Fairfax County Supervisor John W. Foust: Reward moral cowardice...send John Foust to Congre...

Fairfax County Supervisor John W. Foust: Reward moral cowardice...send John Foust to Congre...: As a county supervisor John Foust could have spoken out against the murders of unarmed, innocent citizens by the Fairfax County Police....

FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE TO DUPLICATE EFFORTS OF THE METRO TRANSIT POLICE

The Washington DC Metro system is among the safest in the world but the Fairfax County Police have decided to police the metro lines in Fairfax County despite the fact that Metro already employees 490 officers, 64 special police and 91 civilian personnel to do police the lines.

Fairfax County’s Police chief, another grossly overpaid nameless, faceless guy in a silly suit said “It increases our chances of arresting black people from DC and murdering more unarmed white men, we’re really looking forward to this, mostly because we’ll get away with it”

The chief denied that this is a waste of tax dollars that could be used to build a second beltway or hire more teachers. “We waste money all the time, so there must be a lot of it to waste, right?”

He also denied that there are too many police on the force and not enough for them to do “Firstly, if there are too many cops on the force why are there so many cops on the force? Answer me that. Second firstly, we’re trying to balance out our unarmed kill ratio and this will allow us to murder more black men and maybe even some of those one who don’t talk in no good English, especially the urine colored ones”

Supervisor Gerry “Opps Dearie! Hyland said “I just love me a man in a uniform, I’m Gay and there is certainly nothing wrong with that but all I can say is; it let it rain men in uniform!”  

FOIA Request On Effectiveness Of License Plate Readers Greeted With A Blank Stare By Virginia Police Department

from the I'm-not-familiar-with-the-sort-of-thing-you're-asking-for dept

Law enforcement agencies are generally pretty happy with their automatic license plate readers. It allows them to harvest millions of plate/location records without having to exit their vehicles, much less slow them down. It also allows them to spring from their cruisers with guns out and force non-car thieves into submissive positions while they perform the sort of due diligence that should have been completed long before the cops/guns exited their respective holders.

What they don't seem to like is anyone asking questions about the massive databases they're compiling or whether they've bothered to institute any minimization/privacy policies. When questioned, they usually talk about what a great tool it is for crime-fighting, even if said tool contains millions of useless photos entirely unrelated to criminal activity. Some even claim that every single photo in the database is integral to ongoing investigations and therefore cannot be subjected to minimization procedures, much less the pesky FOIA requests of surveilled citizens.

And sometimes, these agencies are so sure they like the tech that they can't even be bothered to determine whether it's actually doing anything to assist in the business of law enforcement. Stephen Gutowski at the Capitol City Project recently asked the Fairfax County, VA police about the effectiveness of its license plate photo database and got this 'FILE NOT FOUND' statement in response.

This letter is in response to your FOIA request in which you requested the number of ALPR records Fairfax County currently has on file. This number is constantly fluctuating, but as of 05/20/2014 at 1003 hours there were 2,731,429 reads in the system.

You further requested any available metric the county uses to determine the system's effectiveness. It was found that the Fairfax County Police Department does not possess any such responsive materials based on the information you requested.

The assumption here is that the system works. The Fairfax County PD occasionally posts arrests linked to ALPR database hits and… well, beyond that, the PD draws a blank. Presumably a handful of arrests justifies a multi-million image-and-location photo database. But this lack of self-assessment shouldn't be acceptable, not for an agency that has abused its technology in the past.

It came to light late last year that the Fairfax PD trolled political rallies to grab more plate data, racking up nearly 70,000 photos in five days. This abuse prompted a local lawmaker to push legislation aimed at severely limiting, if not completely eradicating, ALPR readers in his district. Not a bad idea, as far it goes.

Virginia law enforcement agencies aren't going to be happy with this move and they'll be able to mobilize a pretty powerful opposition. But these are the same entities that tried to bury info on plate readers back in 2009, simply because they felt the public might try to get the system shut down if they knew what was going on. But the lack of controls or any gauge of the system's effectiveness shouldn't be allowed to escape unnoticed, because the failure to monitor error rates and hits can result in catastrophic consequences for citizens whose plates trigger false hits -- something this system does at twice the rate of recoveries.

The license plate readers demonstrated a high error rate. Four ALPR vehicles used in Fairfax County over the course of five nights in February 2009 scanned 69,281 vehicles. The camera database produced twelve bogus hits and recovered four stolen vehicles, for a recovery rate of 0.6 percent and an error rate of 1.7 percent.

The technology can be used responsibly, but law enforcement agencies with tough minimization policies are almost nonexistent. And as we've seen twice in the last month alone, officers relying on faulty data aren't making an effort to verify database hits before attempting to effect arrests. Someone's going to be hurt or killed because of bad data, and hardly anyone in law enforcement seems to be concerned. If they did, strict policies on verification and disposal of non-hit data would be the rule, rather than the exception.

Cowards

cop shoots other cop by mistake

Idiot cop

Fairfax County Police Watch: Troy officer charged under state's super drunk law...

Fairfax County Police Watch: Troy officer charged under state's super drunk law...: By John Turk Rochester Hills The Troy police officer accused of drunken driving will soon face jury trial in district court. Ca...

Fairfax County Cops Find another way to intrude on Our Lives.

   

     The Fairfax County cops are painting a car with distracting sentences and parking it near a busy road to stop drivers from being distracted.

     This leads us to the question…..does it get….could it possibly get..…more white trashy than this?    People, we have got to elect someone to the Board of Supervisors who will take charge the morons at the police department, I mean, my God, what’s next?  Mandatory incest? Regulation flower planters in old tires on our front lawns?

     It’s terrible to pick on the mouth breathers I know, and yes, understandably most cops on the Fairfax County police force probably have an abandoned car on cinderblocks in their drive way in Loudon County so printed cars make sense to them and yes, were in Dixie, but Good Lord, can we at least try to pretend were not? I mean….printed cars?

      I’m going to write this next sentence slowly so as not to confuse the cops:  A car covered in anti-drinking- and-driving sentences will not decrease the vast number of idiots who drive around drunk. They’re too drunk to read the notes side of the car and attention deficit drivers are too busy to read it.  

    The cops say that it’s okay for this idiocy to happen because the printing cost is being covered by Transurban, the people who operate the 495 Express Lanes.     You want stop crime? Arrest those shameless money hungry pricks.

     Start there and work your way up to finding the missing files in the John Geer shooting case then you’ll have the credibility to tell other people about obeying law.  We would rather live with drunk and distracted driver than with a police force that guns down unarmed citizens.