Category: Bruce Whitaker

Bruce Whitaker is signatory of the Great Fullerton Recall of 1994. He was elected to the Fullerton City Council in 2010.

Posted onBehind Closed Doors

Speaking of Apologies…

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Frown now, pay later...

Frequent commenter, blessusall stopped by yesterday to share a thought about the formal “apology” on today’s City Council Agenda. As you all know the apology was from the City to the Nordell family because last year a bunch of heavily armed FPD cops broke into their house by mistake in some sort of botched drug raid.

blessusall opined about the irony of this insincere apology (got only by dodged persistence by the Nordells) vis-a-vis all the other FPD misbehaving’ going on lately and suggested the City might:

Apologize for the lawless behavior of:

McKinley
Sellers
Ramos
Wolfe
Cicinelli
Hampton
Craig
Blatney
Goodrich
Rincon
Major
Siliceo
Tong
Cross
Wren
Nowling
Mejia

And who else?

Who else, indeed. These pages are strewn with the miscreance, mayhem, and murder perpetrated by Pat McKinley’s hirees and trainees. At this point even the most die-hard cop apologist must be wondering about the stuff that hasn’t even emerged yet, and how much all this crap is going to cost the taxpayers of Fullerton.

Apology? Hell, yes! And why not demand that apology tonight!

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Posted onBruce Whitaker

A Double Dose of FPD Disgrace: Sex Assault Settlement and A Killer Goes Free

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A couple nights ago KTLA served up a two-course menu with back to back stories on FPD disgraces. First they dove into Officer Albert Rincon’s sex assault case, where David Begnaud discovered that the city was planning to settle the Federal rights case with two of the seven women who say Rincon sexually assaulted them during wrongful arrests; followed by the report that somehow accused FPD murderer Manny Ramos was out on bail. Yay! More  good news for the people of Fullerton.

You would think the folks over in City Hall would be getting just a little bit tired of all the horrific news coverage they’ve been getting, and start to clean up the mess they’ve made.

However, if you thought that you would be wrong. That is because nobody is in charge in City Hall. The monkeys have been permitted to run the zoo.

 

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

Disband the FPD?

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We're from FPD and we're here to help.

In the wake of a rolling tsunami of scandals, cover-ups, and abuse of its own citizens I have been hearing increased calls to disband the department altogether and bring in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Apparently the issue is not just FPD-fatigue and the brutal costs their misbehavin’ is going to cost the taxpayers; nor even police misconduct in general – since the OCSD has had its own share of bad behavior in recent years.

Anything you can do I can do better...

No, the prime motivation will be the comparatively low cost per capita that the OCSD charges its contract city partners for varying levels of service. Some have said that the City could easily save the General Fund $10-15 million a year, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Former Fullerton councilmember and current County Supervisor Shawn Nelson would be in a perfect position to help broker this deal

So could we be seeing the streets of Fullerton patrolled by guys in green? Perhaps. Why not? The current police force has disgraced itself so badly in the past few moths that from a public relations standpoint there would never be a better time.

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

The Double Standard

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A public service announcement...

We all know there’s laws for us and there’s laws for cops. The sort of stuff Fullerton Police Department members have been busted doing lately, or accused of in court proceedings would land you or me in jail. For a long time. It’s hilarious to listen to the FPD apologists bemoan the “lynch-type mob” of protesters that want answers before the official cover-up, er, investigation is over, thus denying our fine officers “due process.”

The latest example of the double standard that exists is the revelation that the Kelly Thomas killers were permitted to view (and review, and review again, one surmises) the taxpayer-owned video that shows the killing. This is just fine and dandy according to interim Chief Kevin Hamilton because it helps our boys in blue refresh their memory as they cook up and orchestrate plausible accounts of what they did. But it is not okay for for the public to see the video because it might color the recollections of eye-witnesses!

The same crapola is going on with the request to hire one Michael Gennaco to come into Fullerton and have a look around. Forget the fact that this is going to end up costing the taxpayers the better part of $100K. The real issue is why the City is embarking in this direction when the so-called investigations by the FPD, the DA, and the FBI are ongoing!

We are not permitted to seek answers while these alleged investigations are ongoing, and yet the Three Blind Mice (hopefully Whitaker and Quirk-Silva are smart enough to vote no) are willing to instigate yet another “investigation” at the same time.

It seems very clear to me that the Gennaco hiring, and the attempt to make it appear as both an emergency and some sort of reform action is nothing but a PR gimmick to make the City look like it is finally doing something proactive in the wake of the Kelly Thomas homicide. Of course it’s nothing but a cheap trick to try to stem the tide of public relations disasters that have befallen Fullerton since the image of Kelly’s battered face and crushed neck went globally viral.

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Posted onBruce Whitaker

Playing ‘Hide the Tape’ is Not So Fun Anymore

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The folks over at PBS SoCal were kind enough to let us post this “Inside OC” special on the Kelly Thomas story in its entirety.  It contains interviews with Ron Thomas, Bruce Whitaker, Chris Thompson and a couple of milquetoast experts on homelessness and mental illness.

Most notable, however, is the Q&A with District Attorney Tony Rackauckaus. His persistent insistence that witnesses (and the rest of the public) not be able to view any videos before they testify is reduced to a mere “preference,” but only after he is confronted with the likelihood that police officers watched the recording as they coordinated their own reports on the incident.

The case for keeping that tape away from the public seems to diminish every time one of these goofs steps in front of a camera.

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

There Is An Emergency in Fullerton!

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Things never looked better for Fullerton.

Yep, there sure is.

The City Manager has called an emergency meeting of the City Council this morning at 9:00, a mighty odd time to hold a public hearing. The ostensible purpose of this emergency is to hire an outsider to evaluate the condition our FPD condition is in.

It’s pretty obvious that this decision could have waited until the next scheduled meeting. So what’s the emergency? Maybe City Manager Joe Felz and the Gang of Three are trying to look like they are finally, really and truly taking things seriously. And maybe they prefer dealing with Kelly Thomas related humiliations at nine o’clock in the morning to avoid hundreds of angry commenters.

Fail to the Chief...

The really pathetic aspect of the abject failure of leadership in Fullerton and this desperate and transparent effort to defuse a recall is that the real emergency existed on July 5, 2011 and was completely unknown to our oblivious City Council, including the supposed law enforce experts Pat McKinley and Don Bankhead. Or maybe they knew and just didn’t care. After all, McKinley was police chief from 1993-2009 and has admitted he hired all the cops who have made Fullerton famous lately; and Bankhead has been on the city council since 1888. Oops. I mean 1988.

Has it really been that long?

F. Dick Jones has been on the council for 15 years; will he not take responsibility for the state of affairs he created?

Hail no!

What about the ever-compassionate Sharon Quirk? She has been on the council for seven long years. How many police-related monetary settlements has she approved?

Knitting socks as fast as she can...

Well, there you have it. An emergency. But its an emergency created by world-wide attention to the Fullerton Police Department’s culture of corruption, not by the corruption itself.

Well, go ahead and have your emergency meeting, folks. You can run but you can’t hide.

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Chief Sellers Takes a Powder?

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I just heard from a reliable source that Fullerton Police Chief Mike Sellers has put in for a minimum 30 day medical leave for some undisclosed malady.

Yikes! Is this going to be a stress-related gig? Can it be preliminary to a pension tax-grab? Is it driven by the dismal McPension interview on CNN?

I don’t know, but when I do I’ll let the Friends know all about it.

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Posted onBruce Whitaker

Whitaker Says “Release the Video!”

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FullertonStories.com just published this letter from councilmember Bruce Whitaker, in which he demands that the video and audio recordings of the July 5th police beating of Kelly Thomas be released to the public.

Read the letter

Don’t forget to check out the printed responses of the other councilmembers, including McKinley who says “I disagree with that last sentence about releasing the video.  It isn’t a wise thing to do and is for the authorities to do.”

What does that mean?

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

Would Fullerton be a Ghost Town without Redevelopment?

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Here’s a revealing exchange between Fullerton City Councilman Bruce Whitaker and his two dinosauric RINO colleagues Don Bankhead and Dick Jones. The subject is Redevelopment.

Whitaker points out that Redevelopment property tax diversions from school districts are back-filled by the State and that absent Redevelopment diversions back, taxes could go up. He also takes exception to Bankhead’s assertion that without Redevelopment Fullerton (or downtown, take tour pick) would be a ghost town. Bankhead loves big government economic central planning; Whitaker has faith in the private sector.

Naturally the ever-increasingly disheveled Doc HeeHaw (say that haircut sure looks like blight to me) stimulates himself by babbling about about stim-u-lus and even mentions Prez Obama and how Fullerton’s government stimulus is real stimulus. Thanks, Comrade Heehaw.

Well, there you have it Friends. A clearer distinction between calm, conservative opinion and rambling, emotional, Jurassic nonsense could not be drawn.

Kudos to Whitaker. And shame on all the Fullerton voters and repuglican string pullers for making sure nincompoops like Jones and Bankhead re-elected.

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