Fairfax County Police Watch: 04/04/22

Fairfax citizens’ panel agrees with suggestions to reform police use of force policies

Megan Cloherty

A group of volunteers who served on a community panel to analyze how police use force in Fairfax County, Virginia, said it agrees that changes need to be made in how officers are trained and data is collected by the department.

In looking at a study by the University of Texas at San Antonio on Fairfax County’s use of force between June 2016 and December 2018, Yolonda Earl-Thompson of the Use of Force Advisory Committee told the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors that the committee agrees with suggested changes.

“Without cultural change, internally and externally, policy change will not make meaningful and impactful improvements for a safer community and a safer Fairfax,” Earl-Thompson said.

Along with documenting when force is used, the panel said the department should collect data on its de-escalation techniques and educate officers on county history with a focus on generational trauma.

“One of our overarching recommendations is to ensure that the changes are rooted and guided by trauma-informed perspectives that grants a higher value on lived experiences of communities of color, youth, residents with behavioral and substance abuse dependencies, immigrants and undocumented persons,” Earl-Thompson said in her presentation on March 1.

“These are the people most impacted by the use of force and the contact with law enforcement.”

Those residents must be kept top of mind in retraining officers and changing the way the department collects use of force data, the committee found. It also recommended tracking instances where deadly force was authorized to reduce the risk of selection bias.

The study analyzed 1,360 use-of-force cases from January 2016 to December 2018 and found that 42% of cases involved Black individuals, compared to 38% for white people, and Black people were 1.8 times more likely to have a weapon pointed at them by police.

The study was released in June and given to the panel of volunteers to analyze.

Following the committee’s presentation, Police Chief Kevin Davis informed the Board of Supervisors that the department has adopted a new ICAT (integrating communications, assessment and tactics) training guide recommended by the study and will begin to retrain officers next month.

He also told the board that officers will train with non-lethal tools, such as BolaWraps, which can restrain suspects with minimum force.

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.