Fairfax County Police Watch: 11/25/22

Short nearly 200 officers, Fairfax PD staffing 'at a crisis level' ahead of holiday season

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (7News) — Thanksgiving tends to be one of the most dangerous and deadly times on U.S. roads due to increases in impaired drivers and reckless driving.

Going into the holiday season, the Fairfax County Police Department is facing a shortage of police officers – officers who are responsible for enforcing traffic laws and getting drunk drivers off the roads.

Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said recruiting classes have gotten larger. However, the Fairfax County Police Department is still facing a staffing crisis.

“When you’re down around 200 officers and you’ve disbanded your specialty units, of course, it’s at a crisis level,” Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity told 7News on Tuesday.

Herrity says The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors needs to focus on keeping current officers by paying them more.

“We’ve seen increases in crime, we’ve seen increased traffic accidents and pedestrians fatalities,” said Herrity. “Public safety isn’t something you can ignore. It will catch up to you and it is catching up with us.”

7News was the first to report the staffing emergency at FCPD over the summer.

At that time, FCPD was short 189 officers, Davis told 7News in August.

Vacancies later reached above 200, according to police sources. Now FCPD is short 192 officers, Davis told 7News on Tuesday.

“We’ve still seen a higher rate of resignations than retirements,” Davis told 7News. “We are doing all we can to keep people focused on the value of policing. It’s still the greatest job in the world. We just need to increase the volume of the right candidates who want to do this job for the right reasons.”

Davis hopes new recruitment efforts, including a $15,000 signing bonus for new officers, will help.

“This is a hot market and we are all in competition with each other. The application pool has dwindled over the past couple of years,” Davis said. “We have great support from the Board of Supervisors and the community at large. So we have to consider many things like compensation and financial incentives and other benefits to attract people to the job because a police applicant in 2022 has a varied menu of choices about where to go and young people are paying attention more now than they ever have.”

Fairfax Co. Police Chief Kevin Davis speaks to 7News on how the department is handling a staffing crisis (7News)

“In about a week and a half that 192 will go to 154 when we start our largest police academy class in several years,” added Davis.

“They're still in a crisis level,” said Herrity. “We're still around 200 short. Through September, we had 101 officers leave. We've had a couple of recruit classes, some transfers into a total of about 57. We got one more recruit class coming in. We're going to have some additional resignations. So we're still at a net loss on officers. We still got work to do.”

Herrity praised the $15,000 signing bonus for new officers, but he said it came too late. He blamed the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors for failing to act quickly enough. The Board of Supervisors is led by Chairman Jeffrey McKay.

“I think it was late, but I'm happy it was there,” said Herrity. “I wish we had given them the salary increases. The best thing we can do is retain our current officers. That's going to help a lot with bringing new officers in, but we really need to focus on retaining current officers.”

“There were some ideas put on the table last budget,” Herrity added. “Salary increase that got cut in half and spread across all public safety agencies rather than given to the patrol staff where we really need them - Second Lieutenant below. We could extend Drop. That was also on the table. So there are some creative things that we should and can be doing. And I hope that the board will come around on it.”

Herrity predicts more officers will have to retire by the end of the year.

“Simply, [the ] Drop [program] is officers pick their retirement date three years out, and they can't work past that date,” he said. “So they’re not allowed to work past that three years. We can extend that by a year or two years with literally no cost to the government.”

“And the board said no?” 7News' Nick Minock asked.

“And the board said no,” Herrity replied.

One place some officers have gone to is Amazon.

“Amazon is certainly a challenge not just for Fairfax but for police departments around the country,” Davis said. "We have to be creative We have to be the employer of choice and there is a commitment to do so.”

But Supervisor Herrity expressed doubt that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has that commitment.

“We need to get back to public safety being a priority in Fairfax County," said Herrity.

Fairfax County is beginning its budget process soon. 7News will let you know if the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approves pay raises for current officers - or not - to address the staffing crisis.

“We hope we are turning the corner a little bit on recruiting,” said Davis. “We had five Fairfax County police officers who resigned in the last year who came back, so they came back to the job. So that’s exciting. The grass isn’t always greener.”

'Everything is not OK. It's not anywhere near OK' | Major crimes are up in Fairfax County

FAIRFAX, Va. (7News) — With five weeks to go until the end of the year, crimes against people and crimes against property are up in Fairfax County, Va.

That’s according to the latest data from the Fairfax County Police Department.

These crimes include arson, burglary, vandalism, robbery, motor vehicle theft, assault, homicides, kidnapping, sex offenses and other major crimes.

“We have for the first time ever, have an Auto Crimes Enforcement squad. All they do is go after car thieves,” said Kevin Davis, the Police Chief of the Fairfax County Police Department.

Davis said this has helped reduce skyrocketing auto thefts --- although he said auto thefts are still up over last year.

“At the end of March, across the county, [auto thefts] were up about 45%,” said Davis. “And this Auto Crimes Enforcement squad has driven that down and we stand at about ten percent increase in auto theft.”

“We are challenged by auto theft,” added Davis. “We are challenged by the theft of catalytic converters. We are challenged by domestic violence, and we are challenged by simple assaults.”

All year, 7News has been tracking and reporting on crime trends in Fairfax County.

In August, when 7News told Board of Supervisor’s Chair Jeff McKay that several categories of crime are going up, McKay responded by saying Fairfax County is the safest jurisdiction of its size in the country.

It’s a message that’s been echoed by Fairfax County’s top prosecutor Steve Descano.

“At the end of the day, we are experiencing what most jurisdictions are experiencing except we are weathering it much better,” Descano told 7News. “That allows us to keep our communities safe and crime is down over the last few years in general.”

Descano is counting all crimes, including Group B offenses which include drunkenness. But the number of Group A crimes is increasing.

Supervisor Pat Herrity is calling out local leaders like Chairman McKay for painting a rosy picture of crime trends in Fairfax County while the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) is short around 200 officers.

“Everything is not OK. It’s not anywhere near OK,” said Herrity. “You can’t be down 200 officers, disbanding all your specialty units, units that took our department from a good department to a great department and be OK. The police shortage impacts everybody day to day. Whether that be increase crime, increase speeding, and people ignoring traffic laws. It puts us at risk. We’ve seen that in everything from our mall managers not reporting crime, now to the increased traffic fatalities that we’ve had. It’s something that when you lose control of, it’s hard to get back. We need to get back to public safety being a priority in Fairfax County.”

As of Nov. 22, Fairfax County saw 20 homicides in 2022 which is the same number of homicides in 2021. In 2020, there were 15 homicides and in 2019 there were 14 homicides, according to FCPD data.

“Murders 2022 vs. 2021, we are at 20. You might recall we finished 2021 with 20 murders,” said Davis. “A third of those murders were committed by adult children killing their parents inside their homes. This year is a little bit different. But, domestic violence in terms of homicides is still the theme. Nine of our 20 murders are domestic-related murders. So, we are still seeing domestic violence stress and anxiety, isolation all those things play a role in the family dynamic and violence that has erupted because of that.”

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.