I Had Never Heard Of This Issue Before...

What do you think?

Comments

[Tonto]

Yep. that't what is going on here in Fairfax.

Bottom line: the majority of police officers of the Fairfax County Police Department will not (they say they cannot) apply a pen to paper and write any notes done about a dispute between two parties, neighbors, and in "general cases" domestic issues.

These police officers, and their sergeants who back them up, claim limited resources, a risk for being called to the stand in civil cases, and a risk for being put in the middle of a civil dispute.

In other words, the FCPD is simply reducing themselves back to traffic patrol, control, and presence. Nothing more, nothing less.

Even when a FCPD officer must (has no real choice) but to get involved, his/her notes are scarce when you see it beeing written and, to the point, a FOIA is impossible--even for cases where someone was charged and convicted.

Finally, the FCPD is large enough that each District is run as a fiefdom, and no information is shared between each district (no central IT network for information data and awareness) on residents and "drive through cummuters" from PW and Loudoun counties.

Its a Damn mess, and a Damn shame. For those of us who run businesses and have to deal with some difficult to crazy folks, we utilize well qualified PI to do background for documentation, and most of us have a separate attorney handle writing letters and keeping a basic file.

Just three months ago, our attorney asked for a FOIA request as a formality in keeping a file up to date: we knew we would get nothing on this (police notes and court review for a person convicted of a Class 1 Mis), and sure enough we got the same general "nope" letter.

Ugly damn mess, and until FCPD faces and loses a court challenge from the media, this will stay the same. No one big entity or lots of small entities are challenging this, as the media is no longer very interested in Fairfax issues and the rest of utilize other avenues for due diligence in civil matters that cross over to misdemeanor and criminal.

[VA Blogger]

Its worth more scrutiny, that's for sure.

[Brian W. Schoeneman]

We put something up about this back on TC in April when the guys first column came out.

From what I can see, this is pretty par for the course. Virginia's criminal justice system leaves much to be desired - it's pretty much trial by ambush for defendants, with defendants not getting much more than a single paged police report before heading to trial.

Thus it makes perfect sense that the police would be very close with the information. I don't see the need for that, given that FCPD is very professional and well funded - they don't need to win cases by being opaque.

[Spock]

Ben sometimes you live a nice sheltered life. This has been going on for years, I am glad someone has the balls to do something about it.

[martinlomasney]

This situation is a reflection of the authoritarian heritage of the Commonwealth.

Law enforcement is always right and never to be questioned.

[Mike Rothfeld]

Those with the power to incarcerate and seize property (LE and prosecutors) should be the MOST transparent of all government actors.

best regards,

Mike Rothfeld

[Glen Tomkins]

Secret Police

If you have an actual republic, a government of, by, and for the people, everything it does has to be public, there can be no official secrecy. How can the people run the government if they are not allowed to know what the government, supposedly their government, is doing?

Sure, the police can have operational security, much as the military needs to exercise during wartime. But that need for secrecy of their operations ends when the indictment is brought, when the evidence against a criminal is made public.

But we've gotten into a situation where we imagine that the problem isn't that, among the vast majority of law-abiding citizens, there are a few who will incidentally turn to crime on occasion. We imagine instead that our society is in some permanent struggle of the law-abiding majority against a permanent class of people permanantely dedicated to crime. We find it reasonable and necessary that the police be transformed into our army of occupation against this enemy, whether that enemy is thought to be the permanent underclass, illegal aliens, drug dealers, or terrorists.

Once you go over to that mind-set, once you agree that the police aren't there to investigate just incidental crime, but are needed to protect us against some organized permanent threat, then you have to concede that we need a secret police. They don't just investigate to find evidence of this or that particular crime that will eventually be charged against some individual in open court, they have to maintain permanent surveillance of all activities of this whole criminal class. It goes without saying that they can't just let any member of the public, which includes these enemies, have access on demand to their battle plans and intelligence. They can't reveal the extent of their activities in protecting us from this threat, because they have to protect "sources and methods".

Now, a police state and a secret police may be just fine with people who imagine that these insitutions will only ever be used to oppress just the real or imagined enemy within. These people imagine that they will never be identified as the enemy. But once you give the police, and the authorities they answer to, the power to operate in secret, you give them control over designating who the enemy might be.

You can't have a secret police without a whole police state, and you can't control that police state, because you've given it license to operate outside of public scrutiny. Maybe it hasn't gotten out of control, yet, in ways that you disapprove of. Maybe you approve of the oppression so far meted out to the officially designated "enemies within" because you think they have it coming, you imagine they are a real threat -- it's us or them, and it ain't gonna be us.

Perhaps some nations, at some times, actually have faced such a stark choice. But we don't, not now, not in the foreseeable future. We can have our liberties and our security. Yes, you can point to this danger or that. Yes, 9/11 wasn't a figment of someone's imagination, and yes, there is a whole vast group of people in this country illegally, and yes, there are organized cartels for delivering illegal drugs. But you also have to admit, unless you have surrendered completely to mindless, gibbering terror, that no nation ever in history has been more secure from the threat of foreign invasion or domestic subversion than ours is right now. We are certainly far more secure than we were when the Founders wrote the Constitution, and they seemed to think that even that perilous state was compatible with a republic.

What a nation that has not surrendered to mindless, gibbering terror does when confronted with threats, is to not just react, and lash out in fear and rage, demand that its laws be obeyed. It considers the source and causes of these threats, working from the premise that reasonable laws will only be disobeyed incidentally, by the occasional criminal. If we find this not the case, if we find our immigration and drug laws systematically disobeyed, then we need to face the fact that such laws are not compatible with a republic, that we are trying to impose standards so rigid and failing of widespread acceptance, that we have created a permanent class of enemies of the law within our nation. That is not compatible with a republic, so we have to decide which is more important -- unrealistic immigration quotas and unrealistic drug laws, or our republic.

Those are the hard choices. But there are easy choices here, as well. In the case of the "threat" of Islamic subversion, which, unlike the others, is not even a real threat, we only have to choose between our liberties and submitting to continued terrorization at the hands of bed-wetting fearmongers. Not a hard choice. But I don't want to pretend that all of the choices are that easy.

Hard or not as adapting to particular threats might be, the choice is simple. You either think that we live in times so perilous, more perilous than 1789, that we need to have a police state to combat the threat, or you think that whatever real threats we face are manageable under standards of liberty and open government no different than the Founders thought reasonable.