Fairfax County Police Watch: Stop hiring punks and watch how quickly things change

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — For Lee District Supervisor Rodney Lusk, reviewing how Fairfax County dispatches public safety personnel seems like a good first step if you're looking to improve how police respond to calls for service.

"That's where everything starts," Lusk said, in an interview with Patch. "Most of the calls that aren't going to fire and rescue end up going to the police. And the question is, do the police need to get all of those calls, especially for those that have low-level substance abuse, low-level issues with mental health, where there's really no criminality involved? The person is just having an issue."

Lusk and Hunter Mill Supervisor Walter Alcorn submitted a board matter Tuesday calling for a review of the county's 9-1-1 call system. The idea behind the measure is to identify incidents in which police officers are not necessary, and where it would be better to dispatch unarmed medical, human services, and mental health professionals instead.

In his board matter, Lusk referenced other jurisdictions around the country that have established models where dispatchers routinely divert mental health and similar calls away from the police department to more appropriate responders. In particular, Lusk pointed to the CAHOOTS model employed by the City of Eugene, Oregon.

"It's been around for like 30 years and it's been extraordinarily successful," he said. "If you look at the numbers for it, you can see that they've been able to divert 20 percent of their police calls through this process. With that 20 percent allocation of calls that are going directly to this behavioral, mental health platform, you're only having like 1 percent of them needing [police] backup."

If Fairfax County adopted a program like CAHOOTS, it would not immediately see the same level of success, according to Lusk.

For one thing, the county does not have a level of staff it could dedicate right now to respond to those types of calls. Currently, if a police officer responds to a call that she determines to be a mental health or substance abuse situation, she could either bring the subject to the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center or call in the Mobile Crisis Unit.

"We're going to probably have to work ourselves to be able to clearly triage and identify which cases are those low-level ones, and then send out those kind of behavioral, mental health folks and not have to have backups," Lusk said. "But there will be instances, I'm more than certain, where there will be a need for backup. And that's why we don't want to defund the police, because you still need to ensure the safety of those workers and the citizens, when something devolves and becomes much more serious and much more dangerous than it was originally anticipated."

Adopting a CAHOOTS-like program in Fairfax County would also free up officers from certain types of cases and allow them to focus on their core mission.

"If the police aren't dealing with these kind of issues, they can deal with other issues of criminality, other issues that are more of important to the community for public safety," Lusk said. "So to me, I think it allows them to do their best work and to be focused on the issues that are most pressing within the community."

In regards to deescalating violent situations, Lusk is in favor of all FCPD officers receiving Crisis Intervention Training — currently, only 40 percent of the department has received such training.

"Even with this new model, you just never know what circumstances they're going to be put in where you might think that this call that they get sent on is not a behavioral health call," Lusk said. "It might turn into one when they get there. ... I think that's the thing that we've done wrong. We've put them in the front when they probably should be in the back only as support."

Like other places around the country, the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police has proved to be a tipping point for Fairfax County when it came to police reform, according to Lusk.

"If you'd asked me right after George Floyd, I would have been like, 'I don't anticipate that we would have this happen in Fairfax County,'" he said.

But that all changed about a week after Floyd's death when a Fairfax County Police officer responded to a call in the Gum Springs neighborhood.

Body-worn camera footage showed Tyler Timberlake, an eight-year veteran of the force, kneeling on a man's back and tasing him in the neck. Tyler was subsequently charged with three counts of misdemeanor assault and battery.

At its June 9 meeting, the Board voted unanimously to approve a statement of support for those in the county calling for racial justice and to find funding to implement the next phase of the Fairfax County Police Department's body-worn camera program.

"I think there is a recognition that we will not have business as usual," Lusk said. "I also think that the body worn camera has changed this forever into the future."

In the interest of greater accountability, the Board has also pushed FCPD to be more open about the data it collects. The department recently issued arrest and traffic data demographics for 2019.

Lusk said the Public Safety Committee will be bringing in the Citizen Review Panel and the Independent Police Auditor to present their annual reports, as well as the University of Texas, which is conducting a use of force analysis study for the county. He's also planning a series of public information sessions, including one with representatives from the City of Eugene, Oregon, to talk about the CAHOOTS program.

"I think there's a lot of the interest from the Board members, and I think even the work that my committee, the Public Safety Committee, is doing, we have strong advocates in these communities," Lusk said. "They're very specific about what things they think should be changed. They articulate those recommendations extraordinarily well."

At Tuesday's board meeting, the supervisors unanimously approved Lusk and Alcorn's board matter. Now, county staff, including the Deputy County Executive for Public Safety and the Deputy County Executive for Human Services, will review the county's 9-1-1 dispatch and response system to deploy tried unarmed medical, mental health, and human services professionals to respond as needed. A status update must be shared with the board no later than Oct. 1.

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.