Bad Cops Archives - Page 13 of 15 - Friends For Fullerton's Future

April 22, 2017April 22, 2017Bad Cops

Behind the Badge

One of the more startling examples of stupid waste at Fullerton City Hall has been the exorbitant expense of Behind the Badge: fifty large ones a year for former bad OC Register “journalists” to publish and disseminate pro-cop propaganda pabulum. It was all phony crap meant to obscure the real news about the FPD: a litany of bad behavior and criminal activity that over the past decade has spanned the breadth of the California Penal Code. Fortunately, thanks to the Friends this ridiculous waste is coming to an end. We wanted to make sure, too, so we requested the good bye letter.

And here is our temporary police chief Dave Hinig, hand-wringing over the loss of what can only be described as no loss at all for the taxpayer:

Is this some sort of sick joke? Value? To whom? Certainly not for the people who were paying out almost $250,000 over the past four years.

And what’s really laughable is all this lachrymose bullshit over a contract that was made in secret, was grossly mismanaged, and that had no actual requirements for performance – even if Joe Felz had had any inclination to oversee what he initiated.

Well, anyway, Behind the Badge is going away although why we have to pay another $8000 for two more months of this unadulterated literary manure is beyond me.

April 22, 2017April 22, 2017A Step in the Right Direction

The Dan Hughes Sense of Entitlement

by David Curlee26 Comments

City Hall did something really helpful this week. The Clerk’s Office worked with Administrative Services to post very detailed budget documents online in advance of next Tuesday’s City Council budget workshop. I asked if this could be done and they made it happen 24 hours later. Thank you!

Budget detail of this depth has never been provided to the public. This is a big step in the right direction, and likely never would have happened if Joe Felz was still in charge.

The files are posted here: http://cityoffullerton.com/gov/departments/admin_serv/city_budget/2017_18_proposed_budget_information.asp

From this cache of documents, we are able to see the type of General Fund waste that Dan Hughes justified during his tenure as police chief. The next time you call the Police Department and are told no officers are available to respond to a call for service, just remember where his priorities were.

Much of this is charitable and/or personal expenses. Dan Hughes was Fullerton’s highest compensated employee in 2015 with $358,403 in wages and benefits. He should have paid these expenses out of his own pocket, or simply not at all.

Let us not forget that it was the City Council — led by Fitzgerald, Flory, and Chaffee — that let him get away with shenanigans like this.

One can only hope the current City Council sees fit to finally end this nonsense.

April 12, 2017Bad Cops

“Not Guilty, Your Honor!”

by Joe Sipowicz3 Comments

Fullerton PD Corp. Ryan Warner, left, and Officer Timothy Gibert are honored during a city council meeting for their work in getting drunk drivers off the road.
grossly taxpayer funded Photo by Steven Georges/Behind the Badge OC

Thus pleaded former Fullerton cop, and MADD Hero, Timothy Gibert, to charges of conspiracy and grand theft up in the high desert, and repeating a phrase that is becoming the recognized official motto of the City of Fullerton.

Here’s the news as reported in the Daily Titan.

April 10, 2017April 10, 2017Bad Cops

Young Kim Gets Endorsement From Tarnished OC Law Enforcement

by Mr. Peabody9 Comments

Young Kim, who last year managed to get herself unelected as our State Assemblywoman still lusts after political office, it seems. So now, unemployed, she is running for County Supervisor, a job she is no more qualified to hold than she was a seat in the State Legislature. Actually, a ling cod is more qualified to be a County Supervisor.

Her campaign, run by the proudly sleazy Dave Gilliard, just announced that Kim is endorsed by OCs two top law enforcement officials: DA Tony Rackauckas and the Sheriff, Sandra Hutchens. In days gone by these endorsements were no doubt a help to a campaign. Now? Probably not so much.

See that guy over there? He didn’t do anything wrong. He told me to say that.

Hutchens and Rackauckas are both embroiled in a several years-old scandal involving the illegal creation and deployment of a system of jailhouse snitches. The jail deputies have repeatedly lied about the existence of the system and its use, and the DA’s crew has not only known about it, but has prosecuted people based on it. And tellingly, the DA has charged no Deputy Sheriffs with perjury even as the evidence of their lies and their destruction of evidence has become irrefutable. The result of this crooked fiasco so far is that the Feds are investigating the County – which will, of course, lead nowhere. More problematic is the DA causing the release of murderers and other not nice people in order to keep a lid on the whole steaming pile.

I know, “public safety,” right?

But loyal repuglican foot soldiers that they are, both the DA and Sheriff got on board the Young Kim Express as it was crawling out of the station, getting behind, they hope, the front runner who might eventually approve their budgets some warm June day at the County; and maybe willing to deploy the considerable resources of the County of Orange to run interference for their own criminal behavior.

April 6, 2017April 8, 2017Bad Cops

The Tribulations of Sonny Siliceo

by Joe Sipowicz35 Comments

Siliceo chillin’ with his bro, on-duty sex pervert Albert Rincon, in happier times…

The OC Register reports that one of Fullerton’s Finest, Miguel (AKA Sonny, Sonny Black) Siliceo has pleaded not guilty to charges leveled by the District Attorney.

A while back I shared the news that Siliceo was charged by the DA with filing a phony cop report. It had to do with a case in which some dude in our downtown booze palace had been busted and charged with “resisting” Sonny’s attempt to hook him up. The trouble was that cop video exonerated the guy. This has been an unfortunate recurrence in Fullerton where all sorts of people end up in the Fullerton jail and workable pretexts need to be ginned up by the cops to explain their presence in the clink. Remember the unfortunate Veth Mam?

And Sonny himself is no stranger to throwing the wrong guy in jail, but apparently now nobody is willing to run interference for him, including our gelatinous acquaintance Andrew Goodrich who once blew off Sonny’s seemingly deliberate misidentification of Emmanuel Martinez that left the guy in jail for 5 months.

Poor misunderstood Sonny has been on paid leave since October, which is costing us plenty, but it still may be cheaper than having him on the streets getting into mischief.

According to his mouthpiece, Michael Schwartz, Siliceo came to Fullerton in 2006 from Tustin. Which makes you wonder why a 40-year old cop would suddenly move to a new employer. Of course because of the obnoxious Police Officer’s Bill of Rights, the taxpayers and citizens are not permitted to know anything about Sonny’s departure from Tustin. But now we can start to make some educated guesses.

And just for fun, you may remember Mr. Schwartz as the beneficiary of the bungled case our District Attorney tried against the one-eyed Fullerton cop, Jay Cicinelli, who smashed in Kelly Thomas’s face with a the butt end of a Taser – right before the homeless man was bon voyaged by the FPD into a lethal coma.

April 1, 2017April 1, 2017Bad Cops

Wild Ride Joe Felz Goes to Court

by Joe Sipowicz18 Comments

Our former City Manager, Joe Burt Felz, the guy who couldn’t keep his minivan on Glenwood Avenue in the early morning hours of November 9th, is scheduled to go to court for arraignment on April 3rd. That’s Monday.

You may remember the Wild Ride incident, in which motorist Felz, after a night of election partying, jumped a curb, ran over a tree, and tried to drive away. After a few months of procrastination, DA finally charged Felz with a couple of misdemeanors. The obvious problem to anyone paying attention is that there is no physical evidence of inebriation, leaving charges that could be easily batted away by the dimmest of defense attorneys.

Your Honor, can I borrow that wooden hammer thingy?

So when asked to enter a plea, what will Felz’s high powered attorney do? Guilty is problematic, personally, for Felz. and his ever-dimming reputation. Not Guilty could mean the embarrassment of a trial at some point, no matter how implausible that event seems – a trial in which video evidence is bound to surface; but it would have the salubrious effect of delaying PRA requests under the bogus argument that that legal proceedings are underway. Then there is the nolo contendere plea, which seems to offer the benefit of making the thing go away, possibly with some sort of fine and suspended sentence without having to utter the word guilty.

If the hearing is held as scheduled we will be alerting the Friends as to the outcome.

March 25, 2017March 25, 2017A Step in the Right Direction

Behind the Bullshit Goes Bye-Bye

by Joe Sipowicz16 Comments

Of all the money that former City Manager Wild Ride Joe Felz wasted during his shaky tenure, nothing was quite as egregious as the annual fifty grand Stumblejoe blew on Behind the Badge, a silly, pointless PR outlet that passed along empty feel-good tales involving Fullerton cops. No one knows if anyone even bothered reading this pabulum. The idea of us taxpayers actually forking over this dough in order to be administered unhealthy doses of saccharine PR back at us was bad enough. The fact that this policy decision was made, maintained and mismanaged by a bureaucrat made it worse.

Fortunately, last Tuesday, the City pulled the plug. City staff teed up the item as a cut – unless three councilmembers voted to save it. They didn’t. Here’s the video.

Of course cop supported candidates Bud Chaffee and Jesus Silva thought the whole idea was just peachy. Predictably, Jennifer Fitzgerald seemed to be going along. Bruce Whitaker and Greg Sebourn opposed wasting any more on this crap. Sebourn correctly pointed out that the cop union, having plenty of money to stick its snout in Fullerton politics, can easily afford to promote the good deeds of its membership.

Whatever changed Jennifer Fitzgerald’s mind to drop support for this ridiculous concept that has cost us $200,000 in the past four years remains a mystery, but she suddenly did a 180. Hopefully FFFF had something to do with the sudden shift to fiscal responsibility.

In the end the self-serving BS rhetoric of Chaffee and the feeble gibberish of Silva amounted to nothing and the council unanimously went along with the proposed package of cuts that included Behind the Badge.

Rest assured, Friends, FFFF will be following up with a Public Records Act request to get a copy of the termination notice.

March 16, 2017March 17, 2017A Step in the Right Direction

Behind the Badge on the Chopping Block?

by Mr. Peabody16 Comments

We are notoriously bad at getting our story out…

Next Tuesday’s Council meeting brings us another Budget Show, one more in a line of footling meetings strung out like faux pearls on a cheap necklace. This one is particularly entertaining since it acknowledges a big structural deficit that the suggested cost savings will do almost nothing to correct: “modest” revenue increases are broadly suggested, but apart from some fee increases and one-time sale of “surplus” property nothing meaningful is proposed. Obviously the recommendation for a utility tax or a sales tax increase will be sprung like a rabbit out of the magician’s hat at the last moment.

One entertaining bit of the agenda memo is the inclusion of a small table identifying some of City Manager Allan Roeder’s “loose sofa change,” giving the impression that maybe, just maybe, Mr. Roeder regrets his previous offhand dismissal of a $50,000 per year contract that accomplishes nothing as not worthy of councilmanic attention. Of course I am referring to the ridiculously conceived and suspiciously ill-managed “Behind the Badge” agreement that was improperly contracted by Wild Ride Joe Felz in the first place.

Well, good for Roeder, even though desperate times call for desperate measures And it takes a lot of desperation for a City bureaucrat to even tacitly acknowledge the expendability of a contract. The irony here is thick. It is the exploding pension cost of the Fullerton police Department that is breaking our bank. Even as we pay for the cops to peddle their dopey PR right back at us.

March 15, 2017March 17, 2017Bad Cops

Uh, Oh. Sonny Siliceo Steppin’ On Own Weenie. Again.

by Joe Sipowicz32 Comments

Another black eye for Danny Hughes’ “reformed” police department. It looks like Miguel “Sonny” Siliceo is being tuned up by the DA for submitting a false police report, a report that was subsequently used by the DA to prosecute some downtown bar-hopping schmo.

The douchebaggery spanned the generations…

You may remember Sonny from 2011. He’s the guy that framed Emmanuel Martinez for a crime he didn’t commit, a dereliction that was cavalierly blown off by then FPD spokesphincter Andrew Goodrich, but that now looks very much like a possible pattern of behavior for Mr. Siliceo. Sonny also briefly popped up in 2012 as a facebook friend of Jan Flory attacking people who might have suspicions about the integrity of the department that employed and deployed him.

Now for some more recent history – from 2015.

Unlike 2011, Siliceo’s assertions were apparently belied by data from cop video recorders and the case against Mr. Schmo was dropped – a situation so remarkable for our cops-über-alles DA that the lies of Siliceo must have been stupendously blatant. The complaint is a felony.

Sonny seems to be on leave now so it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. And it makes us wonder how many of the other arrests that Siliceo participated in were on the level.

Honored by MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving) for their efforts in getting drunk drivers off the road are Fullerton PD Officers Cary Tong, left, Timothy Gibert, Jonathan Munoz, Corporal Ryan Warner and Officer Miguel Siliceo.
Gag-reflexively expensive photo bought by taxpayers taken by Steven Georges/Behind the Badge OC
*** Officer Siliceo’s name on the plaque is misspelled as Sihiceo. ***

March 13, 2017March 13, 2017Bad Cops

Dry and Reckless

by Disillusioned Ex-Hippy16 Comments

The new, special FPD medal for number of “dry reckless” arrests.

There is a term for a plea agreement for those drivers who may or may not have been legally impaired when they were pulled over by the cops. It’s charmingly called “dry reckless” and means that the police and the DA aren’t sure they can pin a DUI rap on the driver, and the driver would rather take a big insurance premium hit than take his chances in court.

Cheers. I knew they’d figure it out for me…

And that is exactly what is going to happen with Joe Felz, he of the November 9th, 2016 Wild Ride. The DA can’t win a DUI case against Felz because our sterling police department refused to collect any evidence. And Felz will be more than satisfied with making the stigma of “drunk diver” go away, and no mandatory license suspension. Once the DUI part vanishes, the cops will only be on the hook to explain why they didn’t at least give Wild Ride Joe a traffic ticket for his careening out of control (while driving uphill) on Glenwood Avenue. And that’s nothing for a force that has a history of making up stuff on the witness stand.

Video evidence may or may not ultimately be produced, depending on the daily whim of the DA, but it won’t matter since all the relevant charges will have been dismissed, with all the legal niceties observed.