On Sept. 24, Luis Albisu, owner of Phantacee salon and spa in Arlington hosted a get-together to allow voters to meet Vellie in person and to discuss issues facing the Mason district.

Meanwhile, Vellie has expressed outrage that Fairfax County for not being able to provide a station-by-station or district-by-district breakdown of the most serious crimes since December 31, 2005. She said the failure of the county board to make decisions on allocating police resources without such data “borders on negligence.”

In a statement late last month, she said the board had failed “to maintain even a full-time homicide division and that police officers’ pay are so low they could not even afford to live in the very jurisdiction they patrol. Now, we’re told they’re not even allocating sufficient resources to accurately tell us the extent of crime in our own individual neighborhood police precincts. Such data is crucial to the effective deployment of police resources, and for policy-makers to make."

“With the face of crime changing every day, how can they make intelligent decisions based on information that’s almost two years old?” she asked.

2d Lieutenant James M. Pollock confirmed to Vellie that District-by-District or station-by-station breakdowns of the most serious crimes (murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, larcenies and car thefts, otherwise known as ‘Index’ crimes) is only done on a yearly basis. “In other words, the most recent crime statistics for areas smaller than all of Fairfax county are no more recent than calendar year 2005.”

She said this failure to maintain records on a more frequent basis reflects the board’s poor judgment and misplaced priorities in the area of public safety.

Vellie has focused on public safety issues in her campaign for Mason District Supervisor following the murder of her neighbor and friend, a senior citizen living alone named Marion Marshall, one year ago in her own home.

Several months after Marshall’s murder, another Springfield senior citizen, Marion Newman, was also murdered in her own home, under similar circumstances. Police so far have made no arrests, and Vellie has pledged her campaign to keep the murders in the public eye. “Somewhere, somebody out there knows something, and we want to encourage them to come forward,’ Vellie said, noting that individuals with knowledge of either of the homicides can anonymously call Crime Solvers at 1-866-411-TIPS (8477).

Crime Solvers is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in either of these two homicides, and a private reward of at least $21,000 is also being offered for information that leads to an arrest for the murder of Marion Marshall.