A million bucks. It’s hard to begrudge the Thomas family of the settlements that are coming their way in this obscene killing. And yet for those of us who have criticized the obvious Culture of Corruption in the FPD it rankles to contemplate the fact that we are responsible for the bill; and that other enormous payouts are coming our way.

Pat McKinley created this unholy mess as police chief while Don Bankhead and Dick Jones sat on their fat behinds all these years as the department festered under the incompetent and indifferent leadership. We get the bill. And Acting Chief Hughes can only act like nothing is wrong, even as Joe Wolfe, the apparent instigator of the Thomas murder breathes the air of a free man on paid vacation.

First there was the sexual battery cases against Albert Rincon. Those cost $350,000. We now know the Thomas murder will probably cost us at least $3,000,000. And there’s no telling what the other violent and criminal episodes perpetrated by thugs like Kenton Hampton, et. al., will cost.

I also note that once again PatMcPension voted to approve a settlement to make on of his embarrassing problems go away.

Really folks, haven’t you seen enough of this rogue’s gallery? The answer is crystal clear. RECALL.

Those ladies were't like you...

Here’s an article from the tanking OC Register about the Kelly Thomas murder case, that includes a delicious quote from Mr. She Bear himself, the egregious former Fullerton Police Chief, Pat McKinley, who nonchalantly admitted he hired all the brutal thugs involved in the remorseless killing of the schizophrenic homeless man. “Let the wheels of justice turn!” says Pat.

The Wheels of Justice. Anybody who has reviewed the checkered career and sayings of McKinley, or the activities of the gang of thugs, pickpockets, perverts, con men, petty thieves, perjurers, and casual liars that he loosed upon Fullerton, may well question whether McKinley has any concept of justice at all.

O Patience! preaches McKinley, now a city councilman. Surely all the evidence is not in! The pathetic plea for more time to clear his thuggish hirelings is telling, as was his previous wink-wink comment about how good his goons’ lawyers are. But for McKinley time is the proverbial double-edged sword. For even as he admonishes us to wait out a protracted legal process that is designed in almost every way to avoid prosecuting criminal cops, his own political time is quickly running out.

Oh yes, it’s hard to avoid the gratuitous sharing of the irrelevant tidbit that McKinley is on vacation. Is this a sly reference to departed, disabled former Chief Mike Sellers who went on vacation in the days following Kelly Thomas’s murder? Naw, because that would be clever and insightful. Rather, we are left to wonder if, with a mere four weeks until the recall election, McKinley has all but given up fighting for his job; or maybe he is so confident that the somnolent folks of Fullerton will turn a blind eye to his own perverse incompetence, that he can afford to vacation – after all, nobody has ever cared what he did, or didn’t do before.

At the OC Weekly Nick Schou has uncovered an old article about the militarization of the Fullerton Police Department under Pat McKinley. The seminal event of the story takes place in 1997 and describes a military-style invasion of the Latino Maple neighborhood in response to a drive-by shooting along Harbor Boulevard.

Me and my gang are gonna kick your ass. And you're gonna like it.

Since McKinley had cut his fangs on SWAT deployments up in Los Angeles it was just a matter of time before the bald badass brought his methods and manpower from the LAPD to Fullerton. The trouble with militarization, apart from the monetary cost of deployment, is the inevitable occupation mentality, and the concomitant “us versus them” mindset. When you watch the Veth Mam video this comes through loud and clear.

15 years later many of McKinley’s scrofulous chickens have now come home to roost. I have to wonder how many incidents in Fullerton over the years were escalated into confrontations by the cops themselves. And I have to wonder what all of this is going to cost us.

Joe Wolfe, in happier days...

At about the 14:30 mark of the Kelly Thomas murder video something happens. Suddenly the mood of Manny Ramos changes from one of bored hostility to outright aggression. He has just gone to the back of the patrol car and has had a conversation with Joe Wolfe who has been sifting through Thomas’s scant possessions in his backpack.

When Ramos returns to Kelly he immediately dons the latex gloves that a helpful Wolfe had previously given him (“take these you may need them”) and begins to verbally threaten the homeless man. “See these fists? These fists are about to fuck you up…” For his part Thomas seems to sense the ramped up hostility. When Ramos tries to grab his shoulder Kelly brushes away the cop’s hand and stands. Immediately sensing his peril he puts his hands up and begins slowly backing away. It’s too late.

Suddenly Wolfe appears almost on cue; at the top of the frame he emerges from behind the patrol car, where, a mere 15 feet away he must have been perfectly aware of what was going on. As Kelly continues to back away toward the front of the car, Wolfe lunges at him, swinging his baton; immediately he is joined by Ramos who takes a swing to, too. As Kelly begins to flee rightward in front of the car and out of the frame, we can’t see what happens next; but Ramos has evidently managed to grab or tackle Thomas as Wolfe, who has circled counterclockwise around the back of the car, piles on.

So here’s my question: how can Joe Wolfe be exonerated from any wrongdoing by the DA? Barely fifteen feet from the exchange between Ramos and Kelly, he must have known exactly what was going on; he also knew who he was dealing with;  and he actually struck the first, illegal blow with his stick. So why was Joe Wolfe never charged with a crime?

Click here to view the transcripts.

Ramos is charged with second degree murder; Cicinelli with manslaughter.

The purpose of the hearing is for a judge to view evidence presented by the District Attorney and decide whether the charged should be bound over for trial.

All sorts of questions will be answered in the next day or two: will the DAs original charges fold as some have predicted? Will a cop-cozy judge say Ramos and Cicinelli were just doing their jobs? On the political side, how will more media exposure effect the Recall of the Three Bald Tires, occurring as it will with the delivery of absentee ballots?

For those who can make it, the hearing will take place this morning at 8:30 in Courtroom C1 in the Superior Court building, in downtown Santa Ana.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How could a human being justify such bone-breaking violence against passive citizens? I suppose it would require a complete emotional callousness towards the condition of anyone unlucky enough to live outside of his law-enforcement bubble. Indeed, the then-LAPD captain Pat McKinley told the judge that these folks had a “unique ability to withstand pain” that required his officers to use extreme force.

What sort of warped mind could spin out such psychobabble as an excuse for extreme violence visited upon the citizens of the United States of America? Well, the kind of mind that said this.

It just makes no sense to me at all. For decades this man has been trusted to wield the force of government in the pursuit of justice, and instead he has chosen to use it against those who stand in the way of his convenience.

It’s time to get this sociopath as far away from public office as possible. Forever.

- The Fullerton Shadow

Yesterday, the She-Bear, ex-Fullerton Police Chief and current city council embarrassment, Pat McKinley, lumbered into Brea. His mission was to help the sweet ladies of the Soroptimist’s local defend themselves in dangerous situations.

Of course when he signed up for the gig, his hosts were probably unaware that as police chief of Fullerton he hired a serial sexual predator, Albert Rincon, who, even after numerous incidents of assault victim complaints, was permitted by McKinley to keep patrolling the streets of Fullerton. We know what he was patrolling for. Rincon’s MO was to falsely arrest, handcuff, then grope his victims in the backseat of an FPD patrol car.

Naturally, some womenfolk took umbrage at McKinley’s bald-faced hypocrisy, and showed up to ask  the questions McKinley had been hoping like hell nobody would ever ask. To say that She-Bear stepped in his own poop would be the understatement of the year. He’s not going to be able to scrape this off his shoe anytime soon. Here’s some of the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

He said what??!! “Those ladies weren’t people like this”??!! So now Pat McKinley gets to pick and choose which women deserve sexual battery at the hands of his hand-picked police officers?

And somehow this creep keeps a straight face as he urges women to use their “she bear” instincts to avoid the type of pervert cop he kept on the street, despite the fact that bent cops like Albert Rincon are armed with tasers and guns and are amply protected by the tarnished badges incompetents like McKinley not only give them, but let them keep.

The final insult? According to McKinley, Rincon didn’t sexually assault anybody. It was only “inappropriate touching.” Not a good thing, but  “it ain’t a dangerous thing.” Well that may be a novel defense for rapists in the future!

I don’t know about you, but I say it’s time for this dangerous sadist to go.

When you are done ask yourself whether or not, in good conscience, anyone can fail to endorse, help and vote to recall the Three Dim Bulbs.

- Grover Cleveland

There is a good essay in today’s Wall Street Journal by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. about the sort of trouble individuals can get into when they act, or fail to act, to shield and protect the institution they represent. And, conversely, the institutions that invest too much credence in the all too fallible figurehead run the risk of failing to employ objective and rationale controls on the latter. As decades of affiliation pass, the problems becomes more acute. Age becomes the enemy.

Of course the writer is talking about Joe Paterno and the disastrous and disgusting pedophilic events at Penn State University. But he may as well have been talking about Fullerton, and about how, after the Kelly Thomas murder, when the public demanded clear, honest, and forthright leadership, their long-term elected officials gave them silence, obfuscation, falsehood, and comfortable retreat behind legal advice they were all too eager to embrace.

Don Bankhead, Dick Jones, and Pat McKinley signally failed their constituents by placing the protection of City Hall and the FPD ahead of their responsibility to do what they were elected to do: lead.  Did they ever even attempt to fathom any particle of the truth? Would they recognize it if they saw it? It hardly matters now.

At first it probably seemed easier to simply ignore the Kelly Thomas killing; a whacked out homeless guy versus Fullerton’s Finest? Strictly no contest. After all there was a fight; bones were broken; the bum was a thief; probably a drug addict; an internal investigation would reveal all. Sure, Chief, take your two-week cruise.

Indifference to the victim and the victim’s family, although demonstrating a fundamental callousness, was the least of their dereliction.

Later as the pressure mounted and the glare of the media spotlight became intense, McKinley and Jones began to utter incompetent and ignorant remarks for consumption by the nation and the world: facial injuries are not life threatening; far worse injuries were survivable; the Coroner cannot determine the cause of death.

As public meetings became rancorous they relied upon the monotonous drone of their attorney to explain to an outraged public why they were weak as kittens and powerless to control any part of their own police department.

And they refused to display any concern about why the FPD brass had permitted the cops to review and re-review the evidence that the public is not permitted to see; why their superiors made them re-write their reports of the killing; and why the culprits were permitted to return to duty as if nothing had happened. They ignored the fact that the police department spokesman had lied about cops’ injuries and had deliberately mischaracterized the killing to the public and to the City Council.  They never addressed the fact that the “internal investigation” hadn’t even started.

The police chief, freshly returned from his cruise soon wilted like an old lettuce leaf. His replacement was a 30 year veteran of the same department about which a string of criminal behavior had recently been exposed. Bankhead, Jones and McKinley refused to accept what had become obvious to almost every one else: something was fundamentally wrong in the FPD.

As the weeks passed, Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley seemed to hope that temporizing and protracted investigations by the DA and Coroner would cause the situation to just wither away. It didn’t. The protests for justice got louder. Their answer? Characterize the protesters as a lynch mob.

The most telling gestures of all were the damage control employment of an outside investigator, and the appointment of a hand-picked committee to address homeless problems, hilariously suggesting that the real problem was that the poor cops just weren’t properly educated about how to deal with the homeless. The concept that Kelly Thomas was deliberately killed seems not to have been seriously entertained by Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley. No. The Fullerton Police Department doesn’t do that. Fullerton doesn’t do that. We don’t do that.

When the DA finally brought charges of Murder and Manslaughter against two of the cops Jones expressed elation and McKinley befuddlement as to how two of his boys could stray so far from their training. But it was clear that the damage control script was written to write off the two and then retreat back into their insulated bunker.

And yet, by now the public now knew all about what the Three still refused to acknowledge: the embarrassing string of stories of drug addiction, theft, fraud, brutality, false arrest, perjury, and sexual assault by members of the police force. This serial criminality has been met with a stony silence from Bankhead, Jones and McKinley. Why?

Asleep. Fried chicken. Hey, where'd my halo go?

It’s because if they ever could, they can no longer distinguish right from wrong when it comes to protecting the institution that they have come to completely identify themselves with. Those Fullerton lapel pins that they so proudly wear have become a symbol of inertia, dereliction, and blind dedication to an abstraction of their own creation: their own delusional view of themselves and their City. It is a perfect representation of the bunker mentality.

As with a sick patient, denial and inaction will only cause the illness to get worse. The patient is the City of Fullerton, and in the now-ironic words of Dick Jones, it is having a grand mal seizure; we don’t want to let go of the patient, but we need to get it under control. Damn straight. The patient needs medicine, all right.

And the medicine is Recall.

- Joe Sipowicz

Yesterday FFFF shared some Fullerton crime statistics that were really pretty damn shocking. Contrary to what council candidate and now beleaguered councilman Pat McKinley claimed and claims, crime not only did not decrease every year in Fullerton, but in the years 2005-2009, it skyrocketed spectacularly.

He's smiling, but why?

Here’s the ugly truth, derived from FBI crime statistics, probably a more reliable source than Mr. McKinley’s fantasy world of self-serving make-believe.

The statistics don't lie, but Pat McKinley does.

Uh, oh. Now, that’s not very good is it? Ol’ Doc Jones’ Galveston was better run by the Italian Mob and it had open gambling and a red light district!

Actually, it was very well-run...

Of course everyone knows the reason for the spike in crime is the crazy shooting gallery Jones and his colleagues created with all the bars masquerading as restaurants they approved in downtown Fullerton; and don’t forget all the illegal bootleg night clubs they ignored, then actually subsidized.

Chillingly, the trajectory of crime in Fullerton coincides perfectly with the spike in the FPD Culture of Corruption that led to beatings, wrongful arrests, and perjury by our own cops. And nobody in City Hall seems capable of grasping the perverted correlation. The cops were given a free hand to fix the mess the politicians made downtown. Soon the entire department was infected.

Speaking of Doc HeeHaw, here he is taking credit for creating his monster. Pay particular attention as Jones documents the crimes committed and the need to to get hard, and tough, and mean.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jones got one thing right. He just doesn’t recognize human behavior.

P.S. Will some public-minded citizen please take this crime chart to the Council meeting next week and read it out loud for the benefit of Jones, Bankhead and McKinley?