Fairfax County police report more than 60,000 citations and warnings in 2026 Road Shark campaign

By Hannah Prewitt

FAIRFAX, Va. — Fairfax County police and Virginia State Police troopers issued 19,272 citations and warnings during the final week of this year’s Road Shark traffic enforcement campaign, bringing the 2026 total to more than 60,000, the Fairfax County Police Department announced Friday.

That is a 23% increase over 2025, when officers issued about 50,000 citations and warnings, the department said. The campaign, run in four one-week waves since April, targets speeding, reckless driving, distracted driving and impaired driving. Police said it produced hundreds of arrests for driving while intoxicated, along with citations for reckless driving and unlawful use of handheld devices while driving.

The department did not publish a breakdown of the final wave by violation. An Inquisitor tally of the four waves, drawn from the department’s own releases, shows that each wave was larger than the one before it except the second, and that the October wave was the biggest of the year.

Sources: FCPD releases of May 4, June 22, Aug. 21 and Oct. 23. The total is the Inquisitor’s sum of the four wave figures.

Each wave also ran ahead of the same wave a year earlier, according to the department. The first wave produced more than 4,200 more citations and warnings than the first wave of 2025, and the second topped the more than 8,250 issued in the second wave of 2025.

What the numbers do and don’t show

The releases count enforcement actions, not outcomes. The department has not said in its Road Shark announcements how many of the stops ended in warnings rather than tickets across the full year, or whether crashes fell on the roads where officers concentrated. In the two waves where it did split the figures, warnings outnumbered citations: 6,051 to 5,740 in June and 10,073 to 6,162 in August.

The campaign is “designed to increase police visibility, enforce traffic laws, and educate drivers to combat aggressive driving, reduce traffic crashes, and promote safer roadways,” the department said when the first wave ended. In its final release, it urged drivers to “plan ahead, stay focused behind the wheel, obey posted speed limits, and never drive under the influence.”

7News (WJLA) and WUSA9 also reported the year-end figures.

The Inquisitor contacted the Fairfax County Police Department, the county’s Office of Public Affairs, the Fairfax County Department of Transportation, the office of Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association on Saturday to ask about the final wave’s breakdown and whether crash data show an effect. This story will be updated with any responses.

Photo: A Fairfax County Police Department cruiser in Oak Hill, Va. Famartin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.