What neither Travis nor any of us knew was that Sellers was doing very little to impress this philosophy onto the crew of thugs, misfits, whackjobs, and pickpockets he inherited from Pat McPension. Unfortunately for us, Chief McPension had cultivated quite a nasty little garden over his 17 year command.

But let’s not shed any misplaced tears for Sellers. Even tho’ McPension left him a considerable criminal element, he appears to have done nothing to weed out the noxious blooms in the FPD flower bed during his abortive, two-year stint as Chief.

- Joe Sipowicz

Last week Sharon Quirk-Silva invited me to join her public chat with Fullerton Police Chief Michael Sellers at the Fullerton Museum Center. Chief Sellers answered a variety of questions from Fullerton’s usual cluster of civic participants. Some were there to ask legitimate questions, while others used the open Q&A format to primarily talk about themselves under the guise of asking a question (the excessive use of the perpendicular pronoun reveals the intentions of the self-important).

The most vacuous question of the night came from school board candidate Aaruni Thakur, who was interested in the number of Baker to Vegas trophies displayed in the lobby of the police department. While some of us at FFFF would never question the opportunity to make a mockery of the ‘ol dog and pony show, it struck me as a missed opportunity for the untested school board candidate who should have been impressing us with his civic insight.

So on to Chief Sellers. He gave most of the answers that one would expect, citing crime statistics elaborating on existing department policies. Nothing surprising or terribly revealing.

But here’s what struck me: I listened to the Chief of Police for an hour and a half, and not once did I catch a hint of the authoritarianism that tends to seep out of career law enforcement bureaucrats. He never implied that he “knew what’s best for the people”. His responses to controversial questions on marijuana dispensaries and homeless disturbances were telling – Sellers said he can only enforce the laws that the People enact, regardless of his personal feelings on the issues.

Sellers came across as genuinely amiable to policing methods that seek to reduce crime through community interaction, rather than relying purely on brute-force suppression and mindless “law and order” approaches that alienate law enforcement agencies from the people whom they are supposed to serve. Officers are encouraged to build relationships and find long-term solutions to crime problems, rather than just cycle junkies and gang bangers through our failing prison system.

I left feeling surprisingly satisfied with the police chief appointment that our city council made last year. Hopefully Sellers turns out to be “tough on crime” without being tough on the rest of us.

In light of all the horror stories that have emerged from the FPD dungeons since we posted this story, it seems more credible than ever. I wonder if all the trolls who tried the hair-splitting approach to discredit him are having second thoughts.

And I wonder if this guy has had the good sense to contact Garo Mardirossian.

- Joe Sipowicz

When we posted a college student’s allegations of police brutality last week, several commenters responded by calling the victim a liar and saying that the claim could not possibly be true.

Well, here is the truth according to FPD’s own Internal Affairs department: the complaint containing allegations of brutality and theft was “sustained” against FPD Officer Cary Tong.

Read the findings (pdf)

The letter from Chief Michael Sellers calls officer Tong’s actions “inappropriate and not within policy,” and states unequivocally that “a finding of sustained means that the evidence indicates that the complaint was well founded.“

Officer Cary Tong was listed as both the arresting and booking officer that night, putting him at the center of the entire event described by the victim in the complaint. That complaint included a long list of violent actions against the young man while he was handcuffed, including the deliberate breaking of his finger, theft of his personal cash and several beatings both at the arrest scene and during his booking at the jail.

The opaque and severely limited disclosures made in this non-public letter are a direct testament the police union’s lobbying power, which has fostered laws and an internal culture that encourages police departments to protect bad officers and keep their abuses secret from the public. In this case, we still don’t know if the officer was punished with a light slap on the wrist or even disciplined at all.

In all likelihood, Officer Tong is still patrolling the streets of Fullerton. Shoot, he might even pull you over tonight.

Enjoy a blast from the past courtesy of the FFFF archives!

- Joe Sipowicz

Officer misconduct cases are usually handled behind closed doors, hidden away from the public who are ultimately the victims when cops go bad. Recently a document slipped out from underneath the curtain and gave us some insight into Chief McKinley’s department, which had a habit responding to officer misconduct by looking the other way and pressuring victims to stay silent — demonstrating brazen contempt for the rule of law.

Officers John Cross and Gregg Nowling were caught on tape in the 2005 beating of a young man who was pulled over for playing his music too loud. Fearing outrage, the department refused to release the recording to the public. Nowling resigned, but John Cross was the president of the Fullerton Police Officers Association (the union), so he decided to take his chances and ride out the punishment that was sure to be nothing more than a token admonishment from his friendly boss, Chief Patrick McKinley.

I'll just pretend I didn't see that.

John Cross should have been fired and sued, but a deal was allegedly struck with the victim in which charges would be dropped if the young man kept quiet. This allowed the department head to give Cross a mere slap on the wrist – a two step demotion in pay for the next two years.

When nobody was paying attention, Chief McKinley eliminated John Cross’ punishment one year early:

The record shows that almost immediately, John Cross began another series of disturbing actions that ultimately forced the department to fire him. The Council found one example most frightening – Officer Cross had covered up an incident involving a drunk off-duty sheriff who was brandishing his weapon in public. He also failed to follow up on a potential suicide when it was only a few doors down from his location. At least six of these events involved Cross’ turning off his audio recorder in violation of department policy.

There are plenty of other allegations of McKinley’s department looking the other way when incidents were perpetrated by those the department favored, and this is only one of the most severe. As one of our commenters said, McKinley’s game was played at the the expense of our community’s safety, peace, and tax dollars.

UPDATE: Please note Coffman’s admission: ”This year, my first citation”.  So he obviously took on this assignment to harass citizens out of the sheer joy of it. And there you have it. Your tax dollars at work.

The other day we shared a video here of the Fullerton Police Department’s PR disastrous anti-honking ticket strategy. Of course it was justifiably greeted with a hail of scorn and outrage and was ridiculed across Southern California as blatant harassment of peaceful protesters. Egad, another FPD humiliation. Another day another embarrassment!

Oh, well, I guess when you don’t have a sense of shame it’s impossible to be shamed.

What went unmentioned in the video was the identity of the well-fed cop who handed out the ticket to the protester who had the temerity to honk for justice for Kelly Thomas. Well, I know who this churlish individual is.

No surprise! That’s Fullerton Police Officer Association President, Barry Coffman - the head union goon who got The Three Blind Mice McKinley, Bankhead, and Jones elected in the first place, and then watched in satisfaction as these three clowns handed over Fullerton to his union comrades.

Barry says he is smirking because he gets so much job satisfaction. But Barry won’t be smirking for long. Whatever the DA does there will be Federal and civil lawsuits coming FPD’s way, and likely punitive damages against the McKinley Six.  And that’s not going to be hushed up as usual. And he’s got an anti-recall campaign to finance with three elderly orangutans who have finally been exposed as utterly incompetent.

Not much to work with...

Smirk on that, Barry.

Here is the full video from OCTA Bus 5599′s DVR on July 5. Perhaps our more observant readers can glean new information from the 18 minute recording. As always, leave your observations in the comments section below.

Update: As suggested by EyeNeverSayNo, I ran the audio through a noise reducer to help clarify some of the conversation. That version of the video his here.

The video shows all seven cameras at once and is best viewed full screen at 720p.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This camera is about 150 ft. away from the spot where the beating took place. In this example, the camera was aligned to capture the comings and goings of Slidebar patrons on a Tuesday night.

You pay the mortgage, we live in the palace...

Friends, for the past couple weeks I’ve been out in the lonely salt flats and rocky wastes of the great Mojave searching for new zinc veins; so now I belatedly bring you the final installment of Professor J.H Habermeyer’s entertaining essay on the means and methods local government deploys to do what it wants, to get what it desires, and to abuse those who oppose it. Here is the Seventh and final wall.

The Seventh Wall

We have reviewed the myriad ways that local governments obfuscate what they do and then defend their actions against the very citizenry that has placed its faith in the charming swindle known as participatory democracy. The process is one of systematically winnowing out ever smaller numbers of remaining opposition through all sorts of clever tactics that include preying upon citizen apathy, bamboozling the public with unfathomable pseudo-technical jargon, delaying, temporizing, and even legal hair splitting that would make any Philadelphia lawyer proud.

Finally we come to the seventh and final wall that the bureaucracies of local government have erected about themselves and that provides the ultimate protection of the citadel, the sanctum sanctorum, the Holy of Holies. This final palisade is constituted of the legal and practical insulation in which the government functionaries have enveloped themselves.

It is well-known that government employees are cocooned in the protections afforded the “civil service.” This insulation provides great protection and engenders great arrogance. While politicians are theoretically answerable to the public, public employees, practically, answer to nobody. Practice and law provides effective shields to these denizens of the citadel.

The police structure can be counted upon to cover up, obscure, and ultimately exonerate instances of corruption and physical brutalization of perpetrators and innocent, alike. How? Because sham investigations are performed by other police like “Internal Affairs” and the local District Attorney  -fellow members of the law enforcement fraternity who need each other symbiotically.

Likewise the urban renewal bureaucrats and land planners who devise titanic fiascoes effecting the lives and livelihoods of hundreds if not thousands of people are protected from public wrath and disapprobation. Their mantra is to look forward not backward; that hindsight is eagle-eyed; that lessons learned will provide a guide for the future; and most comically, that their projects would have worked but for lack of adequate funding. The vehicle known as local government has no rear view mirror, and no matter how rickety the contraption is, its operators will never cast a backwards glance. Thus the great open air civic center mausoleums and dysfunctional ghetto-creating human warehouse projects that should have worked in theory but that failed in practice dot the urban landscape while the perpetrators thereof suffer no rebuke for their manifest failures. In fact they are apt to give each other self-congratulatory awards and accolades!

Layer upon layer of onerous regulations will be promulgated by compliant politicians and then used, and abused, by the bureaucracy with an autocratic arrogance against which the citizenry has little effective recourse; for the guardians of the citadel cannot be held accountable.

In the last analysis, the agents of local authority take their decisions with impunity. They have invested nothing in the expensive mistakes that will cost the taxpayers plenty. There being no practical difference for the bureaucracy between success and failure we may be sure that strategies based on arbitrary whims, and not sound financial or economic judgment will be propounded. The consequent failures and municipal catastrophes will result in no opprobrium, let alone fiscal detriment will fall upon the decision makers.

Inside the seventh wall the air is rarefied, indeed. Those securely ensconced within its sacred precincts look down upon those outside the citadel with the resigned noblesse and disdain of the mandarin. They are from the government and they are here to help.

And no, you may not come in.

<< Wall #6 – The Long Arm of the Law