This story was updated on June 24 at 7:17 a.m.

While the majority of Fairfax County police encounters with civilians do not end with officers using force, those that do disproportionately involve Black people, according to a report released today.

The 2019 FCPD Use of Force report shows Black residents make up less than 10% of the county’s population, but are involved in 45.6% of police use-of-force incidents. In total, there are 1.2 use of force incidents per 1,000 calls for service. The report was compiled by the Fairfax County Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, and the statistics are based on incidents that occurred in 2019 and have been closed as of June 1, 2020. 

“We’ve seen [for] five years now, a trend where African-Americans are disproportionately represented in the use of force, always hovering around 50 percent even though we’re 10 percent of the county. So I think this proves this is a deep cultural issue within the FCPD that they need to address,” said Sean Perryman, president of the Fairfax NAACP. “We want the chief to address this, the board supervisors to address this with some sort of urgency. … There’s overwhelming support in this community to reimagine public safety.”

Perryman cited NAACP’s car rally at the beginning of June, which he said attracted a thousand cars and about 2,500 people with only two days notice.

Three days after the rally, white Fairfax County police officer Tyler Timberlake used a stun gun multiple times on a Black man who was disoriented and did not appear combative — and stuck his knees in the man’s neck and back, seemingly without provocation. The officer was charged with three misdemeanor counts of assault and battery.

The region and the nation have been gripped by weeks of protest over the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25. Since then there have been renewed calls to reform, rethink, and defund police forces. For its part, the Fairfax County NAACP is calling for better data and police misconduct reporting, removing police from schools, demilitarizing the police, a review of its use-of-force policy, and other reforms.

“Most importantly, out of all of this, we’re saying that they should make these reforms with no new dollars. You don’t reward people for doing a bad job at something. And I think that’s just good governance,” Perryman said. “We haven’t used the term ‘defund the police’ necessarily. But I think at the heart of what we’re saying is that we need to reallocate budgets to the things that actually serve the community better.”

The Fairfax police officers involved with use of force incidents are majority white, at 82%, the report shows. In fall of 2019, white officers made up almost 80% of the FCPD, while the county overall was 52.4% white.

Overall, the number of use-of-force incidents increased by almost 300 from 2018 to 2019.

This story was updated to correct the percentage of Black people involved in use-of-force incidents.