Protesters Maintain Pressure On Fairfax Leaders To Reform Police

FAIRFAX, VA — Fairfax County residents are refusing to give up on their campaign to get policymakers to hear their message about holding police departments accountable and ensure county leaders follow through with implementing wholesale reforms to the largest local police department in Virginia.

On Monday afternoon, about 50 protesters, mostly young people, marched from the public safety headquarters building in Fairfax County across the street to the Fairfax County Government Center to demand changes to policing and justice for Black people.

The organizers of the rally and march, two rising seniors at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, spoke about how funds dedicated to the Fairfax County Police Department should be diverted to social programs that do not involve weapons or escalation tactics but that focus on issues such as mental health.

By "defunding" the FCPD, the county can reallocate "the astronomical amount of money that our government spends on law enforcement," Hannah Lee, a student at Lake Braddock, said in a speech outside the Fairfax County Public Safety Headquarters building.

The money that has gone increasingly toward the militarization of the county police department over the past 40 years should be spent on communities, "especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs," Lee said.

As a high school student, Lee called for the removal of school resource officers from all county schools. The SROs are Fairfax County police officers who wear uniforms with bulletproof vests and carry weapons in schools with young students. The SROs often disproportionately single out students of color, she said.

Lee and her co-organizer of the rally and march, Heather Belfort, who also will be a senior at Lake Braddock in the fall, are part of the Black Lives Matter NoVA chapter.

Protests and demonstrations are not letting up across the nation, including in Northern Virginia, given the history of resistance by elected officials to any meaningful police reforms.

As protests continue across the nation, a study released by the University of Chicago Monday found that the largest cities in the United States are failing to meet even the most basic international human rights standards governing the use of lethal force.

Researchers at the University of Chicago's law school found not a single police department was operating under guidelines that are compliant with the minimum standards laid out under international human rights laws.

The lack of guidelines and a long history of prosecutors refusing to hold police accountable have contributed, the authors say, to the spate of police killings of unarmed Black people. Recent deaths in police custody have underscored the fatal results of officers applying lethal force in situations that do not conform to “last resort" situations. George Floyd died in Minneapolis after he was pinned down under an officer’s knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

After they reached the Fairfax County Government Center Monday afternoon, protesters kneeled down for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor Floyd and bring attention to how long Floyd, a Black man, suffered before he died.

On June 12, Brad Carruthers, president of the Fairfax County Fraternal Order of Police, said Fairfax County Police Chief Ed Roessler Jr. had lost the confidence of the Fairfax County police force and called for his resignation after the charging of Tyler Timberlake, an eight-year veteran of the department, who used a Taser on a Black man who was experiencing a medical crisis in the Hybla Valley area of Fairfax County. After the June 5 incident, Timblerlake was charged with three counts of misdemeanor assault and battery.

In an interview on radio station WMAL, Carruthers criticized Roessler for ignoring "due process for the investigation of use of force and rushing to judgment" and for publicly condemning Timberlake.

One of the march participants who spoke at the rally in front of the main entrance to the Fairfax County Government Center criticized police officers and police unions for rejecting calls for greater accountability. The speaker highlighted how some police officers have resigned from their jobs rather than work to improve their agencies, while other police officers are fighting efforts for even small reforms in their departments, he said.