WASHINGTON — Fairfax County Police Department has made its internal “Use of Force” report public. It reveals an unexpected uptick in assaults on officers and that assaults by officers are slightly down from the year before.
Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler released the department’s 2016 internal “Use of Force” report, calling attention to a rise in assaults on police officers. His decision to publish the data on officer assaults was prompted by a request, he said.
“My officers asked I publish the data to be absolutely transparent that we just not report our use of force but the use of force committed against us at the same time,” he told WTOP.
The report states simple assaults on police officers were at 132 in 2016 with 11 aggravated assaults. One officer was nearly killed that year, resulting in an attempted capital murder charge.
“We’ve already surpassed, in 2017, the total number of assaults on police officers that we tracked in 2016,” Roessler said.
He pointed out that if a citizen resists arrest and uses force on an officer, the incident will count as a use of force on both sides of the interaction.
While the use of force by police officers fell by 31 instances between 2015 and 2016, according to the report, Fairfax County has not been immune to officer misconduct. Roessler spoke in November 2017, defending his officer’s actions at a parade that came under community scrutiny.
At the community meeting about the incident, Roessler provided a progress report on the implementation of a commission’s recommendations for changes in the county police department. The commission was formed after county officials thwarted prosecutors’ investigation into the 2013 death of John Geer, who was shot and killed by police responding to a domestic disturbance call. The officer who shot Geer, Adam Torres, eventually pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to a year in prison.
As WTOP has previously reported, the commission recommended multiple reforms, especially in terms of communicating with the public.
The Use of Force report found of the more than 460,000 interactions between officers and the community in 2016, Fairfax County police officers used force in 500 of them, which works out to .01 percent of the time.
“The majority are our officers being assaulted is the person resisting us through pushing away and physical force, and we have to use force to make the arrest,” he said.
