Police chief vows to increase foot patrols in Culmore

Police Chief Kevin Davis speaks at the Bailey’s Community Center. At the right is session moderator Michael Shochet, FCPD chaplain coordinator.

Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis plans to bring a new approach to improve safety in Culmore and other high-crime areas. He will direct officers to spend time every day on foot patrol to establish personal relationships between the police and residents.

Davis made the announcement at a Meet the Chief event July 23 at Bailey’s Community Center hosted by the Communities of Trust Committee. He also talked about the need to train officers better on the use of force, to recruit a more diverse police force, and to bring mental health professionals on service calls involving a person in crisis.

Safety in Culmore

Several people in the audience raised concerns about safety in the Culmore community in Bailey’s Crossroads. One resident said, “gangs are taking over the area, human trafficking is really big – several female teens went missing – and walking outside is not safe.”

Davis’s solution is to have more officers walk the streets getting to know residents. “We want police officers out of their cars and on foot more,” but “not in an enforcement posture,” he said.

Now people only see the police when there’s a crisis. He wants to turn that around through the iPAC (integrated police and community) approach, to start around Labor Day.

He expects patrol officers to spend 30 minutes every day introducing themselves and “simply interacting with human beings” with the goal of enhancing relationships between police and the community.

In addressing human trafficking, which is a regional problem, Davis said, “we rely heavily on relationships with our federal partners to break up those criminal organizations.”

“Our absolute priority is to protect the safety of communities,” added Capt. Sean Adcock, the commander of the Mason Police District. He lauded the School Resource Officer program for building positive relationships with kids early.

“The key is neighborhood engagement,” Adcock said. Officers are directed to have friendly interactions with youths; to play soccer and hang out.

Career missteps

Davis came out of retirement to accept the position of police chief in Fairfax County, despite several racially motivated misconduct incidents earlier in his career.

He told the audience at the July 23 meeting he “made some mistakes,” citing an incident in 1993 when, as a police officer in Prince George’s County, Md., he slammed an African American man’s face to the ground while using racist slurs. The victim won a judgment against Davis.

“I regret that happened,” Davis said. But as a result, “I grew up and matured because I had to.”

“I’m proud of the trajectory of my career,” he said. “I never shied away from talking about my own experiences.”

When the Board of Supervisors hired Davis in April, it touted his leadership in police reform, citing his experience as assistant chief of the Prince George’s County police force, chief of police in Anne Arundel County, Md., and police commissioner in Baltimore.

Police-involved shooting

To help prevent police-involved shootings, Davis plans to introduce a “co-responder model” in which mental health professionals will accompany officers on calls involving people in crisis. “Fairfax County going to lead the way in that.”

A police-involved shooting in Fairfax County “is and should be a big deal,” Davis said, noting that in a county with nearly 1.2 million people, there are only about one of these incidents a year. “We are one of the largest and safest jurisdictions in the country.”

The most recent such incident occurred in North Springfield earlier this week. Police were called to a group home for reports of an intellectually disabled woman who was threatening violence against herself and others. Other people who were in the home were afraid to leave, Davis said.

The two officers who responded “found a pretty chaotic scene,” he said. The woman, age 30, “was in crisis and was armed with a very large knife.” As she advanced toward the officers, one of them discharged his firearm, and a bullet struck her in the stomach.

This was the first time a police-involved shooting was captured on a body camera in Fairfax County, he noted. The footage eventually will be released to the public.

“Every facet of what occurred” is being investigated, and the results will be submitted to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office, Davis said.

A criminal investigation will determine whether the officer’s actions were lawful or justifiable or not. Another investigation, by the Internal Affairs Bureau, will determine whether the officer complied with the FCPD’s rules on the use of deadly force.

Police reforms

Davis plans to adopt the Integrated Communication Assessment and Tactics (ICAT) approach which was recommended by a recent report on the use of force in the FCPD. That report, by the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio, found officers more likely to draw firearms against Blacks than Whites.

Merely using the power of speech to de-escalate a potentially dangerous situation isn’t enough, Davis said. ICAT calls for officers to use time and distance to manage an incident involving a person behaving erratically to avoid a violent confrontation.

Davis also took up the recommendation in the report to adopt a data-driven approach to policing. “We have a ton of data but we typically only look at data when something bad happens,” he said.

Following a nationwide search for an expert in crime data analysis, Davis hired Noah Fritz as the FCPD’s first-ever director of crime control strategies and data analytics.

The goal is to get a real-time analysis of crime trends and recommend ways to address them. As an example, the department is examining the current pattern of car thefts and car break-ins by teenagers throughout the region and is partnering with other jurisdictions to identify suspects.

Improved recruiting and training

Like police departments across the country, FCPD is seeing a drop in police academy applicants and a rise in retirements.

Fairfax is down about 115 officers, from its allowable level of 1,459 sworn officers, Davis said.

He hopes some of the 90 kids in the FCPD’s Public Safety Cadet program will eventually join the police force, but acknowledged that’s not enough. On a negative note, an officer was indicted this week for sexual misconduct with a female teen cadet in 2019.

The challenge is not only to encourage young people to choose a career in law enforcement but to increase diversity in the police force, he said. To better ensure that police officers reflect the communities they serve, Davis assigned a lieutenant to make recommendations on how to recruit diverse police candidates.

Another challenge is ensuring police candidates have the right moral character. Police academy applicants are given a psychological examination – which can assess whether they can differentiate right from wrong, for example – but Davis believes that’s not good enough.

He would like to add a behavior assessment, which would flag a recruit with a narcissistic personality and a tendency to bully. The department also pays attention to candidates’ social media posts that indicate racism or misogyny.

To reduce racial disparities, the whole police department is now receiving training on implicit bias, Davis said.

The moderator at the meeting at the Bailey’s Community Center, FCPD police chaplain coordinator Michael Shochet, said he teaches a class at the police academy that addresses how to be compassionate. He tells recruits “they are in a calling to make the world better.”

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