Fairfax County Ad Hoc Police Commission

[KevinB]

Police go into the business understanding their lives may be at risk.
Cody

Dude, clearly you have not seen young recruits...

This is a good point.

A well reasoned, highly regarded copper on this forum once said, "Officer safety is a goal, not legal authority."

This x100

There needs to be an assumption of risk in order to work any job, heck even to drive a car.

Main issue I have seen from Cody's posts is that the perception is that the Fairfax County LEA's are 1) not trained well 2) not transparent. I'm not judging - however it does seem in several of these instances that he does have a good point - and things need to change. However Cody - we do not live in a police state - One can't randomly roadside execute people, or detain folks willy-nilly. The sky is not falling, but it does look like the roof has a leak in a few areas that the rotten section needs to be cut out and replaced.

[jnc36rcpd]

While I can't speak to Fairfax County PD's protocol, I am extremely cautious in searching premises where people might lawfully be. This usually entails multiple announcements of office. This would probably include the search of an open door in a display apartment. I wonder if that occurred with our Iraqi war veteran. He doesn't say, but he probably doesn't know. After all, he apparently came home from thee bar past midnight and was so hammered he didn't close the front door of the display apartment. Presumably hung over or perhaps still drunk, he is shocked when FCPD challenges him at gunpoint. Our Iraqi war veteran seems unaware of the many criminals who hop into bed or the shower in the hope of being mistaken for residents.

I appreciate his service, but I thought everyone opposed "militarizing" law enforcement. Moreover, if we're going to apply military tactics to policing, maybe we should choose tactics from a war we actually won.

[cclaxton]

RE: Police State.
This characterization is probably not fair, as some have noted. However, there are gradations of this. I like the reference to "The sky is not falling, but it does look like the roof has a leak in a few areas that the rotten section needs to be cut out and replaced."
I might call these more like large holes in the roof as opposed to leaks.
Any one of these alone is not so worrisome: bad no-knocks, inappropriate use of SWAT, muzzling citizens without good cause, using the handgun as intimidation to "show me your hands," Civil Forfeiture, "sneak and peek" warrants, inappropriate protection of police against prosecution, lack of transparency, etc.
But when you take these TOGETHER they present a powerful potential abuse of authority and with too many lethal results or inappropriate use of force.
Cody

[cclaxton]

While I can't speak to Fairfax County PD's protocol, I am extremely cautious in searching premises where people might lawfully be. This usually entails multiple announcements of office. This would probably include the search of an open door in a display apartment. I wonder if that occurred with our Iraqi war veteran. He doesn't say, but he probably doesn't know. After all, he apparently came home from thee bar past midnight and was so hammered he didn't close the front door of the display apartment. Presumably hung over or perhaps still drunk, he is shocked when FCPD challenges him at gunpoint. Our Iraqi war veteran seems unaware of the many criminals who hop into bed or the shower in the hope of being mistaken for residents.

I appreciate his service, but I thought everyone opposed "militarizing" law enforcement. Moreover, if we're going to apply military tactics to policing, maybe we should choose tactics from a war we actually won.

Two mistakes were made IMHO:
1) The police failed to contact the actual landlord for that address and confirm that no one was supposed to be there. The neighbor's information was wrong. The landlord could have tried to call the guy and see if he was the one leaving the door unlocked.
2) Muzzling the guy when entering the room. If they had guns out and at the ready, I would have no problem with that.

Sal Culosi was killed by Fairfax SWAT by accidentally touching his HK trigger while pointed at Sal, who was in sandals, shorts and a T-shirt in the front of his own home with no expectation that he was armed. (An undercover agent pretended to be his best friend).
Cody

[KevinB]

Cody - your picking on segmented aspects from Fairfax, how many interactions and officer hours went by without incident, or positive outcomes?
Yes there is an issue - but it's not like one is significantly at threat by Law Enforcement in Fairfax.

Yes I agree any death from improper handling of firearms is too many - but the Gestapo is not running the street. You loose a lot of credibility when you shotgun out your complaints as a blanket attack. I would suggest that looking at each incident and coming up with TTP corrections for them are a better use of your energies - and focusing on changes to those aspects -- it would garner more support from LE, which is what you need to affect changes that will take place, as opposed to lip service mandated from the outside...

[Mr_White]

I'm all for taking a hard look at what we're willing to use laws to enforce. Key bit there is "force"...we are putting people in uniforms and handing them weapons with the expectation that they will use force on people. It would behoove us as a society to ensure to do some soul searching on exactly what things we are willing to use lethal force to enforce because every time a police officer makes contact with someone in an enforcement capacity there is the possibility of using significant force.

People were ticked off that Eric Garner ended up in a fight with the police over a loose cigarette...but a lot of the same people complaining about that supported the ridiculous tax scheme on cigarettes in NYC that made it possible for him to sell loose cigarettes on the street. Because the city and state wanted revenue, the police and the force they bring with them were put on a collision path with Eric Garner.

If we're not willing to see people (police and suspects) get killed, maimed, and injured over something then there doesn't need to be a law against it. Sadly I don't think this is going to happen. As a society we will likely proceed on with our usual cognitive dissonance of insisting that the police "do something" about this thing "we" don't like and then complaining when they actually take the bait and legitimately do something.

I could not agree more with you on this Tim. + 1,000,000

[GRV]

There's a sentiment floating around that laws against drugs are justifiable on the grounds that they are often what actually put real criminals behind bars. This is a reasonable argument and one that can almost certainly be backed by good stats.

However, personally, I have recently grown to strongly oppose such "criminal by association" justifications for laws. This is largely from a Blackstone's Formulation perspective. I feel that, on moral grounds, we should not criminalize things that we don't feel are inherently wrong. The litmus test is: if a person who is otherwise completely clean commits act A, would you want to see them punished for it? If the answer is yes, then a law against A is proper under this philosophy. E.g. clearly murder, theft, etc. all pass the test. If an otherwise "good" person steals from someone, tough luck, jail it is. Whether or not drug laws pass the test is up for debate.

Living by such a tenet would undoubtedly have downsides. There would probably be tons of criminals that we couldn't convict, who would beget more crime, but I feel the "moral" issue at stake holds greater weight.

One of the things that led me to this philosophy was the issue of firearms laws. At the end of the day, the anti argument is often: "guns are bad because people who do bad things that we'd otherwise like to convict possess and use them". Now certainly the firearms issue is more complex because there is the constitutional issue (which drugs for example don't share), and there are fair arguments for civilian ownership having positive outcomes for society, but my feeling is that this particular anti argument is on its own an intrinsically poor way to guide legislation. Anyone whose rebuttal argument to the anti is along the lines of "what you're really worried about is murder, theft, etc. and those things are already crimes and those people are already breaking the law so they'll break the gun laws too" is essentially appealing to this philosophy, i.e. that we should punish intrinsically wrong things, rather than creating "trolling" laws that catch large groups of criminals by association at the cost of snagging up some totally innocent people in the nets.

[TGS]

There's a sentiment floating around that laws against drugs are justifiable on the grounds that they are often what actually put real criminals behind bars. This is a reasonable argument and one that can almost certainly be backed by good stats.

However, personally, I have recently grown to strongly oppose such "criminal by association" justifications for laws. This is largely from a Blackstone's Formulation perspective. I feel that, on moral grounds, we should not criminalize things that we don't feel are inherently wrong. The litmus test is: if a person who is otherwise completely clean commits act A, would you want to see them punished for it? If the answer is yes, then a law against A is proper under this philosophy. E.g. clearly murder, theft, etc. all pass the test. If an otherwise "good" person steals from someone, tough luck, jail it is. Whether or not drug laws pass the test is up for debate.

Living by such a tenet would undoubtedly have downsides. There would probably be tons of criminals that we couldn't convict, who would beget more crime, but I feel the "moral" issue at stake holds greater weight.

One of the things that led me to this philosophy was the issue of firearms laws. At the end of the day, the anti argument is often: "guns are bad because people who do bad things that we'd otherwise like to convict possess and use them". Now certainly the firearms issue is more complex because there is the constitutional issue (which drugs for example don't share), and there are fair arguments for civilian ownership having positive outcomes for society, but my feeling is that this particular anti argument is on its own an intrinsically poor way to guide legislation. Anyone whose rebuttal argument to the anti is along the lines of "what you're really worried about is murder, theft, etc. and those things are already crimes and those people are already breaking the law so they'll break the gun laws too" is essentially appealing to this philosophy, i.e. that we should punish intrinsically wrong things, rather than creating "trolling" laws that catch large groups of criminals by association at the cost of snagging up some totally innocent people in the nets.

This.

I'm surprised to see so much support for victimless crime by some persons in this thread, when in any other thread they view victimless crimes as the bane of our legal system.

[SouthNarc]

Cody are you going to answer my question?

[cclaxton]

Cody are you going to answer my question?

Yes, getting the research done now.
May take me overnight.
Cody