....then your game. Stop hiring goons and John Wayne wanna-be's.
Fired D.C. firefighter to get $390K from Fairfax County over wrongful arrest
Elon Wilson spent 21 months in prison after his arrest by
former Fairfax County Officer Jonathan A. Freitag
Oct 11, 2021
By
Janelle Foskett
WASHINGTON
— A former D.C. Fire and EMS firefighter will receive nearly $390,000 from
Fairfax County, Virginia, to settle a lawsuit alleging a wrongful arrest that
resulted in his 21-month imprisonment.
Elon
Wilson filed a federal lawsuit in July, three months after a judge vacated his
convictions and ordered him freed. The judgment followed an internal
investigation into Jonathan A. Freitag, the Fairfax County officer who arrested
Wilson
The
lawsuit stemmed from an April 2018 incident in which Freitag pulled over
Wilson, ostensibly for crossing a yellow line on the road, failing to pull over
when signaled and having illegally tinted windows, according to court records.
Freitag arrested Wilson after finding oxycodone and handguns in the car. Wilson
said they were not his.
Wilson
was subsequently fired from D.C. Fire and EMS.
In
July 2019, Wilson was sentenced to a little over three years in prison.
Around
the same time, Fairfax internal affairs investigators began reviewing Freitag’s
traffic stops. Freitag ultimately admitted that he had made “pretextual”
traffic stops, using a false reason to pull over a vehicle. In February 2020,
Wilson’s lawyer, Marvin D. Miller, filed a motion seeking information about the
internal affairs investigation.
The Washington Post reported that, in
April 2021, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Daniel E. Ortiz vacated Wilson’s
convictions and ordered him freed, saying “Freitag’s fabricated grounds for the
stop, police report, and warrant made under oath fundamentally tampered with
the judicial machinery and subverted the integrity of the court itself.”
Following
Wilson’s release, Miller and civil rights lawyer Victor M. Glasberg filed a
federal suit against Fairfax on Wilson’s behalf. Fairfax began settlement
negotiations and, on Oct. 7, agreed to pay Wilson $390,000.
Freitag
had defended his actions in multiple interviews.
Fairfax County Police
Remove Arrest Blotter Over ICE Data Sharing Concerns
Colleen Grablick
Community advocates
said the list violated a new law that limits local law enforcement’s
interactions with immigration enforcement agencies.
Michael Pope / WAMU
Fairfax County’s
police department will no longer publish the names and personal information of
people arrested for crimes, heeding concerns from advocates that the list
endangered immigrant residents.
Earlier this year,
the county’s Board of Supervisors passed a Public Trust and Confidentiality
Policy, cutting off all voluntary cooperation and information sharing between
local agencies and federal immigration authorities. But advocates said the
arrest blotter, which lived on the police department’s website and included
information like names and last known addresses, continued to violate the law,
commonly known as the Trust Policy, by allowing Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials to target immigrant residents.
“We believe that [the
arrest blotter] violated the Trust Policy, because it’s not necessary to
release that personal information,” says Diane Alejandro, a lead advocate with
ACLU People Power Fairfax. “It just is, more than anything, a shaming list.”
According to Anthony
Guglielmi, a spokesperson for Fairfax County police, the county originally
began publishing that type of information online in 2016 in order to limit the
amount of calls the department received from residents seeking information
about arrests in their neighborhood.
The arrest blotter
came down last Friday, after a review of the practice by ACLU People Power
Fairfax found the blotter to be non-compliant with the Trust Policy, Guglielmi
said. The Washington Post first reported the decision.
The county will still
be running a weekly crime roundup on the department’s website, but will
withhold names and any other information regarding the individuals arrested.
“Important
information will continue to be shared with the community, and arrest data
remains easily accessible via FOIA to residents and reporters,” County
Supervisor Dalia Palchik, one of the nine supervisors that voted in favor of
the Trust Policy policy, wrote in a statement to DCist/WAMU.
Alejandro, who
advocated for the passage of the Trust Policy, say ACLU People Power Fairfax
supports the continuation of a crime roundup, without the names and personal
information of individuals arrested. If someone is truly interested in
gathering that information, she says, there are plenty of ways to dig for it on
the internet — instead of the police proactively offering it.
“It’s not like folks
are being left in the dark,” Alejandro says, adding that arrest information
will still be available to members of the public upon a FOIA request. “I think
that honestly smacks of racism to suggest that the interests of people who just
want to know the name of every person arrested to satisfy their curiosity
should take precedence over the lives of immigrants.”
Unlike in D.C. or
Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, where the police force is
overseen by the top elected official, the Fairfax County Police Department is
under the purview of the Board of Supervisors. The Trust Policy, which passed
the Board of Supervisors by a 9-1 vote in January, applies to all agencies
across Fairfax County’s government. While the provisions of the new law allow
cooperation with ICE officials if it is required or requested, the policy bars
willful or voluntary local information sharing that would help immigration
enforcement track down individuals.
Alejandro says she
does not know of any residents that were targeted directly as a result of the
arrest blotter, but that she and other advocates “know it happens.”
“We don’t need to
hand [the information] to them on a silver platter,” Alejandro says. “We’re not
going to volunteer information to ICE, and this is what the police were doing.”
A spokesperson for
ICE denied that the agency used the Fairfax County’s arrest information to
locate or apprehend any residents.
“ICE Enforcement and
Removal Operations does not use police blotter data to identify immigration
enforcement targets in Fairfax County, Virginia,” the spokesperson wrote in an
emailed statement to DCist/WAMU. “ICE ERO officers use intelligence-driven
leads to identify specific individuals for arrest.”
The removal of the
arrest list marks the latest step in Fairfax County’s efforts to limit the
county’s interactions with federal immigration agencies. In 2020, the county
codified a policy that prevents police officers from asking or disclosing a
person’s immigration status, or using immigration status as a determining
factor when considering to take a person into custody on a misdemeanor charge.
Regionally, Arlington
County officials are also considering ways to decrease local law enforcement’s
engagement with ICE — last week, the Arlington County Board released the draft
of a framework to increase protection of immigrant residents, including
proposals to decrease the local police’s contact with immigration agencies.
California
Gov. Newsom signs sweeping police reform bills
More
than three dozen groups representing police officers opposed the legislation,
according to a report
California
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of police reform bills Thursday to address
law enforcement misconduct that would strip officers of their badges for a
range of incidents, among other measures.
Surrounded
by lawmakers and the family members of victims killed by police officers,
Newsom signed four bills he touted would increase transparency. During his
remarks, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said there is a "crisis of
trust" when it comes to law enforcement.
"We're
delivering concrete solutions from banning dangerous holds that lead to
asphyxia to multiple other mechanisms that improve accountability and oversight
and transparency," he said.
But more than three dozen groups representing
police officers opposed the legislation, claiming it subjects law enforcement
officers to double jeopardy with vague definitions of wrongdoing and calls for
the use of an oversight panel that would potentially be biased and lacking in
expertise about law enforcement, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Senate
Bill 2 "merely requires that the individual officer ‘engaged’ in serious
misconduct – not that they were found guilty, terminated, or even
disciplined," the California Police Chiefs Association wrote in a letter
to state lawmakers, according to the Times.
Another
bill, Assembly Bill 26, was opposed by the California Association of Highway
Patrolmen, which said it participated two years ago in an effort to change the
state's use-of-force policies, the Times reported.
The
Assembly bill calls for officers to intervene if they suspect a fellow officer
is using too much force against a suspect, but the police group argued that in
fast-moving incidents, an officer arriving at the scene of an incident might
not have enough information to determine if the force is excessive, according
to the newspaper.
With
Newsom's signings, California joins 46 other states that have laws on the books
allowing officers to be fired for acting criminally and for incidents involving
racial bias and excessive force. The reforms also raise the minimum age for
police officers from 18 to 21, ban some restraining techniques and limit the
use of rubber bullets during protests.
"I'm
here as governor of California mindful that we're in a juxtaposition of being a
leader on police reform and a lagger on police reform," Newsom said from a
park gymnasium in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena. "We have a lot to be
proud of but there's areas where we have nothing to brag about."
While signing the legislation, supporters
chanted "Say his name," in reference to Kenneth Ross Jr., a
25-year-old Black man who was killed in 2018 when an officer shot him at the
same Gardena park where the Thursday event occurred. An investigation
determined the officer, Michael Robbins, acted lawfully when he shot Ross.
Ross'
mother, Fouzia Almarou, said she hopes the bill prevents the loss of life,
particularly for people of color.
"This
bill means a lot because it's going to stop police from attacking and targeting
and being racist towards Black and brown people," she said.
Sandra
Quinto Collins, the mother of Angelo Quinto, brushed back tears as she thanked
lawmakers for passing the reforms. Quinto died when a San Francisco police
officer pressed his knee against his neck during a mental health response call
last year.
"To
lose a son, to lose a brother, sister, dad — that pain, that intensity, that
expression is reflected not just in the words of these two remarkable women and
their families, but we hope reflected in this legislation," Newsom said.
The
bill's signing came after failed negotiations in Congress halted a bipartisan
police reform plan.
'We've been bleeding officers': Fairfax police union
says officers need to be paid better
by Nick Minock
Thursday, September 23rd 2021
FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (7News) — The
President of the Virginia Police Benevolent Association’s Fairfax County Chapter
is sounding the alarm.
“We’ve been bleeding officers left and
right,” said Ali Soheilian.
Soheilian and the union’s board sent a letter to the Fairfax
County Board of Supervisor’s this week warning the Fairfax County Police
Department is more than 100 officers short and they are losing more by the
week. They are calling this is a staffing crisis.
The union said the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors needs to
take positive action.
In their letter, the Virginia PBA said patrol officers are
pressed to more each day while they cover the workload of officers who have
left. All of that while violent crime is rising rapidly in their jurisdiction,
according to their letter.
The letter claims morale is down at the police department and
officers in Fairfax County are leaving the department for better paying jobs at
police departments in nearby Prince William and Loudoun Counties.
The PBA board is requesting the Fairfax County Board of
Supervisors to take swift action by approving better pay for officers.
“When you tell these officers that they are
not worth the money you are basically telling them what you value and what you
don’t value as a county board of supervisors,” said Soheilian. “It’s a quick
fix. They’ve skipped over us with cost of living adjustments and market rate
adjustments raises in terms of 14 percent over the years.”
“If something doesn’t change eventually, they are going to have
to stop staffing certain positions,” Soheilian added. “Your specialty units
that investigates major crimes might be impacted. We might have to pull
officers from different resources to staff the street because what’s happening
is you’re going to get overwork, tired officers that are responding. It could
impact your response times as we’ve seen it impact agencies across the nation.”
7News took these staffing concerns to the Fairfax County Board
of Supervisors Chairman.
“I don’t see this as a Fairfax County
problem. Clearly it’s a nationwide problem,” said Jeffrey McKay.
McKay acknowledged the staffing challenges at the police
department and defended what the county currently pays its officers.
“I believe we are very competitive to our peer jurisdictions and
that’s something we look at annually in our budget process,” he said. “We’ve
been focused on recruitment efforts We never stop looking at pay. We want to
recruit the best officers. Our board will continue to do what we always do
which is look at this every year and make sure Fairfax County remains
competitive in police pay.”
Analysis: Here’s how Chicago’s
most powerful police union preserves tradition of problematic leadership
By Emanuella Evans and Adeshina
Emmanuel | September 13, 2021
Timeline: Chicago FOP presidents’
turbulent relationship with race and police reform
Injustice Watch reviewed the
tenures of past FOP presidents elected by Chicago police, from the civil rights
movement to the Black Lives Matter era. We found a history of police union
leaders making inflammatory statements, antagonizing racial justice and police
reforms, and shielding allegedly brutal cops from accountability.
And then in the spring, Catanzara
said the cop who killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo was “heroic” and described the
killing of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez, shot in the back by another Chicago
cop, as “a 100% good shooting.”
A growing chorus — including
dozens of community groups, Chicago city councilmembers, and state lawmakers —
have demanded that Catanzara either resign or be fired. The police department,
too, has attempted to remove Catanzara.
In February, Police Supt. David
Brown suspended Catanzara and filed charges with the Chicago Police Board
alleging that he violated nearly a dozen department rules. Some of the charges
stem from inflammatory social media posts, including a 2017 Facebook post in
which Catanzara referred to Muslims as “savages” who “all deserve a bullet.”
He made the comments in reference
to a video of a woman being stoned, also adding that “this is the life many
want to bring to this country,” though he later claimed in another post that
his comments were not specifically targeting Muslims.
Still, Catanzara’s words are not
surprising within the history of the FOP.
Injustice Watch reviewed the tenures of each
of the eight past FOP presidents elected by Chicago police and found a pattern
of leadership defined by inflammatory public statements, resistance to
accountability, and antagonism to racial justice and police reforms. Police
union leaders also tend to stand by police officers who have killed civilians,
from Fred Hampton and LaTanya Haggerty to Laquan McDonald and Toledo.
Illinois FOP President Chris
Southwood said by defending officers’ actions in violent encounters, Catanzara,
like his predecessors, is doing exactly what rank-and-file cops elected him to
do.
“That’s his job as the president
of Chicago Lodge 7,” Southwood said, “to stand up for his membership,
especially in situations where they’re being portrayed as doing something wrong
or terrible.”
“All I did was follow the lead of
previous presidents”
The defining issues of Dean
Angelo Sr.’s three-year tenure as FOP president was the police killing of
17-year-old Laquan McDonald and the subsequent calls for reform. Angelo
staunchly opposed the demands emanating from a wave of protests, blaming the
“anti-police movement” for cratering member morale and jeopardizing public
safety. Nonetheless, Angelo was voted out of office in 2017 by members who
found him too accommodating. (Illustration by Veronica Martinez for Injustice
Watch)
Our research spanned six decades,
from the civil rights movement to the Black Lives Matter era. We reviewed
dozens of news clips, FOP newsletters, academic studies, and interviewed
experts who shed light on FOP presidents’ problematic history. Retired Chicago
Police Department Sgt. Shawn Kennedy, the information officer for the National
Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, said the problem has deep roots.
“When you look at modern-day
policing, you have to look at the foundation in which law enforcement was built
upon,” Kennedy said. “It was built upon systemic racism and white supremacy, so
when you look at police unions, they are there to maintain the status quo.”
Why I’m terminating my membership
with the Chicago police union
Chicago police officer Julius
Givens pens an open letter to John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order
of Police's Chicago chapter.
Many Black officers don’t feel
represented by Chicago Lodge 7, Kennedy said. In addition to actions such as
endorsing Donald Trump as president, the union has previously backed hiring
policies that have helped prevent Black officers from joining the force and
uphold a majority white union membership.
Dean Angelo Sr., the sixth
president of the FOP, said many officers don’t feel represented because they
don’t realize everything that is done by the union to secure their livelihood.
“The purpose of your job as the
head of a union is to protect the greater number of membership,” Angelo said.
“I’m not saying they didn’t experience racism, but I don’t know that it was 25
or 30 years of systemic racism that they faced. I tend to look at that with
questionable eyes.”
Since the FOP opened its Chicago
lodge in 1963, only white men have served as the labor organization’s
president. While demographics alone do not determine how police unions
function, or their impact, Craig Futterman, a longtime police critic and
director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the
University of Chicago, argues that white police leadership has largely wielded
its power in ways that uphold white supremacy and police impunity.
Read More
The Chicago police union is
trying to put its members on the state’s torture inquiry commission
Two bills introduced by
Republicans in the state legislature are "a smack in the face," says
one torture survivor.
“There is no enlightened history
of police unions and police union leadership,” Futterman said. You have a long
history of an overtly racist police union and overtly racist union leadership
that has been protected, served racist interests within the police force, [and]
has not represented officers of color and particularly Black officers,”
Futterman said.
He and other experts said the
presidents’ leadership exemplifies the ways that police unions function as
truth-denying bodies that perpetuate violence and act as barriers to police
reform, racial reconciliation, and justice.
“The problem with police unions
is that it all seems to be very narrow-minded thinking about the best way to
protect police, which is essentially to close ranks, not share information, to
deny systemic problems,” said Kim Ricardo, a law professor at the University of
Illinois at Chicago’s law school who has represented plaintiffs in police
brutality cases and published scholarly writing focused on reparations law and
social movements.
Our timeline of Chicago FOP Lodge
7’s past presidents, which you can read here, takes a deeper look at their
tenures, focusing on their words and leadership during tenuous times and
examining how their actions have strained the relationship between police and
Chicago communities, specifically overpoliced Black neighborhoods that have suffered
the brunt of state violence and police misconduct.
Chicago’s first police union
president started his tenure during the height of the civil rights movement. As
organizers like Martin Luther King Jr. put the spotlight on the vicious
segregation and police brutality in northern cities, including Chicago, Joseph
J. LeFevour aggressively defended officer misconduct and attacked prominent
movement leaders. After nine years as president, LeFevour ended his term in
1972. He died in 1984.
The first president of the FOP,
Joseph Lefevour, accused Martin Luther King Jr. of inciting violence in the
city. When King’s assassination sparked riots in Chicago’s Black communities,
Lefevour applauded then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s shoot-to-kill order to police
responding to the chaos.
In Mount Prospect, a village
divided over the ‘thin blue line’
Mount Prospect, Ill. is the
latest of dozens of U.S. cities and towns to take steps toward restricting use
of the 'thin blue line' by police and other government agencies. The
controversial symbol has become a focal point for community tensions over race
and policing in recent years — especially in the wake of the nationwide
protests against police violence last summer.
In the post-civil rights era, the
second and longest-tenured FOP president, John Dineen, opposed efforts to
diversify the police department. He was one of several union leaders over the
years to express support for disgraced former police Cmdr. Jon Burge. And their
support has continued, despite mounting evidence that Burge tortured scores of
mostly Black men from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
After former police officer Jason
Van Dyke shot and killed McDonald in 2014, Angelo remained one of Van Dyke’s
most vocal supporters, even offering him a job as a janitor at the lodge after
he was suspended from the force.
“All I did was follow the lead of
previous presidents, where we brought in people that were found in
circumstances that were headlines and that did not put the officers in the best
light,” Angelo said. “Did it turn off the community? The community was already
turned off.”
Angelo is the only past FOP
president interviewed for this story. Injustice Watch reached out to all living
FOP presidents by phone, email, and certified mail.
In a response sent by mail to
Injustice Watch, Kevin Graham, FOP president from 2017 to 2020, wrote, “The
fraternal order of police works hard for its members and the public. It is
essential that workers are treated fairly by their employers.”
Other past presidents either did
not respond to requests, were unreachable, or had passed away.
A political playbook
FOP presidents wield considerable
power as the leaders of a labor organization that elected officials have to
reckon with from city hall in Chicago to Illinois’ statehouse in Springfield.
The union represents a formidable political bloc that includes current and
retired cops, their families, and others who support police or align with FOP
stances.
Peter Pihos, an assistant history
professor at the Western Washington University with research in policing, race,
and politics in Chicago, said police union leaders’ largest political impact is
in helping to push a law-and-order approach to public safety. This makes it harder
for politicians to address the root causes of crime in social, economic, and
political systems for fear of being called “soft on crime.”
“They really set the marker for
others to also use this kind of often dehumanizing, very racist language and
frameworks,” Pihos said.
The FOP has a history of
endorsing and financially backing political candidates who will protect their
membership while opposing those who run on criminal justice reform platforms.
The union helped get former State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez elected in 2008 and
2012 before Kim Foxx defeated her in a landslide victory in 2016. Alvarez’s
critics alleged she was beholden to police and lenient toward cops accused of
wrongdoing. She infamously waited more than a year to charge Van Dyke after he
shot McDonald 16 times.
The union also has a history of
negotiating contracts that organizers and police accountability experts say
make it harder to hold cops accountable, and lobbying lawmakers about policies
that govern how the city handles police misconduct complaints, investigations,
and records.
“Any type of policy, procedure,
[or] law that’s going to strengthen the accountability and transparency of
police officers, the unions are going to fight it,” Kennedy said.
However, Angelo said politicians
are to blame for the relationship between the police and communities because
they choose police department leaders, vote on contracts, and create policy.
“Laws are put into place and officers follow it. … You have inexperienced
people with no knowledge of the job dictating how the job should be done,” he
said.
New deals, same old FOP?
John Catanzara is the first FOP
president to be elected while stripped of police powers, after having them
stripped in 2018 for a report he filed against the former police
superintendent. Since joining the police department in 1995, Catanzara has
racked up at least 35 misconduct complaints and been suspended about half a
dozen times. (Illustration by Veronica Martinez for Injustice Watch)
This summer has seen several
major developments in city hall that will have a big impact on the FOP and its
members. But even though the changes are seen as progress on several fronts, in
many respects, the FOP president has sung a familiar tune.
In late July, the Chicago City
Council voted to establish civilian oversight of the police department. On the
eve of the vote, Catanzara complained during a public safety committee hearing
that giving civilians more power to influence policy “is absolutely absurd and
dangerous and reckless” and maintained that the city already has enough layers
of police oversight.
Chicago has nearly tripled per
capita police spending since 1964, data show
For activists and city leaders
calling on Mayor Lori Lightfoot to cut the police budget, it’s clear that the
money could be better spent elsewhere.
The tentative contract agreement
between the FOP and the city also includes reforms that could enhance oversight
and accountability. In late August, police officers voted in favor of a new
eight-year contract with the city affording them a 20% pay hike over eight
years. On Tuesday, the city council workforce committee gave the labor deal the
green light, setting it up for a Sept. 14 vote before the whole council, in
which at least 26 alderpeople must sign off.
During the committee meeting, the
city’s legal team walked the council members through 10 key accountability
reforms in the draft contract. The agreement would remove the ban on the
investigation of anonymous misconduct complaints and allow disciplinary records
older than five years to be preserved. It would also eliminate a requirement
for people alleging misconduct to submit sworn affidavits and allow CPD to
recognize officers who report misconduct.
Here’s what you should know about
Chicago’s latest police accountability ‘compromise’
Injustice Watch reviewed the new
civilian police oversight ordinance and the changes that it will bring to
policing in Chicago.
Negotiators for the city and the
FOP say these changes would bring the contract in line with federally mandated
reforms spelled out in Chicago’s 2019 consent decree. But several key reforms
pushed by advocates in recent years — including an end to the 24-hour delay
that cops are afforded before speaking to investigators following a shooting
and a requirement that they disclose any employment outside the police
department — didn’t make it into the draft deal.
Ald. Mike Rodriguez (22nd Ward)
questioned this omission.
“I am still concerned about a
number of items here,” Rodriguez said. “I, for one, think it’s important — particularly given the sensitive nature of
police officers’ work — that they don’t come to work tired.”
The workforce development
committee voted unanimously to endorse the deal, which would resolve most of
the central issues between the city and the FOP. But the two sides could still
continue negotiations over areas in which no agreement has yet been reached.
Ahead of the full city council
vote, organizers are urging a careful review of the agreement.
“We need the community to
scrutinize line by line,” said April Friendly, mass liberation organizer at The
People’s Lobby. “Any little T-crossing, I-dotting, comma-adding inside of the
existing system’s contracts is still not really going to save or mitigate harm
for our communities.”
No one knows how many Chicago
cops are vaccinated against Covid-19
How many cops have gotten their
vaccine shots? The question has a definite answer. But no one in Mayor Lori
Lightfoot's office or the police department seems able to put a number on it.
Meanwhile, a contentious debate
is brewing around the mayor’s vaccine mandate for city workers, of which
Catanzara has been one of the fiercest critics. In late August, after Mayor
Lori Lightfoot announced a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all city employees,
Catanzara made comments to the Chicago Sun-Times that critics interpreted as
comparing the mandate to the Holocaust.
Infectious disease experts
interviewed by Injustice Watch said unvaccinated police officers put the public
at risk because they’re constantly in contact with people, making them likely
to contract the virus and likely to spread it. The city’s Black and Latinx
communities, which tend to be the most policed, have suffered
disproportionately amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Sept. 3, before Labor Day
weekend, Catanzara gave members an update in a nearly seven-minute video, of
which he spent almost three discussing the pending contract and the FOP’s plans
to fight the vaccine mandate. He spent the remaining four minutes opining about
a recent incident in which a Black woman found walking her dog on the lakefront
after hours was violently accosted by a white police officer. She had allegedly
failed to comply with his order to leave the area. The police union president
called for the officer, who was put on desk duty pending an investigation, to
be reinstated “effective immediately.”
“He didn’t throw her to the
ground and arrest her like he would have been entitled to do. … I don’t care
how bad it would have looked, he would have been justified in doing that,”
Catanzara said.
He continued: “It is the
recurring theme in police shooting after police shooting; any police incident
across this country, [with] few exceptions, is all about a lack of compliance
by the subject the police are encountering to start with.
“If that mindset changes, we will
not have incidents like Mike Brown, like Laquan McDonald, you name it; there’s
name after name after name, and the reoccurring issue is a lack of compliance.”
As the nation continues to
envision solutions to racism and police violence, from reforming to defunding
or abolishing police, the FOP and its presidents are likely to remain prominent
fixtures in the conversation, for better or for worse.
Sarah Wild, an activist with the
Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, emphasized that
issues with the police union are impossible to separate from broader problems
with the department.
“The problem of the police and
the issues with community control and abolition become the real issue,” Wild
said, noting that organizers are continuing to push for more robust community
control of the police, including democratic input into the department’s budget
and the FOP’s contract. “The union is an expression of the bigger issue.”
Update: On Sept. 14, a group of
community organizers and police accountability advocates held a rally in front
of City Hall before the contract vote. They urged council members to reject the
agreement, calling for the city to work more accountability measures into the
deal before giving it the green light. But the city council ultimately approved
the contract, with only eight council members rejecting the deal.
Olivia Louthen and Aviva Waldman
contributed reporting and research.
.
EXCLUSIVE: Fairfax County police
chief says no bias found in Herndon driver case
David TaubeAugust 18, 2021 at
9:30am
The Fairfax County Police
Department has concluded for a second time that allegations of racial profiling
by one of its officers during a 2019 incident in Herndon were unfounded.
The Fairfax County Board of
Supervisors directed police to revisit the case in question in January after
the county’s Police Civilian Review Panel recommended an additional review in
its first-ever challenge of police findings.
According to a June 1 FCPD memo
obtained by Reston Now, the second review — this time under a new police chief
— found no evidence that a police officer who followed and questioned a Black
driver was motivated by racial bias.
“I have reviewed the supplemental
investigative findings and concur that no new evidence was revealed to support
the allegation of bias-based policing,” Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis
said in the memo.
Davis took over as police chief
on May 3 amid criticism of his past work in Baltimore and Prince George’s
County. In the initial months of his tenure, he has emphasized his willingness
to introduce reforms, including revisions to the department’s vehicle pursuit
policy and the addition of a data director.
For its follow-up investigation
of the Herndon incident, Fairfax County police asked eight employees in the
Reston District Station’s Criminal Investigations Section the following
question:
“Do you have any direct or
indirect knowledge which would indicate [employee name] has engaged or is
engaging in behavior that was or is motivated by bias toward a victim’s race,
religious conviction, ethnic/national origin, disability, and/or sexual
orientation?”
Police said no one indicated
there was any evidence of bias exhibited by the detective.
Davis also suggested options for
reviewing the case were limited, noting that FCPD started collecting data on
officers’ interactions with civilians last October that it wasn’t measuring at
the time of this particular incident.
The change aligns with new state
requirements for police data collection that took effect on July 1.
“Due to recent updates in
Virginia legislation, the Virginia Community Policing Act, the Department has
updated our current record management system to capture additional details
pertaining to the circumstances of community contacts,” the FCPD said in a
statement. “The further details will allow our Department to better understand
the contacts we have within our community.”
In his memo, Davis wrote that the
department has “further enhanced our transparency by creating a Police Data
Sharing Dashboard” that allows people to search information related to
warnings, citations, and arrests.
The civilian review panel began
reviewing the Herndon incident on May 23, 2019, when it got a citizen’s
complaint about an officer who followed him into the parking lot of his
apartment complex and repeatedly questioned whether he lived there.
According to the panel’s report,
which was published on Oct. 23, 2020, the officer said he followed the
individual after becoming suspicious and discovering that his vehicle was
registered under two names.
A recording of the encounter
shows the officer questioning the man about his residency, while the man
sometimes asks whether he is required to respond. At one point, the man asks
for the officer’s badge number.
According to the panel’s report,
the officer asked the man about his residency 11 times, and the man answered at
least nine times that he lived there. After telling the man he was free to go,
the officer stayed in the lot “for several more minutes” before verifying his
identity and residency.
Fairfax County police said in a
statement that they have measures in place to address issues of bias:
FCPD has reaffirmed our
well-established commitment to fair and impartial policing by recently adopting
General Order 2. This policy focuses on human relations and procedural justice.
Procedural justice requires Department members to ensure they are being fair in
process, transparent in actions, providing opportunity for communication and
being impartial in decision making. All well-established pillars of FCPD, but
this policy reaffirms our commitment to these principles with the hopes of
[increasing] police legitimacy.
The department says it conducts
implicit bias training for all employees and supports the county’s One Fairfax
policy in support of the chief’s vision of police being “the leading agency
dedicated to fairness, trust, and respect.”
The FCPD also says supervisors
are required to perform monthly reviews of officers’ body-worn cameras and
in-car videos.
“When there is an allegation of
misconduct, [Internal Affairs Bureau] investigations review the officer’s
arrests and citations based on race and compare them to other officers at the
assigned district station, which covers an 18-month time period,” police said.
In a December 2019 letter to the
complainant, then-Police Chief Edwin Roessler wrote that the officer’s actions
were improper and in violation of departmental regulations.
He also told the civilian review
panel that the officer had no reason to initiate the stop, calling his actions
unacceptable and the result of “poor, cascading assumptions and judgments that
were wrongly based on his training,” according to the panel’s report.
However, when the panel voted 6-3
in March 2020 to request further investigation, Roessler responded that police
would not interview the officer’s coworkers for evidence of racial bias, a
stance that evidently changed after the panel voted 7-2 in September 2020 to
advise the Board of Supervisors that it considered the investigation incomplete.
“It’s not clear to me under our
bylaws that we have any additional move,” Civilian Review Panel Chair Jimmy
Bierman told Reston Now yesterday (Tuesday). “We did what we were allowed under
the bylaws, and we passed it to the Board of Supervisors.”
The panel released a four-year
review on Feb. 26 that included recommendations for an expansion of its
authority in light of recent changes in state law, including:
• Limited
investigatory powers, including the opportunity to interview a complainant and up
to three key witnesses
• Electronic
access to redacted police investigation reports
• The
ability to monitor police investigations for racial bias or profiling without
needing a complaint submitted first
• More
flexibility in how it presents its findings
The county board fulfilled one of
the recommendations in agreeing earlier this month to give the panel a
full-time executive director position.
Fairfax
County Releases Bodycam Video of Police Shooting
Fairfax
County police released body camera video and dispatch calls from a
police-involved shooting that wounded a woman last month.
The
woman who was shot appeared to be having a mental health crisis as she
threatened residents and police.
A
caregiver at the group home for adults with intellectual disabilities called
911 and told the dispatcher, “She’s making noise, breaking things. She wants to
fight … she wants to kill me.”
Women
retreated to the basement. A third person locked themselves in their room.
Then
the suspect said she was going to kill herself.
K9
officers first responded to the 911 calls. With guns drawn, they entered the
home and found a 30-year-old resident armed with a kitchen knife. The woman
turned her threats toward them, moving in their direction.
An
officer shot the woman in the stomach, and she dropped the knife.
Officers
immediately helped the woman, reassuring her she was going to be alright.
The
woman is recovering from the gunshot wound.
Fairfax
County Police Chief Kevin Davis believes the video shows the veteran
officers had little choice but to act to protect themselves and others in the
home.
“That’s
tough to watch, but they were doing the best they absolutely could under a very
tough circumstance,” he said.
Though,
neither officer had a taser, Davis doubts they would have had time to try less
than lethal force. But it underscores a problem he plans to address: Not every
officer is assigned a taser.
“I
want to go so far as to assign them individually to police officers so that
they are immediately available,” he said.
The
investigation is ongoing. The officer who fired his gun is on restricted duty.
The woman faces charges of assault on a law enforcement officer.
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