Police Oversight Won’t Work in Fairfax County

Fire David Rohrer as chief of the Fairfax County Police and bring in an outsider to run the department. That’s the only way to change the culture of contempt that rules the department now.

Police oversight won’t work. Ya ’all’s in the south and the good old boys who run this county may allow the creation of a Citizens Oversight Committee but they’ll have it stacked with “Reliable’s” by the end of the year, Good Ole Boys who will make damn sure the Committee does nothing to change anything.

No, police oversight, although well intended, won’t work here. The culture of contempt and arrogance is far too pervasive within the Fairfax County Police Department to be changed by a group of well-meaning citizens.

What will work is to fire the police who run the Fairfax County Police Department. Rohrer is a lifelong Fairfax County government employee and lacks perspective on the group of organized thugs that the police have become under his command.

Secrecy. Rohrer has created a Secret Police force which tells the citizens, the people who pay him that he will not release police incident reports to the public. Their business is none of their business. Instead the incident reports are marked secret and eventually destroyed.

These types of documents are routinely available in most jurisdictions in the US. But of course in those places, the elected officials probably aren’t afraid of the cops. But again, the problem goes beyond even the secretive nature of the force that Rohrer and his assistants have created. It is their lack of understanding as to why a secret police is dangerous and unacceptable in a free society.

In 2009, when a cop gunned down yet another unarmed citizen, the police refused to identify the cop who murdered the man.

"What,” demanded the combative and surly police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings, “What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure? I’d be curious to know why they want the name of an officer."

If Rohrer wants to redeem what’s left of his integrity, he can start by moving that high strung woman to a less stressful position.

Secrecy and contempt. The Fairfax County Police are out of control. They murder us on a fairly regular basis and they prey on us and they get away with it.

It comes down to respect. The cops constantly plead, in fact they demand that the citizenry have respect for them but the cops have absolutely no respect for the citizens and that attitude is endemic throughout the department.

This type of distain for the citizens comes from the top down. It doesn’t come from the bottom up. Generally speaking, people who go into police work are followers, not leaders. A leader wouldn’t consider police as a line of work and if they did, they’d quit within a few months. That’s not a crack at the police, it’s simply the truth. The very reason we hire the people who serve on our police force is largely due to their lack of individuality, originality and their willingness to follow the pack and for good reason. Police departments run along paramilitary lines where following orders is crucial to the organization’s efficiency.

So, no, independent, cognizant types won’t be found on the force and the people we are left with don’t have the motivation or greater awareness to originate the sort of contempt our police department has for us. No, these people take their clues from the bosses and the message from the bosses is clear; “I hold the people, the citizens, in contempt and so do you,” which in turn leads to a zeitgeist within the police department that reads, “We don’t need them, they need us.”

And who can blame them for thinking that way? The bosses think that way and when the rank and file acts out their leader’s contempt, they get away with it because our board of supervisors is too intimidated to do anything about it. Access spawns in an atmosphere without restraint.

Fairfax County underwrites one of the largest and most expensive police departments in the whole of North America. No one has ever stepped forward to question the enormous growth of the Fairfax County Police or the excessive number of people on the force so it continues to grow because Rohrer and his many, many highly paid assistants want it to grow. Power has that effect on people.

As a result of unchecked cop overpopulation, they prey on us because they are bored, and they don’t have enough to do. Here’s an example. In 2010, the occupying force that is the Fairfax County Police….of whom 80% live outside the county, costing us over $50,000,000 in lost revenues….issued about two tickets an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year…..for distracted driving.

There are two problems here. The cop’s tickets produce enormous sums of money for the board of supervisors to spend and balance their budgets. In turn, the board of supervisors looks the other way at the tremendous cost the cops take from this county, and instead of voting for police over sight, they vote not to vote.

If a group of Italian men did what the Fairfax County police are doing it would be called a protection racket. When good old southern boys in uniforms do it, it’s called enforcing the law and when the Board of Supervisors pretends none of this is happening it is called bad governance and criminal compliance.

The definition of distracted driving is up to the cops who issue the tickets……the same cops who can’t tell the difference between a cell phone and a pistol and as a result shot down a citizen named Sal Culosi. If you are not familiar with the highly suspect facts around the Culosi killing, you should be.

Culosi, an easy going, wealthy and successful 37-year old optometrist with no prior record, was entrapped on gambling charges by a cop named David J. Baucom. Baucom met Culosi in a bar, befriended him, and made wagers with him, upping the ante with each bet and encouraging the unsuspecting Culosi to wager larger sums.

Baucom would later say in an affidavit that he had wagered close to $30,000 with Culosi over a three-month period, and had lost nearly $6,000. We have no evidence that he did or didn’t. We don’t know how many other cops got in on the action or how much they made. But Culosi knew and that may explain why he’s dead today.

Culosi made a lot of cops very, very nervous but for half a decade, the department has refused to answer the simple question, “Were other members of the police force involved with Sal Culosi?”

It’s a simple question that can be answered with a yes or no.

The entire episode is very strange. As an example, Baucom assembled the heavily armed Fairfax County SWAT team to arrest Culosi…a SWAT team with flak jackets and bullet proof vests and high powered rifles , to arrest a near sighted optometrist with no criminal record who never owned a weapon and had no history of violence…….why a SWAT team?

When the arrest came, if in fact they really intended to arrest him as opposed to executing him, Culosi offered no resistance but a cop named Deval Bullock fired a bullet through Culosi’s heart, killing him, silencing him, on the spot.

The police department said that Culosi was carrying a cell phone that looked like a pistol and then, realizing absolutely no one was ever going to buy that line, they said Bullock’s finger slipped and the gun went off .

No one bought that either. The police force went into defense mode at once. They lied about everything. A spokesman for the Fairfax County police department originally said that the department serves all of its search warrants with the SWAT team. When pressed for evidence, the department finally admitted that the SWAT team rarely has anything to do with search warrants.

When asked if the SWAT team has been involved in acts of violence against other nonviolent suspects, the department said it “would have to conduct substantial research before answering that question”. That’s almost six years ago. They have never answered the question.

The defense “Us-them” mode continued. The cops waited for five hours before calling Culosi’s parents to tell them that they mowed down their son. Furthermore, they forbid a hospital staff social worker to contact the family and when the family finally arrived to the hospital, the cops physically barred the elderly couple from seeing their son’s corpse for two days. They saw the body for the first time after it was sent to a funeral home.

While the family mourned, Baucom, the cop who set Culosi up, called the dead man’s family and friends, their numbers taken from the victims cell phone…the one the cops said that they thought was a pistol and should have been locked away as evidence…. to gather information on Culosi. At one point he called Culosi's grieving brother-in-law, and asked menacingly, "how much are you into Sal, for?"

The brother-in-law, was not a Fairfax County cop so he didn’t place number s with Culosi, would later say that in his opinion the purpose of the call “smacked of witness intimidation”.

The shooter, Bullock the cop, insisted his story about mishap with his gun and the shot that got a bulls eye hit through Culosi’s heart, was true even though a team of experts hired by the Culosi family proved things could not have happened the way the cop said they did. The family sued. When the police were given the opportunity to explain Bullock’s story….they folded…..they paid the family $2,000,000 of your money to make the case go away.

Nether Bullock, the gunman, or Baucom were arrested. The Fairfax County prosecutor, Robert Horan, announced that, once again, he would not press charges against the cops. In 39 years as a prosecutor, Horan never, not once, brought a single charge against a cop. Horan even went a step further. He joined the police department in not making Bullock’s name public. A Washington Post reporter did that.

When asked if he would have filed charges against citizens under the same circumstances or if he would release the citizen’s names to the public, Horan refused to answer. In the strange word of Horan, the Police chief and the Board of Supervisors, cops are not to be held to a higher standard but to a lower standard.

Not only are there absolutely no repercussions against the cops for shooting down the citizenry in cold blood and no argument can be made to say that there are repercussions. No one on the police force lost a night’s sleep or a single red penny over the killing of Sal Culosi or the other innocent people butchered by the Fairfax County Police.

No one on the force was fired. No one on the force was arrested. No one reprimanded.

They got away with cold blooded murder and not a single member of the Board of Supervisors voiced even the slightest protest in the name of the people they are elected and paid very well to represent.

No one on the force was fined or paid for legal fees. We, the people the cops hold in such contempt that they won’t live in our county, we the citizens who pay their enormous bloated salaries and supply them with one of the highest law enforcement budgets in the world….yeah, the world…..we got stiffed with a $2,000,000 bill to pay for the cops incompetence.

Almost all of the top management of the Fairfax County Police Department has never held a position outside of the department much less a position in private industry, so the concept of merit/punishment in the workplace is beyond them. They simply can’t grasp it. As an example, any negative reports from citizens against any member of the Fairfax County Police never enters the cop’s file. In fact, the negative report is destroyed within a year of its filing.

Police brutality, poor performance, thug attitudes are buried by the Fairfax County Police Internal Investigations unit whose sole purpose, unknown to most citizens, is to protect the department from any and all outside forces. And that includes the County Board of Supervisors.

Then there is the rumor that won’t go away; the story that says that the Internal Investigations unit keeps surveillance on each member of the Board of Supervisors and other political players in the county, which, if true, wouldn’t be at all surprising and may also account for the Board of Supervisors limp wristed response to the demand for police oversight.

Whatever the truth is, the Board of Supervisors has never, not once in 75 years, demanded accountability, transparency, and reform from the police who are supposed to answer to them. In the case of their dealing with Rohrer and his contemptuous attitude, the Board of Supervisors argument for keeping Rohrer in place is that crime rates have fallen in the county.

True but neither David Rohrer nor the Fairfax County police are responsible for lower crime rates in the county.

Crime is down all over the nation and in most first and second world nations as well. In the US, technology, community outreach by local government, demographics (fewer young people, the leading criminal offenders) higher and longer benefits to the poor and unemployed, public awareness, severe sentencing, and general rising of living standards are largely responsible for lower crime rates.

Rohrer is a master at manipulating the local media and spends enormous sums of taxpayer’s money to protect his image. Of course, working in Rohrer and the Board of Supervisor’s favor is the fact that the Washington Post newspaper is virtually the only legitimate media outlet reporting on the police situation in Fairfax County. The Connection newspaper occasionally covers the topic and the local “Patch” reporters have been very diligent and feisty in reporting the Board of Supervisors weasel ways in ducking a confrontation with the Fairfax County Police. The local television news agencies are nowhere to be found in this issue but in fairness they do a magnificent job on reporting about “Police ride alongs”.

Still, even without the media, that ever-so-ugly issue of police oversight keeps popping up and won’t go away. The grass roots movement started in February of 2010, when a cop named David Ziants shot and killed an unarmed driver on Richmond Highway. When citizens demanded to know why Ziants gunned down the man, the police responded by trying to destroy the dashboard video footage of the incident and said they had lost the incident report. That killing sparked the beginning of a movement to create a citizen review board in Fairfax County.

The Board of Supervisors, specifically County Executive Anthony Griffin, have successfully beat back almost every effect for a Police Oversight Board. So Fairfax County is the largest jurisdiction in the country without any independent review of its police department and Anthony Griffin and his boss David Rohrer want to keep it that way. In his world view, we’re safe with the police policing themselves.

When Griffins very suspicious howls of protest against police oversight began to embarrass even the cops, he and Chief Rohrer, who is at the heart of this problem, created a plan for oversight that excluded any citizen input when investigating allegations of police misconduct. The crux of their argument against the people of Fairfax County was based on a 1997 report that said that only 98 out of 651 eligible agencies had public review.

Yes, but only 1 out of the 651 eligible agencies that has public review murders and beats citizens.

Under the plan that Rohrer ordered Griffin to submit, there would be no independent investigation of police misconduct, rather, as remarkable as this is, an accountant would investigate. Rohrer and Griffin, and with a straight face, said that it would be great idea if the county auditor review the police investigation.

The auditor answers to Griffin and Griffin answers to Rohrer. Further, Griffin felt it was best if the auditor had no power to subpoena witnesses but would “Review” the official police investigation. The auditor would have no other role at all.

"Having an auditor review the police investigation is like having the fox guarding the hen-house," said Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. "Citizens should have the opportunity to evaluate, investigate and review police activity."

Kind of makes you wonder exactly how much the cops have on Griffin that makes him dance so hard to their tune.

Rohrer and his new sidekick Anthony Griffin say one of the reason citizens don't need to be involved in oversight is the anticipated installation of cameras in police cruisers. This, according to the cops mouthpiece Griffin is a very good substitute for a citizen review board….for the cops maybe but not for the citizens.

The problem is no one is buying that either. There are several reels of film of Fairfax County Police killing people but it’s all withheld from the public. And when the county Board of Supervisors dolls over the $3.7 million for Rohrer’s cameras without your consent or input, Rohrer refused to answer the simple question “Will the tapes made by the cameras be available to the public?”

Again, contempt and Secrecy.

Again, this problem, the contempt that the Fairfax County Police hold against the citizens who employ them, won’t be solved by cameras or police oversight committees even if the cops would release the film footage or the Board of Supervisors doesn’t stack the Oversight board.

We need a chief…from outside the department…. who understands the importance of not running a secret police force whose sole purpose seems to be to intimidate and draw a steady paycheck. We need a chief who will open up the hundreds and hundreds of secret files on police disciplinary action and who won’t destroy the hundreds of complaints filed against his department every year. The time to act is now. It is only a matter of time before the police gun down another citizen under murky circumstances. Rohr has to go and his top people should be fired along with him. If we fire the weasels on the Board of Supervisors, the people who hired Rohr, then the next Board of Supervisors will fire Rohr.