. But she passed. Then he pulls out this Breathalyzer and
shoves it at her and says, 'Blow,' while he is pressing all of these buttons. Without showing the results to anybody, he
says, 'You're under arrest.’ Then he
handcuffed her and took her to jail."
This actually happened. The cops really did this.
The raid on the house was
apparently pre-planned even though the police said it wasn’t. One of the cops on the scene dropped a sheet
of paper that indicated that the party -- along with four other gatherings
being held in the area that night -- had been targeted for possible
infiltration even before it began. Some
cop assigned some students to write 500-word essays, while other officers chose
to make arrests.
This actually happened. The cops really did this.
In exchange for the plea, other charges
against the hostess were dropped.
THE DIRTY DANCING PATROL
In April of 1977…..that was
1977……the Fairfax County police actually warned people that if they danced on
Sunday’s they would be arrested.
This actually happened. The cops really did this.
A blue law from 1954 forbids
dancing in Fairfax County on Sundays. That month two cops actually walked into
a bar at Tysons Corner's Ramada Inn and ordered about 100 people to stop
dancing and issued a court summons to the motel.
This actually happened. The cops really did this.
A police captain actually sent
cops around to different establishments in his district to inform bar managers
of the ordinance.
ARRESTED FOR DRINKING IN A BAR
In December of 2003, the Fairfax
County Police went undercover in 20 local bars to arrest people whom they felt
were drinking too much. They raided bars
in Herndon and Reston on five nights and arrested nine people public
drunkenness. Seven of the 9 challenged
their arrests.
This actually happened. The cops really did this.
Daniel Crowley was arrested in a
bar in Reston on karaoke night just before Christmas. His crime was drinking six beers. A female undercover cop actually sat near him
and counted the drinks.
This actually happened. They really did this.
"I didn't know what was
going on," Crowley testified in Fairfax County General District Court “I'd
paid my tab, and I was ready to go home”.
Crowley was convicted of public
intoxicated and ordered them to perform 25 hours of community service.
Then he was arrested.
"I'm not happy with the way
they can walk into a restaurant and do as they please," Crowley said of
police. "I don't want to go to
places in the atmosphere where you don't know who is who."
Patrons and bar owners alike said
that those who were arrested were drinking responsibly and causing no
commotion. Crowley and his drinking
companions disputed police testimony that the cops saw Crowley, though the
darkened bar, spilling beer in his lap, slurring his speech and having trouble
staying upright on his seat.
Under cross-examination from
Crowley's attorney, police acknowledged that neither they nor bar patrons had
complained that Crowley was acting unruly or meddlesome. They also testified that he did not disobey
their orders, even though he declined to submit to a breathalyzer test.
Pat Habib, he designated driver
in her dinner party drank one alcoholic drink and it up two sodas. After she finished the second soda,
undercover police yanked her outside for a sobriety test. The cops said that they had received a
complaint about an unruly blond woman matching her description. Then she watched as police tested other women
looking nothing like her.
Instead of explaining why they
were acting Nazis, the cops actually defended their actions by saying the people
they arrested deserved to be arrested "They drew attention to themselves
by their actions.” Said their
spokesperson.
"It does smack of a pending
police state if law enforcement is going into establishments to monitor
behavior”, said Lynne Breaux, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington
Restaurant Association.
At Champs, a bar in Reston,
general manager Kevin O'Hare described police as "antagonistic.” He said they "pulled" people from
their chairs who were making no commotion.
"They're always welcome to come in anytime," he said of
police. "It's not an issue when
they talk to our guests. But when they
actually pull people out of their seats, it is an issue. When it's borderline harassment, it's an
issue."
The Board of Supervisors actually
took a stand on this one, on the side of the cops.
THE NAKED COFFEE GUY CASE
October 19 2009, Erick Williamson
of Springfield was arrested for drinking coffee in the nude in his
kitchen. The idiocy started when the
wife of a police officer phoned her husband to complain that she was looking
into the victim’s house and saw him naked.
The arrest, dubbed the Naked Guy
case, made international headlines and, once again, the Fairfax Police, made
the county look ridiculous in the eyes of the world. (The first time being the raids on bars to
search for drunks, the second being the "This ain’t America no more"
election day video recording)
By their own admission, police
raided the house, enforce, with guns drawn ("just in case we encountered a
hostile individual," the officers explained) and no warrant to enter the
property where they found the culprit asleep…with his pants on.
Pulled outside on his lawn, a cop
asked Williamson if he could take his picture.
Williamson said no. The cop took
the picture anyway and showed it to the woman who had complained for positive
identification, which they got. They
returned to the house and arrested Williamson.
It took a jury less than twenty minutes to find Williamson not guilty.
….BUT NO LAWS WERE BROKEN
On April 10, 1990, ten members of
the police department's "jump-out team" including two supervisors,
came to work at midnight armed and dressed in the team's full uniform of dark
military-type fatigues, drove together to a Leesburg apartment building,
outside the jurisdiction of the department, to deliver a "strong
message" to a man who had threatened the wife of a cop. Believe it or not, the Fairfax police
spokesman Warren Carmichael said that no laws were broken and, he added, no
force was used by the officers that night.
The Board of supervisors said and did nothing.
I’M A GOVERNMENT WORKER, I DON’T
TOLERATE COMPETITION SO I’LL HAVE YOU ARRESTED
In October of 1998, Lt. Larry A.
Jackson was “retired” from the police force.
Jackson had two community volunteers Melvin and Susan Entwisle, arrested
when they tried to start a Little League in competition with the one he headed.
Jackson had the couple arrested for
trespassing on school grounds after they tried to recruit players for their new
baseball league. The couple filed a $
150,000 lawsuit against the police department, alleging that Jackson abused his
authority as an officer to support his position in the Bucknell Little
League. The taxpayers picked up the
bill.
Y’All IN DIXIE NOW, BOY
The Fairfax County Police and the
Black population
In 1967, Chris Stokes, became
Fairfax County's first black police officer.
Stokes said that when he applied for the job, he had to take a polygraph
test that lasted two hours and 20 minutes.
Six whites who applied with him
also took the test, but theirs lasted only 50 minutes. Stokes was the county's first community
relations office. Stokes later testified
that another officer assigned to the community relations office told Stokes
that his job was to keep an eye on Stokes.
Stokes, who left the police force
in 1973, said his repeated attempts to become a detective in Fairfax failed,
apparently because he was black. Several
years later, he joined a federal suit against Fairfax County that charged that
the county discriminated against blacks and women in its hiring and promotion
policies.
The police responded by claiming
that Stokes was thief and a “Liability” as a policeman. But in 1982, the County offered a settlement
offer of $ 2.75 million to be distributed to 685 discrimination victims,
including Stokes.
On August 23, 1974 the cops shot
an unarmed 26-year-old black man six times by a white cop. The cop said that the black man had resisted
arrest on a driving on an expired license charge. The man was not driving at the time his
license was checked. Witnesses, who were
all white, said the cop came into a 7-11 store where the black man was, and
cracked him across the head with a club for no apparent reason.
When the man fought off the
attack, the cop fire six shots, hitting the man in the stomach. The shooting lead to three hours of rioting
by some black citizens in Herndon.
Seventy-five very heavily armed police responded.
A grand jury investigated the shooting but on
August 30, about sixty outraged black citizens of Herndon called a meeting with
police to protest the killing.
The county eventually paid
$25,000 in an excessive force, wrongful arrest suit with the dead man’s
brother. The cop got to keep his
job.
After the killing, the police
made many, many, promises about hiring more black cops but by 1981, the federal
government found that the police had made little progress in hiring blacks and
made even less progress in promoting them.
February 11, 2001 the police shot
another black man, their favorite target, followed in a close second by
Hispanic males. The cops shot the man
while searching a home. The man either
refused to leave the room or didn’t leave the room fast enough.
On September 18, 1993, a headline
read “Fairfax police get 'live fire' training”....the question here
is…why? They get all the free practice
they want shooting down unarmed citizens.
In February of 1996, the Fairfax
County police union used drawings of what appear to be a black bellhop, a dark-skinned
waiter, and a white couple dancing in an advertisement promoting a
dinner-dance. A black officers'
organization demanded an apology from the union, saying the
advertisement-depicted blacks in stereotypically subservient roles, and some
officers said it reflected a long-standing racial tension within the
department. The president of the Fairfax
County Police Association said the union didn't intend to offend anyone.
In late May of 1986, the Fairfax
County Police arrested Vernon Dean, a Black Redskins Cornerback for striking
his fiancé. The problem was, the fiancé
insisted that the football player never laid on a hand on her and "never
hit me"
"I am being cited as a
victim of an assault” she said “no one ever laid a hand on me, not once . . .
If everything had happened the way they [police] said, I wouldn't have been
able to walk, much less work. It is such
a joke.” She added that the only person
who was assaulted was Dean, who was, as she said "attacked by several
police officers" Berry and Dean were arguing in public near Leesburg Pike
when a cop drove by and told Berry to go with him to the McLean station until
her and Dean “Cooled off”.
The cop did not arrest Dean for
assault although the police later claimed that Dean assaulted Berry on Leesburg
Pike. The cop drove Berry back to the
station and Berry called Dean to pick her up, when he arrived, the cops tried
to keep them from leaving together.
"I kept saying (to the cops) we'll be all
right.” Dean said. Then the cops took his arms and he went down
on to the floor "I'm gasping for air”; Dean said I'm saying, is all this
necessary? The four cops who jumped him
from behind chipped his tooth and blacked his eye. "They're claiming he assaulted a police
officer," Berry said. "That's
crazy. If anyone, especially Vernon, had
hit me with a fist, I wouldn't be here telling you right now."
Dean’s lawyer said , "I'm
saying they [police] attacked him because he was not cooperating with their
decision to intervene in what was essentially a domestic squabble . . . This is
something that's been blown out of proportion by police trying to cover up
their conduct. It's typical of the way
they deal with black athletes. A police
officer comes on the scene, a black guy is involved . . . The cops say to him,
'I don't care who you are,' then they say a guy is resisting arrest . . . They
always say they're assaulting the police.
It's a typical excuse police give for reprehensible conduct . . . They
have to justify the arrest. I'm getting
tired of it... Vernon probably said some
things to the officers they didn't like.
Police have to justify their conduct”
May 10, 1989, the Fairfax County
Police offered a man $1,000 to repair damage to his teeth caused by one of five
cops who beat the man across the mouth with his nightstick while the man was
handcuffed. Here’s the surprising part,
the man that was handcuffed and beaten by the police was black and the five
cops who beat him were white…..I know, I didn’t believe it ether.
The man, Steven Martin, a 27-year-old
lawn service employee, was visiting his sons in Reston. At the same time the cops were looking for a
black man whom they say had assaulted a cop.
So they stopped Martin and arrested him on charges of trespassing and
being drunk in public.
The cops then drove Martin to an
empty elementary school parking lot where "they yanked me out of the car
and threw me on the ground.” Martin said
he did not know how many officers were there, but that "they were all just
surrounding me.” Martin, whose hands were
cuffed in front of his body, said an officer placed a nightstick in his mouth
and twisted it numerous times, leaving one bottom front tooth so loose that a
dentist told him it will probably have to be removed.
His pants were pulled down, and
the pockets were ripped out. His shoes
and two pairs of socks were removed.
Then another cop slapped him across the face. He was then dragged before a magistrate at
the county jail and released on personal recognizance. His moth bleeding, his shoes, and socks
missing, Martin walked to his sister's home in Centreville. “He came in with blood all over him,"
his sister said "He said [the police] beat him up, and put the stick in
his mouth. I was mad. I said: 'You should do something about that”
On February 14, 1979, the Fairfax
County Police accidentally killed an unarmed young black man named Stanly
Hughes when four white cops accidentally fired two bullets into his body. The cops said they accidentally mistook
Hughes for a murder suspect named Kenneth E. King, so of course they killed
him.
The cops said the innocent Mr.
Hughes was killed because he ran from his apartment where Kenneth King was
staying and that Hughes resembled King, so, all things being equal, they shot
him down.
After mowing down Hughes police said they
entered his apartment and found Kenneth King of a self-inflicted gunshot wound
in the chest. Naomi N. Hughes, Stanley
Hughes mother would later content that the cops fired indiscriminately at her
son who ran from his apartment to escape Kenneth King. Talk about irony.
The Police chief, Kenneth Wilson
said "We are just very displeased that this has occurred.” But he wasn’t clear if he was talking about
the shooting or the publicity the shooting brought to his department.
Fairfax County Commonwealth's
Attorney Robert F. Horan, who never ever disappointed with his show of support
for the police said he would review the results of the internal police
investigation of Hughes' death. In the
nearly four decades that Robert F. Horan Jr. had been the chief prosecutor in
Fairfax, no cop has ever been charged with improperly shooting someone.
That got more than a few chuckles
around the county and then added “Statistically, it's not fair to say that this
department shoots first and asks questions later... There's less use of weapons by this
department than by any other department I'm aware of.” Two weeks after Stanley Hughes was gunned
down, the two cops questioned in the shooting were refusing to talk to
investigators. It didn’t matter. An internal police investigation cleared the
cops of any wrongdoing.
December 29, 1978, the cop killed another
black man and, amazingly enough, this killing too was also an accident. In this case the cops accidentally put three
bullets in to the head of a school janitor named John Jackson.
The cops accidentally shot him
three times in the head while Jackson was in the kitchen of the private Talent
House School, 9211 Arlington Blvd.
Jackson was carrying a .22 caliber gun, apparently to begin his own stakeout
for a thief who had broken into the school in the past. The police investigated the police and….yeah;
you guessed it….found the police innocent and cleared the cops who shot the man
dead. Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F.
Horan Jr. said the investigation found "no wrongdoing" by the cops
who were the only witnesses to the shooting.
David Feldman, an attorney who is investigating the death for Jackson's
family, said yesterday "It's absolutely obvious that something went
wrong”, Feldman said.
"A dumb nigger" Sworn
two affidavits from officers on how other officers referred to black female
officer Sheila Patterson.
"You have two strikes
against you, you are Black, and you are a female. Because that is the way it is around
here.” Statement of a white officer to
female officer Sheila Patterson.
"Zulu" Sworn two
affidavits from officers on how other officers referred to black female officer
Sheila Patterson.
In 1983 a Black officer Sheila
Patterson had her chair maced by fellow cops.
Earlier, another cop sprayed mace at her from his car and explained
later that spraying the mace was a joke.
In the summer of 1990, a cop
called Patterson as "cruiser butt" or "cruiser ass” and after an
investigation, the officer received an oral reprimand. Two years later, in 1992, Patterson found a
dead mouse in her mailbox at the police station. An investigation ensued in which twenty-seven
people were interviewed and three given polygraph examinations.
The department never discovered
who placed the mouse in the mailbox.
In 1993 Sheila Patterson filed
for a race and sex discrimination complaint against the
police. A short time later, she was fired for
refusing to sign a release form after a psychological fitness-for-duty exam.
According to the officer, she was accused of
throwing a note a pad at a fellow officer and was arrested for assault (This
happened after filing the charges against the department) She said the charges
against her were a "Complete fabrication" and the EEOC, based on the
evidence, agreed.
The U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission found that the police department improperly retaliated
against Patterson for filing race and sex discrimination complaints. The cops were forced to reinstate Patterson
with back pay and stop retaliating against employees and provide training to
all supervisors regarding discrimination and retaliation.
"This is retaliatory, and
ever since I returned in 1994, I have fought one battle with them after
another," Patterson said. "It
is pathetic and outrageous that I have had to go through all this."
In May of 1998, Patterson was
fired again violating the department's regulations governing human relations
and insubordination. On the lighter side
of this, the cops claimed that they had actually fired her for acting “in a
rude, aggressive and unprofessional manner" toward a citizen while on
duty. There is a wonderful Yiddish word
that covers a statement life that, Chupitz.
Basically, it means to act with the balls of an alley cat.
In March of 1997, an African
American couple from Washington D.C. stated that white officers from Fairfax
County “acted inappropriately” during a traffic stop.
In March of 1978, the Fairfax
County police launched another riot when they flooded into the One South
Restaurant Night Club and beat patrons with clubs, placed two of them in the
hospital and arrested six others. Several patrons of the have filed brutality
complaints, claiming that police went on a rampage in the club, striking and
arresting patrons who were doing nothing illegal.
The cops had gone to the club to
arrest a dishwasher who worked there.
They claimed that as they were arrested the man, someone threw a bottle
at them. No one else in the club saw a bottle
thrown or saw or heard anyone interfering with the arrest.
What they did see was the two
cops wrestling the man to the ground and beat him with clubs. A patron described the atmosphere as
“absolute terror, people were afraid to move to do anything”
One patron, for no apparent
reason was dragged from the club by his hair, taken outside into the parking
lot and beat with clubs. The cop then
returned, grabbed another man, dragged him to the center of the floor, and beat
him with a club. A patron said the cop
appeared “Absolutely berserk”
The chief of police denied his
cops did anything wrong and said that if they had beaten people with club, then
they were right in doing it. "We
don't have any sadist on the department," he said.
To add even levity to the
situation the Police Internal Affairs office promised to investigate citizen’s
complaints. In the meantime, the Board of Supervisors said and did nothing.
In 1978, There were 125 “formal
complaints” about the cops meaning just over one quarter of the force had
complaints registered against them. Or
one complaint every day and half. The
force in 1978 numbered less than 800 in all.
On November 14, 2011 an
Alexandria man, a black man, sued two Fairfax County cops for brutality
claiming the cops violated his rights under the Fourth Amendment and Title 42
of the Civil Rights Act.
The man said that the two cops
bravely used excessive force when they handcuffed and detained him on June 16,
2010. The man was walking to Rising Hope United Methodist Mission Church, where
he works as a janitor, when he said the cops assaulted him. He said the cops stopped him and asked him
for identification, which he gave them.
Then they asked if they could
search him, when he asked why they would want to search him, the two cops
handcuffed him and then searched him. One of the cops claimed that he saw not
only cocaine in the man’s mouth; his eyesight was so good that he even noticed
that it was crack cocaine.
Yet he couldn’t find any in the
man’s mouth when he searched him. The,
he said, the cop threw him to the ground
and on to his stomach and one of them rammed him knee in his back as the other
cop choked him and then shocked him with a Taser three times.
Then the cops tossed him into a police car
while they searched the ground for evidence, one would think, for anything to
support their actions. When a supervisor came along, the cops released the man
with a warning.
A black Fairfax County police
officer whose white supervisor asked him to shine the supervisor's shoes was
justified in resigning from the police department because working conditions
were "just too oppressive." a state examiner has rule in 1992. Also in that year Fairfax County Deputy
Police Chief E. Thomas Sines removed himself as a contender for the
department's top job after complaints by female and black officers about a
"good old boy network"
In August of 1968, Nadine
Eckhardt, the wife of a US Congressman, and her two children, were stopped by
Fairfax County Police for no apparent reason other than the fact that they had
visited an encampment of people who had taken part in a Resurrection City in
Dunn Loring.
The cops rousted them, refused to
explain themselves, checked her ID, and then sent her off on her way. The cops had the camp under 24-hour
surveillance although they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why. The chief of police defended the cops actions
by saying that the roust was “A fundamental and essential necessity for the
proper administration of the motor vehicle code”
A few days later the same cops
arrested one man after he left the camp for carrying an expired license….not
driving with an expired license…..carrying an expired license. They also arrested the man who came to the
police station to posts the first man’s bail.
They claimed he used obscene language.
Shopping while black in Fairfax
County is not a good idea. On August 25,
1978, a D.C. Superior Court jury has awarded $245,224 to two black men who sued
Woodward & Lothrop's department store for false arrest after the men were
surrounded at the Tysons Corner store by Fairfax County police officers with
shotguns and drawn revolvers. According
to court records, six county cops confronted the two men as they left the store
near closing time on December 3, 1975.
The cops were responding to a
call from a store security officer who suspected that the men had stolen items
and were armed….so they sent six cops armed with shot guns to question
them. The two men were arrested and
frisked in front of 30 onlookers and then released when the cops could not
prove that the two men had stolen anything.
In 1998 Darrel Stephens was a candidate to be
chief of the Fairfax County police.
Stephens was the St. Petersburg police chief in 1996 during the two
nights of arson and gunfire that followed the fatal shooting of TyRon Lewis, a
black motorist who was shot by a white police officer.
On March 30, 1978, the father of
a 16-year old black boy beaten by police brought charges against the cops
involved in the beating. Witnesses,
twelve neighbors, saw four officers beat the child with batons about the head. He was later taken to the hospital and
treated.
Fairfax County Police Chief Col.
Richard A. King dismissed the charges of brutality against his police based on
an investigation of the incident…..by the police who…wait for it….found the
police innocent of using "excessive physical force" Brutality charges
against the other two arresting cops were dismissed without a trial board
hearing because of insufficient evidence.
King said that "in the
process of arresting (The boy), the officers resorted to force, which required
that (The boy) be given medical treatment.”
King did not release a police version of why the child was injured
during the arrest, and he refused comment on how the decision was made to drop
charges against the cops because all findings of the police department's
internal affairs section are not public information.
He asked that the public
"have a little faith" in the integrity of his police force and said
that he was breaking a precedent for the county police by publicizing internal
affairs action. He said the announcement
was made to "assure the public that we do an in-depth investigation”.
At the time, three of the five
other major police departments in the Washington area made public the findings
of police trial boards, which usually are three or four persons panels made up
of police officers or citizens. King
said he opposed the release of all trial board findings because of his feeling
that internal affairs information "in general" should be kept secret.
The Board of supervisor said and
did nothing.
But on June 3, 1978, a federal
grand jury was ordered to look into the beating of the 16-year-old by
police. The investigation was to
determine if the police department tried to cover up the incident.
The same grand jury also started
to investigate the county's internal police review board, an all-cop agency
that reviewed charges against the Fairfax cops.
The jury was investigating what the chief of police said was a minor
incident in which a cop "roughly handcuffed and put a suspect into a squad
car”, King said. "The incident
involved the use of a foot.”
But then added he couldn’t
remember all the details of the incident, Actually the charges resulted in the
cop being suspended for 10 days without pay.
Why he wasn’t arrested for assault isn’t known. They were also investigating another case
that involved “the unwarranted firing of guns” which resulted in two days off
with pay for the two cops involved.
"We do react to complaints.
We do react in a positive manner," King said. "Obviously, not all complaints are
valid”
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