McLean Police District Discusses Crime Amid Chronic Officer Shortage

MCLEAN, VA — With the Fairfax County Police Department facing chronic officer shortages, police officials believe neighbors getting to know one another could serve as a good tool for helping to fight crime as the department works through its staffing issues.

Community events, especially in areas without homeowners' associations, promote better communication among residents about anything unusual they are seeing.

With more communication, residents also become more comfortable to ask their neighbors to watch their home when they are on vacation or on a business trip, officials from the McLean police district said Wednesday night at a public safety forum.

"It's great that communities are talking more and waking up more to the challenges we face. That has probably been the biggest plus we’ve seen — that neighbors are getting to know neighbors and talking, 'Hey, what happened in your neighborhood,'" Captain Carolyn Kinney, who heads the McLean police station, said at the forum.

The forum, hosted by the McLean Citizens Association and held at the McLean Community Center, gave residents an opportunity to hear from the leadership of the FCPD’s McLean District and ask them questions.

Residents learned that the McLean police district still has a 30-percent vacancy rate among officers, the same vacancy rate as a year ago. “Has it gotten any better? No. Has it gotten any worse? Not really,” Kinney said about police staffing in the McLean district.

The police district has 38 open positions that it needs to fill, she said.

Despite the officer shortage, Kinney emphasized that residents will get a response from the McLean station if they call the police. “We have the staffing to do that,” she said.

The McLean police district is about 44 square miles and covers McLean, Merrifield, Dunn Loring, Falls Church, Tysons and Great Falls. Major destinations in the district include Tyson’s Corner I and II, the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, and the Mosaic District.

Unlike a team of police officers dedicated to the Tyson's Corner Mall, Kinney said her district does not have the funding to place officers in the increasingly popular Mosaic District in Merrifield. Eventually, she would like to see her officers patrolling the Mosaic area on foot, getting to know store owners and residents.

For the McLean district as a whole, there are not enough officers available to conduct patrolling at most times of the day. "A lot of times, officers are responding to calls. That is their main priority," Kinney said. "They are running call-to-call. There’s not a lot of downtime for police officers to conduct patrolling."

At the forum, a resident also asked about the status of getting mental health providers to join police on certain calls. The resident referenced last summer's fatal shooting by police of a McLean resident who was experiencing a mental health crisis at his home.

Mental health incidents appear to be on the rise, especially among younger people, according to the resident, who suggested an increased urgency in getting the FCPD's co-response team program expanded to respond to mental health calls in the county.

Along with the lack of progress in hiring enough police officers, the FCPD is experiencing trouble with recruiting mental health professionals. "Right now, it’s just a numbers game," Kinney said.

"We are striving for 100 percent of our officers to go to crisis intervention training," she explained. "It’s just teaching officers, especially the younger ones, who may have grown up on the phone or the iPad, how to speak with individuals and not immediately think this is going to be an arrest."

For residents concerned about the police officer shortage in Fairfax County, Kinney suggested they contact their member on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and urge them to include increased funding for police officer salaries in the next fiscal year budget.

"The recruiting pool has definitely dropped over the past decade," Kinney said.

In some cases, police officers are leaving the FCPD for neighboring Arlington County or Prince William County, where elected officials recently gave their officers large pay increases, she said.

Lieutenant Derek Gray, a top official at the McLean police district, said at the forum that he believes police agencies also are seeing a smaller applicant pool because people are less interested in public service. "I don't think the youth today want to serve the public," he said.