Open-air drug markets seem to
operate with impunity. The National Drug
Intelligence Center (NDIC), an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, says
that the distribution of illegal drugs in Northern Virginia is conducted by
“West African and Middle Eastern criminal groups are the primary transporters
of Southwest Asian heroin into Virginia,"
The report also said that
“Mexican brown powdered heroin and Mexican black tar heroin available in
Virginia typically are transported into the state from southwestern states and
North Carolina by Mexican criminal groups.”
Dominican and African American criminal groups
are the dominant wholesale and mid-level distributors of South American heroin
in Virginia."
**
THEY AIN’T MUCH IN AN (ALMOST)
FAIR FIGHT
February 26, 1975. A robbery suspect got the drop on four
detectives who had come to arrest him.
He disarmed two of them and fled in a hail of gunfire.
SPEAKING OF DRUGS…………………
June 12, 1972, a judge reversed defendant's
conviction for unlawful possession of LSD and remanded for a new trial that the
search warrant used by Fair fax County police lacked probable cause.
On May 2, 2000 another court in a
different case reversed a guilty verdict against a man convicted for drug
possession with intent to distribute because evidence was seized in unlawful
search due to illegal entry. The cops
forget to mention they were cops so they could get into the house and conduct a
search.
On the other hand, in 1987, four Fairfax
County 911 dispatchers and call-takers resigned after an internal investigation
produced allegations that they had used illegal drugs.
In December of 1978, 28-year old
Donald Ferguson died after three days in jail because the police (who then ran
the jail) refused to give Ferguson prescription drugs and kept him in leg irons
and hand cuffs for two days and refused to give him water or food. The police investigated and cleared
themselves of any wrongdoing. The facts
of the investigation are held secret by the police.
August 29, 2000, a district judge
ruled that a Fairfax County cop was not immune from a judgment for violating
the rights of a woman by stealing her medical records. With probable cause, the cop entered the file
room of a substance abuse treatment clinic and searched for the plaintiff's
confidential treatment records along with many other patients' records.
In May of 1994, two Fairfax
County cops and the coordinator of the department's wellness program were
charged with unlawfully possessing anabolic steroids without a
prescription. Just to teach them a
lesson, the two cops were sent home for three months WITH PAY.
RIGHT DOOR, WRONG DOOR, AS LONG
AS WE GET TO BE DRAMATIC LIKE TV COPS, IT DOESN’T MATTER.
In January of 1975, the cops
kicked open the door to the wrong house during a narcotics raid. The ten cops….you would think one of them
would have figured out they were at the wrong address….busted up the house and
left behind $60,000 in damage. They
refused to pay for damage and the Fairfax Supervisors refused to settle a
$30,000 damage claim brought against the county…well at least the Board of
Supervisor finally did something.
THOSE GOSH DARNED DANGEROUS
FURTIVE GESTURES
fur•tive (fûrtv)adj.
1. Characterized by stealth;
surreptitious.
2. Expressive of hidden motives
or purposes; shifty.
“When I review evidentiary
hearing transcripts for appeals, I cringe when officers opine about what they
saw defendants do. Officers are always 100% sure about what was going on,
whether their opinions match the facts or not. A lot of the time, an officer’s
opinion about what a defendant did can make a defense motion fail. Any movement
by a defendant is a “furtive gesture” suggesting he was hiding something. If
the defendant says his pants were falling down and he had to pull them up, the
cop will say the defendant was trying to hide something in his pants.” Matt Brown, Attorney at law.
In November of 2009 a bipolar man
named David Masters, an unarmed motorist, was shot dead by the cops as he sat
in the driver’s seat of his car. Masters
was wanted for allegedly stealing some flowers from a planter. But in Fairfax County, even stealing flowers
from a planter can get you killed by the cops.
Masters was a former Army Green
Beret and the son of a retired U.S. Army colonel. He had long suffered from bipolar
disorder. He also had a massive heart
attack in 2007 and had a pacemaker installed.
The police refused to release the
name of the shooter and the Board of Supervisor said and did nothing about
that. The cops told, they didn’t ask,
they told the Board of Supervisors that there would be no public hearing to
determine whether there was any wrongdoing.
And, the cops told the Board of Supervisors, that reporters would have
almost no access to any information surrounding the incident of any kind.
Almost needless to say, Fairfax
County Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond Morrogh announced that he would not be
filing any charges against the officer who shot Masters.
Morrogh found that the shooting
was justified due to that gosh darned “furtive gesture” thing again. But the only eyewitness to the furtive
gesture was the cop who shot the man dead.
There was dash-cam video of the shooting, or maybe there was, (Although
the cop denied it, there is dash-cam video of Masters’ shooting.)
The public will never know. "Unfortunately, we had a mentally ill
man who was behaving bizarrely”, Morrogh said.
"His family indicated he was behaving under delusions, that he
might feel he was under attack if approached by the police. I think that's the explanation for his actions."
Michael Pope, a reporter who
covers Northern Virginia for the Connection Newspapers chain and for the
Washington, D.C., NPR affiliate WAMU, filed a series of open records requests
with the Fairfax Police Department related to the Masters shooting. All were denied.
Then he asked Fairfax County Police Public
Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won't at least release
the incident report on Master's death, given concerns raised about the
shooting. "Let us hear that
concern”, Jennings shot back. "We
are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual
reporters."
Jennings also told Pope that
releasing police reports to the press would have a "chilling effect"
on victims and witnesses coming forward to report crimes.
Next Pope asked Jennings why her
department would not release the name of the cop who shot Masters. "What does the name of an officer give
the public in terms of information and disclosure?” Jennings asked, "I'd be curious to know
why they want the name of an officer”.
It sounded like a threat against
the reporter.
It looked like another 70 years
would go by without a Fairfax County cop being
charged for an on-duty shooting,
but then, due to international attention that the case drew, the cops finally
admitted that masters were not armed.
Bad news for the cops came when the FBI announced that they would be
investigation the case. Realizing they
were trouble, the cops reversed a long practice of withholding the names of
cops who gun people down and sold out the cop who shot Masters and released his
name to the public.
When the case drew more and more
attention from around the world and a federal civil rights investigation into
the shooting is continuing. The cops
realized they were caught red handed they fired the cop who killed Masters,
terminating him under the guise of improper use of deadly force.
Justice is open to everyone in
the same way as the Ritz Hotel is open to everyone. Judge Sturgess
December 14, 2006 the cops
cornered and shot an unarmed robbery suspect.
There was no civilian witness to the shooting. The man, who was black, was hiding in a crawl
space with no way out when the cops ordered him to come out of the crawl
space. The man refused and made what
police said was "several furtive gestures”, although they declined to say
what those gestures were. They then fired
two shots into the suspect, killing him.
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