The View From Over Here
Eight months and counting…since John Geer, standing unarmed in his doorway in Springfield, talking to a Fairfax County Police Officer was suddenly shot to death. Shot to death by a still unnamed police officer with no explanation of why he was shot. That is the way police do business in Fairfax County and have been doing so since this Department was created over 70 years ago. Fairfax County officers work for our safety sometimes means shooting someone in self-defense; but, on occasion, some officers kill people with no apparent justification. Mr. Geer’s case is the most recent of too many suspicious police killings. In fact, in over 70 years not one single FCPD officer who has fired a fatal shot or shots has been found culpable in any way following secretive internal investigations by fellow officers and final decisions by the police chief. Unlike the rest of us, they are not accountable to the community. Furthermore, the pace of such killings seems to be picking up—with at least 6 questionable killings since 2006—Dr. Salvatore Culosi, Randall Leroy Collins, Hailu Brook, David Masters, Nicholas Kaelber, and most recently, John Geer. In my own experience, the only places I have seen this kind of impunity by law enforcement has been in third world countries with military rulers. In those cases, as in Fairfax County, the guys with the guns are a law unto themselves and when an officer uses lethal force, he (always a he in my experience) is accountable only to his fellow officers, and the commanding general. Just like Fairfax County, there is no civilian oversight. This is particularly ironic because when the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors created the County Police in 1942, they did so because they wanted law enforcement to be responsible to the civilian authority, as opposed to being accountable only to the independently elected County Sheriff. For some reason—some say it is because the Supervisors fear the Police union, others say they defer to the armed guys for other reasons—the Supervisors refuse to allow any meaningful civilian oversight even in the use of deadly force. Nor do they require FCPD to even inform the public of the shooters’ identities or the content of incident reports or investigations. The public is to pay the bills, occasionally see a neighbor gunned down, and to keep quiet. Fortunately, some in the community have found their voice. Cases like the deaths of John Geer and David Masters, shot in the back while sitting in his car, led to the formation of the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability by a former D.C. detective and long-time NRA member, Nicholas Beltrante. To no avail to date, the CCPA and other organizations, including the NAACP and the ACLU, call upon the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to do their job; that is, to make the police accountable by creating a civilian oversight body as has been done with success in urban and suburban jurisdictions all over the country. After seeming to commit to taking action 5 years ago, Chairman Bulova, Supervisor Hudgins and other Supervisors quietly backed down. Questionable, unexplained, no-one-at-fault killings by the Fairfax Police officers continue, with Mr. Geer’s being the latest. One would think that Ms. Bulova and company could do better than third world dictatorships and create responsible civilian oversight of a police force in the questionable use of lethal force. The families of the slain, the community and the police themselves deserve better. An unresponsive, unaccountable police force whose use of lethal force is very much is question is not one in which the public has confidence. A force accountable to the community is far more likely to be trusted and respected.
