Nearly a dozen police departments in Northern Virginia are joining to create a Critical Incident Response Team that will investigate serious use-of-force instances across the multiple jurisdictions, including police shootings, in-custody deaths, actions that result in life-threatening injuries, and officer suicides.

Participating forces include D.C.-area Arlington County, Fairfax City, and Prince William County (where former D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham is set to take over as chief on Feb. 1). Noticeably absent from the new group, which includes a total of 11 departments, are Fairfax County Police, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, and Alexandria Police. (Fairfax County is the commonwealth’s most populous jurisdiction, and Loudoun County the fourth.) Other agencies on the response team include Falls Church, Herndon, Leesburg, Manassas City, Manassas Park, Vienna, and Purcellville police departments, as well as the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police Department.

The creation of the response team, announced Tuesday by the Northern Virginia Police Chiefs and Sheriffs Committee, aims to bolster public confidence and ensure impartiality in police investigations by allowing the multiple jurisdictions to review each other.

Typically when a police officer shoots or uses other life-threatening action, their own department leads both the internal investigation and any potential criminal investigation into the officer’s conduct. The Critical Incident Response Team will now be responsible for the criminal investigations in these instances, working with state attorneys in each jurisdictions, announced Prince William County’s Assistant Police Chief Kevin Hughart during a press conference on Tuesday.

“The outcries for police reform have been ringing really loudly across our nation throughout the past ten months,” Herndon County Police Chief Maggie A. DeBoard said at the joint press conference. “There can be no better time to launch this initiative to build upon the public trust and support that we have always experienced from our Northern Virginia communities.”

Detectives from all 11 agencies will participate in the investigations on behalf of the Critical Incident Response Team, and any detective whose own department is involved in an incident will be removed, according to Hughart. The detectives will then submit reports to attorneys for each jurisdiction, and the local prosecutors will decide whether or not to bring charges.

Fairfax County Police did not immediately return DCist’s request comment, but Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. told the Washington Post in a statement that he supported the goals of the new group and “would provide technical assistance as requested.” Less than a month ago, a Fairfax County officer shot a man in Falls Church in what the department said was an “armed confrontation.”

A spokesperson for Alexandria City police told DCist in a statement that the department’s participation in the response team is pending a decision from the city council on a police review board, adding that the Virginia State Police handle investigations of police shootings and other use-of-force instances for the city. Loudoun County also defers to Virginia State Police “to ensure independent assessments for fair and impartial investigations,” a spokesperson told DCist.

“The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office has investigative tools and resources available to our detectives and crime scene investigators to conduct thorough investigations of critical incidents that smaller agencies often do not have,” wrote the spokesperson. “We are always willing to share those resources and capabilities with any agency in the area.”

The creation of the Critical Incident Response Team follows a push for police reform across the region. This summer, 11 commonwealth attorneys across Northern Virginia, including those of Alexandria City, Loudoun, Fairfax, Arlington, and Prince William counties, coalesced under calls to scrap mandatory minimums for sentencing, tightening restrictions on no-knock warrants, and increasing accountability and oversight of police records in the courtroom.