A pop quiz for Sharon Bulova & the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors

An article in The Washington Post today has the headline “Fairfax County estimates police reforms will cost $35 million.” It outlines the cost and time it would take to implement the recommendations of the Ad Hoc Police Practices Review Commission (you can read the report here).

I was a member of that commission and this story brings up three questions for the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (in an effort to prevent any tax dollars being spent assigning staff or outside counsel to research these inquiries, I am also supplying the answers).

Question 1– Do you know what doesn’t cost $35 million?

Answer– Transparency.

Question 2– Do you know what else doesn’t cost $35 million?

Answer– Holding leadership accountable for the consistent failure to do the right thing.

Question 3– Do you know what doesn’t take years to implement?

Answer– The items I listed above.

Previous STATter911.com articles on this issue

Chairman Sharon Bulova and the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, stop using bureaucratic BS to avoid the simple changes that can immediately solve the problems that forced you to create the Ad Police Practices Review Commission.

It’s all about restoring trust in the police department and Fairfax County and you aren’t doing that. Yes, we know some very important things the commission recommended are going to take time and money and you need to set up a plan. But you still don’t get that the key changes don’t cost money, don’t require staff to create a matrix and can happen right now.

If you really cared about changing things (so far, I am not so sure), the first thing you should have done upon receiving the report is follow the first two recommendations from the “Communications Subcommittee”. You can find them under the title “Maximum Disclosure, Minimum Delay” (my full disclosure — I was a member of the subcommittee that wrote this part of the report):

1) Provide accurate, timely and actionable information using redundant forms of communication communicating both good and bad news.

 2) Adopt a “predisposition to disclose” approach, with public records presumed to be public and exemptions strictly and narrowly construed. All this takes is the Board of Supervisors to send the message

To adopt these policies, for both every day communications and FOIA requests, costs no tax dollars. All it takes is real leadership from you and orders given to the county executive.

Your failure, so far, to make these simple policy changes, setting the tone for a new day in Fairfax County and its police department, tells me you aren’t at all serious about the commission’s work. These two recommendations are at the heart of what went wrong during the John Geer case and forced you (with many of you kicking and screaming the whole way) to create the commission.

By not immediately embracing these concepts, and letting the entire Fairfax County Government know you mean business, you’re sending the people you serve an ominous message. What you are telling us is the policies that brought about the Geer debacle are still in place and that it all could happen again, the very same way, today.

The other thing you just can’t bring yourself to do is hold anyone accountable for the consistent failures that brought great embarrassment to you, to Fairfax County and to its wonderful police officers.

In the Washington Post article by Antonio Olivo there’s an important quote by one of my fellow commission members:

However, rank-and-file officers are frustrated by the reforms, which they see as a form of punishment for the bad actions of one officer, said Sean Corcoran, a Fairfax County detective who was a member of the advisory commission.

“We’re told that we’re the safest jurisdiction of our size because of the great work that everybody is doing out there every day,” Corcoran said. “But why does it feel a little like, on some level, we’re doing something wrong?”

While I don’t always agree with Sean Corcoran’s take on things, there’s a lot of truth in what he said. The rank and file of the Fairfax County Police Department aren’t the real problem. They didn’t cause the crisis that forced the creation of the commission. This was all the responsibility of the leadership in the police department and the Fairfax County Government.

These are leaders who obstructed the Geer investigation — an investigation that was handled in a professional and extremely competent manner at the lower levels of the police department. These are leaders who, until the commission was formed, spent years fighting to keep the status quo. These are leaders who are still allowing many of the same transparency problems to occur, despite allegedly “embracing” the commission report.

It is truly mind-boggling there has been no accountability and the same folks are in charge. This brings me to a fourth question for my little quiz (must be my Jewish heritage):

Question 4- Why do the leadership of the Fairfax County Police Department and the Fairfax County Government who are responsible for the John Geer case cover-up remain in their jobs?

Answer- The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is scared what might become public and what it might say about the Board’s own leadership if they fired them?

I would love for my answer to Question 4 to be wrong. But Sharon Bulova and the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, you keep doing things in a way that makes me rather certain I’ve aced my own pop quiz.