Fairfax County Police Watch: Idiots at work on your tax dollars

Police investigate apparent gun accident during firearms training in Holden

HOLDEN Mass. — An Assumption College campus police official accidentally shot himself in the foot while at a shooting range in Holden.

Memphis cop suspend officer over KKK tweets

The Memphis Police Department has suspended a cop Brian Hall for social media statements deriding the Ku Klux Klan. The FBI was monitoring social media during a March 30 rally by the white supremacist group in Memphis and saw tweets from Hall's personal account. The agency reported what it found to the city police department.

Cleveland punishes 12 cops in chase

The city fired a police sergeant, Michael Donegan and demoted two other supervisors and suspended nine more Tuesday for their roles in a chase in which officers fired 137 shots and killed a fleeing driver and his passenger. Donegan briefly participated in the chase last November but pulled off, parked his patrol vehicle and failed to supervise his officers, police officials said. “I made a determination that his conduct was so egregious that it merited termination,” said Safety Director Martin Flask, who oversees police and fire. Of the 276 cops on duty on the evening of Nov. 29, 104 were involved in some way in the chase.

Report details misconduct within Butler Police Department

The former Village of Butler Wisconsin police chief, along with several members of his staff, regularly viewed pornography at work, with one officer beginning his day calling it "porn in the morn," according to a 365-page report released Thursday by the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department. Chief Michael Cosgrove retired in March as the inquiry was being conducted. The review confirmed several complaints leveled against Cosgrove, including that Cosgrove accessed pornographic materials on his Police Department computer and used racially derogatory language in emails to employees, including using the N-word.Cosgrove admitted he used the racial slur and defined it as "people who don't fulfill their societal obligations or someone who abuses the system" and could be of any race, according to the report.

The report found:

■ Lt. Brian Pergande engaged in "misconduct in office," though the details were redacted in the report released to the public. He also was found to have improper pictures on his work email, to have used racial comments and to have misused the TIME system — a state-run crime information system — to check criminal histories of individuals for personal use.

■ Officer Chad Rahn acted improperly while on duty, having exposed his penis multiple times. He also used the TIME system for personal use and created an uncomfortable work environment, according to the report.

■ Officers Joel Fus and Rick Napierala had improperly used department equipment.

■ Sheriff's Department investigators found a wallet used as a piece of evidence in a case during the 1990s on Cosgrove's desk, three loaded and unsecured guns in Cosgrove's office, and learned that the department did not have a policy for returning firearms that it held for safekeeping.

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.