Fairfax County Police Watch: STOP SCANNING

The cops can scan 2, 700,000 license plates without getting out of their cars yet they can’t wear body cameras.

Where the hell are our elected officials on this? Where is Sharon “Show me the money” Bulova and her creepy undertakers smile? How about John Faust and his weasel excuses for the cops? They are nowhere to be found and completely silent on the issue.

According to investigative journalist Stephan Gutowski, the Fairfax County Police, 90% of whom live outside the county, use 26 automatic license plate readers and as of May 2014 have scanned 2.7 million plates (In a general population of 1.1 million citizens)

You don’t think this dangerious? Well, think about this; in 2008 the Virginia State Police scanned plates of citizens who attended political rallies for Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. And then there’s the added question….are the cops selling this information to private companies?

The problem is that the Fairfax occupation force is collecting and storing that information without consent or knowledge of the citizens. True to their mission of secrecy with our money, the county police aren’t telling us who has access to those records and which (if any) of the plates have been used by the cops for any purpose whatsoever. This is, no matter what the cops have decided, unlawful search and seizure.

Scanning plates to compare them to a list of plates connected to an investigation is one thing, keeping that information under lock and key is a whole other issue. It’s no surprise that the FCPD chief, Edwin C. Roessler, probably the most unoriginal thinker to ever work in government, thinks the scanning scam is a good idea as a crime fighting tool and says that the police keep the information on record for a year so we shouldn’t worry about it, because, you know, the cops would never fuck you over. The problem is Chief Roessler, who really should be replaced has no credibility in matters of the public trust as his miserable record in defending killers on his force proves.

The occupation force has no means to prove that they have used the collected plates to solve a crime and yet they swear their not collecting this information for profit or to share with the federal government. The cops have defended their position of spying on the public but explaining that “ many other jurisdictions retain ALPR data for up to two years”

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

In 2014 then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli declared that it was unlawful for police to collect the data and keep in on file. The state police SAID they stopped it but the Fairfax County Occupation police, as always, decided they are a law unto themselves and continued collecting information on citizens.

Earlier this year, the Virginia State Senate and House of Delegates unanimously voted in favor of Senate Bill 965 which allows the cops to use Automatic License Plate Readers but stated very clearly that the cops would only be able to store those records for seven days, unless they were part of an active, ongoing criminal investigation.

So here we had a bill with overwhelming bipartisan support from the state congress so naturally the Governor Terry McAuliffe would sign it into law right?

Wrong

McAuliffe cut up the bill and watered it down enough so that allowed the cops to keep records for 60 days.

But why would he do that?

Because McAuliff and his millions of dollars and close friends in the national Democratic Party is feathering his nest for higher office and figures he’ll career will go further as a Law and Order man on the national scene.

Like Sharon Bulova and John Faust, McAuliff has misread the public’s mood on the cops in the United States, especially with this new generation and their tech savvy and phone cameras who just aren’t going to put up with it.

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.