Every
year the Virginia State Patrol releases the comprehensive “Crime in Virginia” which
breaks down criminal offenses, state wide, by local law enforcement
jurisdiction. The report is the state’s official voice on crime statistics for all
state jurisdictions...…..except the Fairfax County Police. They don’t like the
way the report makes them look and because of their aversion to releasing the true figures, national (The VSP report incorporated
in the FBI’s annual report, “Crime in the United States.”) and state law
enforcement officials don’t know the true homicide rate in Fairfax County, the
only county in the state their not sure of.
Virtually
every governmental body says that Fairfax County had at least 17 murders in
2013. But the Fairfax County Police, whose incredible $400,000,000 budget
depends on low crime rates, says there were only 8 murders in the county in
2013.
Obsessively
image conscious and terrified of bad press, the Fairfax County Police not only
duck the truth, they fabricate it as well. The department has droned on about a drop
in the county’s murder rate, claiming it fell 50% from the 16 killings in 2012.
Yet in a private report prepared for the Metropolitan Washington Council of
Governments, the police said that there were actually 17 homicides in the county.
They lie and they get away with it.
They get away with it for two reasons, firstly there is not one person
in local government willing to take a stand against them and secondly, unlike
all other jurisdictions in the state of Virginia, the Fairfax County cops tabulate
their own crime statistics. And no one knows how they compile those figures and they refuse to share the methods used.
Part of
the reason that the Fairfax County cops keep their methods secret is that they
cook the books by using two methods to compile crime statistics.
Meaning that if one method of counting crime (The Unified Crime Reporting) doesn’t
work to the cop's advantage, they use a backup method (The Incident-Based
Reporting) that is guaranteed to give them the results they want the public to
see. If those two methods don’t work to the cop’s
advantage they run the numbers again using a third system that calculates the
numbers of victims involved with a crime. (while crimes against property and
crimes against society are calculated based on the actual number of events.)
It's your government, it's your money. They'll get away with it as long as you let them get away with it.