FCPD progress report met with
controversy
By Angela Woolsey/Fairfax County
Times
May 26, 2017
The community meeting organized
by Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova and Lake Braddock
Supervisor John Cook to discuss recommendations for police reforms was intended
to highlight the progress that the county has made since the Ad Hoc Police
Practices Review Commission published its final report on Oct. 8, 2015.
However, the 90-minute meeting
held Tuesday evening in the Fairfax County Government Center’s board auditorium
turned out to be more indicative of the amount of work that the county still
needs to do in bridging the trust gap between police and the people they serve.
Bulova and Cook, who chairs the
board’s public safety committee, summarized what the county has done over the
past two years to address the commission’s 202 suggested recommendations, which
covered the use of force, independent oversight, mental health and crisis
intervention team (CIT) training, recruitment diversity and vetting, and
communications.
According to Bulova, the Board of
Supervisors has reviewed all of the report’s recommendations and approved 178
of them – or 88 percent – within the first year.
“The Board of Supervisors, police
department and other county agencies continue to move with deliberate speed to
transform these recommendations into actionable policies,” Bulova said. “…I’m
proud of the progress that we’ve made, and I’m especially proud that our
Fairfax County Board of Supervisors took very, very seriously the fact that we
needed to make changes.”
Bulova originally established the
Ad Hoc Police Practices Review Commission on Mar. 3, 2015 in response to a
public outcry over the circumstances surrounding the death of John Geer, a
Springfield resident who was fatally shot by a Fairfax County police officer in
2013.
The roughly 34-member commission
consisted of private citizens, academics, law enforcement representatives,
members of the media and the legal community, and county staff.
Fairfax County Police Department
(FCPD) Chief Edwin Roessler Jr. says that the department began its new
de-escalation training in 2016.
In addition, the Fairfax County
Criminal Justice Academy, which serves the FCPD, the Fairfax County Sheriff’s
Office, the towns of Herndon and Vienna police departments, and the Fairfax
County Fire Marshal’s Office, is already seeing some payoff from efforts to
recruit candidates from more diverse communities, according to Roessler.
A 2015 Fairfax County
demographics report found that 83 percent of the FCPD’s 1,369 sworn officers
were Caucasian, compared to 7 percent African American and 5 percent Hispanic.
Combined, African American and Hispanic residents made up almost a quarter of
the county’s overall population at the time.
The FCPD also had only 184 female
officers, according to that report, which is included in Commission on
Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) 2016 assessment report for
the FCPD.
Roessler recently revised his
department’s use-of-force guidelines, also known as general order 540.
With an effective date of Mar.
31, 2017, the new order states that “force is to be used only to the extent it
is objectively reasonable to defend oneself or another, to control an
individual during an investigative or mental detention, or to lawfully effect
an arrest.”
Bulova, Cook, and Roessler touted
the county’s creation of a Diversion First program aimed at providing mental
health treatment to those who need it instead of sending them to jail.
Launched on Jan. 1, 2016 in the
Merrifield Crisis Response Center, the program received 375 individuals who
would have otherwise been potentially arrested in its first year, according to
Diversion First’s 2016 annual report.
Fairfax County has also
implemented a restorative justice initiative where school students work with
facilitators to resolve issues, rather than being punished through suspensions
or expulsions. This approach is designed to address the school-to-prison
pipeline that sees black students in particular disproportionately caught up in
the criminal justice system at a young age.
The county’s restorative justice
program has received more than 400 referrals in this year alone, says Communities
of Trust Committee chair Shirley Ginwright, who leads a citizen group intended
to strengthen relationships between public safety agencies and the local
community.
Among the most prominent reforms
to come out of the ad hoc commission’s report, however, are the establishment
of an independent auditor and a civilian review panel for the county.
Appointed by the Board of
Supervisors, FBI veteran Richard Schott took his position as Fairfax County’s
first independent police auditor on Apr. 17.
The auditor’s office is
responsible for reviewing internal investigations of FCPD officer-involved
incidents that resulted in an individual being killed or seriously injured. It
does not conduct independent investigations but can request further inquiries
into internal investigations and must review all investigations into resident
complaints regarding the use of force.
Approved by the Board of
Supervisors on Dec. 6, the civilian police review panel is charged with
reviewing resident complaints alleging harassment or discrimination, procedural
violations, the endangerment of a person in custody, and other possible abuses
of authority or misconduct by a Fairfax County police officer.
On Feb. 28, the board appointed
nine people to serve on the panel for three-year terms.
“We want to bring our police and
community closer together. Independent oversight will help us do that,” Cook
said.
Despite county officials’
assertion that progress has been made, many community members said during the
public comments portion of Tuesday night’s meeting that their concerns have not
been adequately addressed, particularly those related to how law enforcement
interacts with people of color and people with disabilities.
“I think this is a positive step
in the right direction. We do have a long way to go,” NAACP Fairfax County
president Kofi Annan said of the reforms, requesting that the county release
data to see if there are racial disparities in who gets diverted from jail
through Diversion First.
An administrative investigation
and use-of-force report conducted by the FCPD’s internal affairs bureau in 2015
found that 539 community members had been involved in a use-of-force incident,
222 – or 41 percent – of them identified as black.
While 52 percent of use-of-force
incidents involved white community members, community demographics indicate
that 63 percent of Fairfax County’s populace is Caucasian, whereas only 8
percent of the population is black.
The report’s disciplinary action
summary shows that one officer was disciplined for using force in 2015 with an
oral reprimand.
Roessler says that he will
“shortly” update information on his webpage about how officers are disciplined
for the use of force.
Cook indicated that Schott has
been tasked with further studying the police department’s use-of-force
statistics, but Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Northern Virginia lead
organizer Cayce Utley argues that there is already sufficient evidence of
racial bias.
“When pressed about the obvious
systemic racism, there’s deflection,” Utley said. “There’s ‘we don’t know if
it’s really that bad.’ Everyone here is content with the status quo.”
SURJ is a nationwide organization
dedicated to mobilizing white people to undermine “support for white supremacy
and to help build a racially just society,” according to the Kentucky-based
group’s website.
Though Roessler points to his
department’s new media relations bureau as proof that transparency and
communication has improved, Utley says that the county has provided few
opportunities for the public to give input on the ad hoc commission
recommendations and how they have been implemented.
The public safety committee
meetings never allocate time for public comment, but the board received input
on the recommendations from entities like police unions, according to Utley,
who says she has attended all of the meetings since the commission report came
out.
Utley says that this has
undermined some of the reforms that the county has put in place.
The Board of Supervisors has
declined to implement eight of the ad hoc commission’s recommendations,
according to an interactive progress report available on the county website.
Among the recommendations that
have not been implemented is an assurance that information is presented for all
officer-involved shootings and lethal incidents within 72 hours, including an
update on any discipline that was administered.
The board also chose not to adopt
recommendations giving the civilian review panel the authority to retain a
criminal investigative consultant and designating that the auditor would serve
for a term between two and five years in order to maintain continuity and
independence.
Neither the new independent
auditor nor the civilian review panel can conduct its own investigations, take
testimony, or interview witnesses who may not have been involved in the police
department’s investigation.
When the Board of Supervisors met
to discuss the civilian review panel in December, independent counsel Julia
Judkins informed the board that state law prevents advisory bodies like the
panel from having that kind of authority.
“If there were laws at the state
level preventing them from creating an independent oversight that was community
controlled, then the state needs to fix that too,” Utley said. “But there are
things they can do to make incremental change, and they’re just not doing it.”
For his part, Roessler says that
he welcomes the criticism and hopes that more community members will actively
engage in these discussions with the police department and other public safety
agencies.
“I’m really grateful that our
community members were direct with all of us,” Roessler said. “I really
appreciate that because that’s the way that we can engage and create change.”
