Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City are prominent examples of how Democrat-run jurisdictions distort the criminal justice system. Other Democrat-run areas typically fly under the radar, and Virginia’s Democratic counties, Fairfax and Loudoun, are among the worst offenders.
The latest criminal saga in Fairfax County is that of Richard Cox. Cox is a man who claims to be a woman, affording him special protections in the transgender-obsessed society Virginia Democrats have built. Cox is also a registered Tier III sex offender, “the most serious level of sex offender” under Virginia law. So, when video showed Cox walking out of a water park specifically designed for children with disabilities, and walking in the direction of a playground despite him not being allowed within 100 feet of a child day program, you would think the straightforward conclusion would be that Cox would be arrested once again.
And yet he was not. The Fairfax County Police Department never charged or even arrested Cox for that visit, or for his various trips to Fairfax County recreation centers, where he regularly exposed himself to women and girls in the women’s locker rooms. It took Arlington County police to finally charge Cox with crimes after he exposed himself multiple times in their county as well.
Fairfax County police said they couldn’t arrest and charge Cox for crimes going back to November of last year because “the policy of Parks and Rec allowed him and other persons to… use the locker room of the gender that they identify with, so a crime was not committed, so he was not arrested by Fairfax County police officers.” Fairfax’s transgender policymaking has given Cox the green light to expose himself to women and girls in every locker room in the county.
There was no explanation why Cox wasn’t arrested for being within 100 feet of a child day program, which is illegal no matter how much transgender anti-science you foist on the law. There is an alternative theory, though, that stems from the fact that the Fairfax County Commonwealth attorney is cut from the same cloth as other progressive “prosecutors” supported by George Soros.
Steve Descano is the Soros-backed “prosecutor” in question, and his soft-on-crime attitude is the best explanation for Cox’s lack of consequences. From 2019 (when Descano took office) to 2023, crime in Fairfax County went up 15%, including a 74% increase in carjackings, a 43% increase in aggravated assault, and a 26% increase in crimes against persons. Par for the course for a “prosecutor” whose goal is ending mass incarceration, not jailing criminals.
But Descano’s office also has a specific record on crimes against children. In 2023, prosecutors in Descano’s office said defense attorneys were emboldened by Descano’s policies to refuse plea deals for child sex crimes that weren’t misdemeanors, with one prosecutor claiming that Descano’s office “does not value protecting children who have been raped.” In 2022, it was reported that a victim had been molested twice after Descano’s office let the offender off the first time with a soft plea deal.
Up until late 2023, Loudoun County was in the same Soros-backed boat. Up until then, Loudoun County’s Commonwealth attorney was Buta Biberaj, who misled the courts to try and secure a soft plea deal for a man alleged to be responsible for a possible 12-burglary crime spree spanning 4 counties over 10 days. The most notable case of Biberaj’s tenure was when she tried to throw a man in jail after he confronted the Loudoun County Public Schools board, after LCPS covered up the sexual assault of the man’s daughter by a boy claiming to be a girl.
Biberaj was defeated by a Republican in 2023, but the distortions of the criminal justice system continued through the aforementioned LCPS school board. LCPS, after all, had been the one that covered up the first assault by the transgender student, allowing him to be transferred to another school where he assaulted another student.
Even without Biberaj as the county’s prosecutor, LCPS is determined to ruin people’s lives to serve the fantasy of transgenderism. Earlier this year, LCPS opened a Title IX investigation in a case where a girl claiming to be a boy was recording boys in the boys’ locker room at a high school. The boys, who are around the age of 15, expressed their discomfort with a girl being in their locker room, and presumably further discomfort with being recorded by that girl.
The investigation launched by LCPS was not into the girl who was sexually harassing these boys, but into the three boys, who are the victims, because those boys dared to be uncomfortable with the county’s transgender policies in action. LCPS has spent years targeting the victims of sexual harassment rather than the culprits, to the point that it is going to continue targeting one of the boys even though his family is now moving out of Virginia to North Dakota.
Fairfax County takes a similar attitude, with the Fairfax County School Board deciding in 2022 that suspension is the appropriate punishment for “misgendering” for students as young as the fourth grade. That policy is currently being contested in court, with at least four students already having been targeted for punishments. Those students have faced more of a punishment in Fairfax County for “misgendering” than the aforementioned Richard Cox did for exposing himself in multiple women’s locker rooms throughout the county.
Both counties have actively resisted the state’s new Republican governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general in order to defend these policies. The counties consider these policies shining gems of their progressive governance, so much so that they must fight the state’s leadership to defend them even as the counties go soft on real criminals in their communities. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that those criminals are being treated with kid gloves, given that both counties are fine with bringing the hammer down on children who don’t adhere to transgender ideology.
YOUNGKIN TO HEADLINE SWING STATE EVENTS WITH POST-GOVERNOR AMBITIONS UNKNOWN
This is important not just for the injustices that Fairfax and Loudoun are perpetrating, but also for the fact that both counties are trying to steer the direction of the state. Fairfax and Loudoun are the largest and third-largest counties in Virginia, and both had more voters back the Democratic ticket in 2021 than any other county. What Fairfax and Loudoun are offering is not token Democratic resistance in a red state, but a model for Democratic governance in a swing state and an alternative to the GOP administration that state Democrats will be expected to follow should they retake control in the state’s elections later this year.
This kind of progressive plague must be defeated at every available opportunity, lest these distortions of the criminal justice system and the very idea of justice continue to make progress. For Virginians, the next available opportunity will be this coming November, where state Democrats will represent the Loudoun and Fairfax county models of “justice,” where children committing thought crimes in schools receive more of a punishment than criminals flaunting their crimes throughout the counties.
