It took a year, and some double talk by our esteemed DA, but news reports are saying the OC Grand Jury is convening to day to indict former Fullerton bully cop Joe Wolfe in the death of Kelly Thomas. Originally Tony Rackukas said Wolfe couldn’t have known what was going on between Ramos and Kelly and therefore was excused from any wrongdoing, a yarn so unbelievable that, well, nobody believed it, especially when the video came out and we could see a fully engaged Wolfe take batting practice on Kelly.
And here’s some food for thought: Joe Felz and Acting Chief Danny Hughes put this cheapjack goon (or so the story goes – and it has the perfect ring of truth) on a disability retirement for throwing out his shoulder beating up on Thomas! In any case Wolfe is gone from the Department, but not ’til afer getting a clean bill of health from our new, reformed police department and its esteemed Acting Chief. Fortunately the Grand Jury is likely to be a lot more discriminating as to who it determines to be Hero. Ad hopefully this Hero will get what he deserves.
Identifying a problem is the first step on the path to fixing it. Sort of like a drunk needs to admit his addiction to booze.
In my last post I described the inherent dysfunction of allowing government workers to unionize, and in effect, place their own collective interests ahead of delivering the services they were hired to perform for their bosses – you and I.
What’s needed? First it’s imperative that all new agreements with public unions reflect parity with employment realities in the private sector. This includes paying fair shares in health care and pension contributions. Retirement age must be raised to eliminate early retirement and double dipping bureaucrats. What’s wrong with mandating the age the rest of us can collect Social Security?
Second, let’s remove bureaucrats from negotiating labor contracts and give the responsibility to experienced labor negotiators. Why not? The unions are doing it. This will remove squishy “administrators” bargaining with their “family” members, giving away the store, and often benefiting from the same benefits they confer upon their employees. The taxpayers are in dire need of independent, hard-nosed advocates at the bargaining table.
Third, remove automatic raises based on seniority or simply taking up space.
Fourth, end the ever escalating salary arms race for public employees.
Fifth, eliminate “management” unions. The very type of “professional” folk whose job it is to implement the will of the elected representatives are simply extensions of that authority. Management in the private sector is never unionized. Why should the overseers be represented? The fact is that lots of government managers are not unionized; none of them should be. The gift of huge benefits on managers including retirement at 50 or 55 has created an exodus of middle-aged middle and upper managers who often go to work for other agencies where they can start up a whole new pension!
Finally, look at total compensation as a means of assessing taxpayer support for public employees. This includes health insurance premiums, pension subsidies, and salaries.
I have always been fascinated by the urge for government employees and their die-hard supporters to cling to the notion of collective bargaining as some sort of birthright. The ability for public employees to unionize is actually not even that old, but is a comparatively recent and curious chapter in the history of organized labor.
Classical Marxist doctrine holds that in the capitalist phase of history there are two elements contributing to economic activity. There are capital and labor; the first representing the bourgeois investment class (and their managerial overseers); the second is the workforce that sells its labor to the former. Naturally, the cost of labor , the investment of the capitalists, and the return the latter is willing to accept determine the supply side cost of goods.
The Marxists believed that capital habitually exploited an oversupply of labor through poor working conditions and long hours of employment. There was certainly evidence to support this contention and the capitalists did their best to outlaw labor “combination” through their control of legislatures.
(For the sake of argument I will happily stipulate the socialist fact in evidence.)
Of course labor did combine.
But the idea of government workers unionizing did not enter the into the equation. Why? For several reasons, one of which is succinctly stated by the most effective liberal in American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt realized that people who work for the government cannot hold the same employer/employee relationship since their employer is the people as a sovereign whole. Clearly the idea of collective bargaining, and particularly militant union tactics used against the citizenry was abhorrent to old FDR himself.
Another related problem is that government employees do not fit into the labor-capital equation, since the “capitalist” investor in their operation is none other than the taxpayers and citizens – and not a natural adversary in an economic system. And public employees were granted civil service protection and security to make up for comparatively modest wages.
Cornering the market…
And then there is the problem of the complete public sector labor monopoly. Producers of goods compete with each other in marketplaces that, among other things, sets a value on product that helps determine the cost of labor. No such balance exists in the public sector where nothing is for sale and there is no competition in the labor market at all.
The ability to unionize and the concomitant ability to engage in collective political action has enabled the public sector labor monopoly to elect its favored candidates at all levels, and subsequently to exact greater and greater salaries and benefits for themselves; and always using the argument that all they seek is parity with the private sector. Yet never have they jettisoned the civil service protections that makes in almost impossible to fire an incompetent public worker.
Most comical are the “management” unions that represent the upper tier employees who oversee the lower, and whose own interests in running the “company” are inexplicably linked with the benefits conferred upon the latter!
We didn’t do it!
And so dear Friends, next time you see a “retired” 50 year old cop who was granted almost 100% of his salary as a pension, and who was given two decades of retroactive benefits, ask him whom he has to thank. I guarantee it won’t be you, or even the other public employees who negotiated his benefits on your behalf; nor even the lackeys on the city council like Don Bankhead, Dick Jones, and Jan Flory whom his union got elected. Nuh, uh. He will thank an anonymous “system” that has created this mess and that has virtually bankrupt California and threatens almost every municipality in the state.
Wolfe is gone. So are Ramos and Cicinelli. The other three cops involved in the Kelly Thomas beating death, despite violating policy, have had their jobs saved by a watery Gennco report and an acting police chief eager to do damage control in the ongoing struggle to deny the obvious: a Culture of Corruption in the FPD.
The other three cops: Blatney, Craig, and Hampton. Hampton. Now why does that name sound familiar? Let me think.
Oh that’s right! He’s the fine fellow who assaulted a bystander who made the mistake of trying to video record a downtown Fullerton incident involving the FPD. Poor Veth Mam never knew what hit him. Fortunately a bystander picked up Mam’s phone and continued the video. Watch as Hampton throws Mam to the ground, swings him around like a rag doll, and sits on him.
But the story was far from over. Mam was arrested and jailed on charges of assaulting the cops!The DA was fine with the story Officer Frank Nguyen cooked up which was so obviously contradicted by the video that Mam was eventually unanimously acquitted by a jury.
So were there any repercussions? Of course not. According to spokesman Andrew Goodrich, the cops really and truly thought they had the right man, even though it’s obvious in the video that from the time Hampton arrives on the scene and his immediate attack of Mam he can have known nothing of any alleged previous assault on a cop.
Jan Flory is running for Fullerton City Council. Jan Flory used to be on Fullerton City Council. Jan Flory is hoping that nobody remembers her disastrous decisions on Fullerton City Council.
Oops! Too late.
In one of the costliest misjudgments in Fullerton history, Mrs. Flory joined her fellow council members in approving the horrible, retroactive 3@50 pension formula for the City’s “public safety” employees that was a massive gift of public funds and created a huge unfunded pension liability that eats up a bigger percentage of Fullerton’s budget every year.
Bankhead, Flory, Clesceri, Jones and Norby. At least Norby apologized for his blunder. Flory never has. She even made the motion to approve the gargantuan giveaway!
Of course the excuse Don Bankhead and Patdown Pat McPension used was that without the benefit Fullerton couldn’t recruit the best and brightest. You know, cops like Ramos and Wolfe and Cicinelli, and Rincon, and Mater and Mejia and Major, and well, you get the idea.
Of course Mrs. Flory never got around to explaining how giving away a retroactive benefit to current employees would improve future recruitment.
Being on a city council for eight long years can create an embarrassing trail of disastrous decision. Our job will be to remind the public of Mrs. Flory’s string of expensive votes.
Tanned rested and ready, after a 9 week hiatus, Don Bankhead, retired police captain, stumblebum, incompetent, tired, phraser of spoonerisms, and the only man in the 162 year-old history of California to be recalled from the same office twice, is back.
Yes, indeedy, recently ousted Fullerton councilman Don Bankhead filed papers yesterday to run for city council this fall – marking his tenth election to get or hold that esteemed position.
Even after the meteorite hit him in the noggin, Blank jumped right back into the game. After all his legacy was at stake. Damn mammals.
You really have to wonder what motivates Bankhead at this point, if anything beyond senile stubbornness. Who he thinks his supporters are is hard to fathom. Perhaps he was encouraged by a room full of cops and cop apologists wearing blue shirts. Blue is Don’s favorite color. Does he believe the FPOA and the fire union will back a clueless octogenarian exhibiting signs of evident cognitive dissonance? Well of course they will!
Still, it will be interesting to see which cruel, thoughtless persons signed his nominating papers.
In a way it’s sort of sad to see a man whom time has so evidently passed by deny the reality: two thirds of the voters in the recent Recall voted to get rid of him.
Imagine a world where you could establish your own police force. A force that doesn’t kill innocent human beings and pretend it never happened; one whose members don’t falsify evidence, or beat people up, or steal from the evidence room, or from TSA checkpoints.
Imagine a police department where male members don’t sexually assault women in their police cruisers, and in which evidence in a jail suicide is not destroyed; where the official spokeshole doesn’t peddle bullshit to non-inquisitive media with impunity. Imagine a department where no lazy or crooked cops ID the wrong man and send him to jail. Imagine a force where the chief doesn’t deny the undeniable; or where the chief can’t get a disability retirement for high blood pressure and an achy tummy.
The streets of Bagdad or Kabul? No, this occupying force is all dressed up with no place to go – except the mean streets of Anaheim, where the police department has done just about everything possible to take a bad situation and make it worse.
But what’s with all the paramilitary bullshit? Camouflage? Really? What the Hell have we let out country become? Why did we let a bunch of neo-conservative chickenhawks and cowardly statist liberals turn our nation into a place where the local street cops are parading around with all the latest military hardware Homeland Security could buy for them?
Courtesy of the OC Weekly
I don’t know about you, but the thought of a Cicinelli, a Wolfe, a Ramos, or a Hampton decked out like GI Joe, gives me nothing but apprehension. In Fullerton our new council needs to start scrutinizing this militarization of the flatfoots, and PDQ.
The recent Time of Troubles in the Magic Kingdom has caused an influx of outside cops into Anaheim. A sharp-eyed bystander noticed some Fullerton police persons giving some mutual aid in Anaheim. This sleek fellow is one of them:
Hey but you’re, but you’re looking good, baby I believe that you’re feeling fine…
