Critics Outline 'Crisis Of Confidence' Between Fairfax County
Police, Public
By: Michael Pope
July 27, 2015
Leaders of the Fairfax County
Police Department are in for some harsh criticism. Tonight, they'll be meeting
with critics who have written a pointed report outlining what they call a
"crisis of confidence." The document is part of a commission created
earlier this year to review the police department in the wake of several
high-profile cases.
Back in 2006, Fairfax County
police leaders sent a SWAT team to raid a gambling game and killed Sal Culosi.
The name of the officer was not released for months. Then, in 2009, Fairfax
police killed David Masters, an unarmed driver. They kept the dashboard video
secret for years. More recently, Fairfax officials came under heavy criticism
for the death of John Geer, an unarmed Springfield man who was killed in 2013.
Now, after a groundswell of
criticism, a new report says communications in those cases and others were
"mishandled, inadequate and untimely, leading to a loss of public trust
and questions about the legitimacy of police actions."
"The message I get from that
report is, 'Chief, you need to do better, and I am trying,'" says Fairfax
County Police Chief Edwin Roessler, who sat down with WAMU to talk about the
report and his reaction to its recommendations. "You need more access to
me, to this agency and we need to provide more information through social media
as they unfold."
But, Roessler says, he will not
be releasing the report his department conducted on the death of a woman who
died after being hit with a Taser stun gun several times while she was
handcuffed. He would also not commit to releasing dashboard video footage or
body camera footage of officer-involved shootings. He also wouldn't commit to
releasing the names his employees who are involved in officer involved
shootings within a week.
Those are the kinds of decisions
that Dave Statter says have given the department a bad reputation.
"When I was a reporter covering the news in
Fairfax County, we often referred to the Fairfax County Police Department as
the KGB. They were the secret police," says Statter, a longtime reporter
for WUSA who is now a member of the panel that wrote the report. "Many
departments, because of sunshine laws, are required to release that type of
information. They still prosecute cases. They still handle the privacy issues.
So I think it's important to find ways to do this rather than to look for ways
not to."
The report recommends the police
department adopt what it calls a "predisposition to disclose," an
approach that would presume records are public and that exemptions be narrowly
construed. It also says that the department release names of officers who kill
civilians as well as video of those events in addition to basic details of
every incident and call to the department.
