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Category: Don Bankhead
Mayor Pro-Tem Don Bankhead is a councilmember in the City of Fullerton. In his spare time he enjoys playing with toy trains and pretending to be a fiscal conservative.
Now pay attention to the legend of Don Bankhead in Fullerton…
Politicians should always be careful about what they say. The public has a nasty habit of remembering their pronouncements.
Back in 1990 during his failed bid for County Sheriff (remember, right before his “total disability” pension claim), Don Bankhead needed a hook to get folks interested in his bad comb-over, lackluster self. So he discovered that he was really a reformer who was interested in establishing an “ethics unit” at the OCSD, you know to clean up the mess over there. Read all about it in an LA Times article, here. Enjoy the rich irony as Bankhead pontificates:
“We’ll put the shine back on the badge and we’ll all have a good clean Sheriff’s Department,” Bankhead said. “If no one’s rights are violated, we won’t get sued.”
Now fast forward to Tuesday night’s Fullerton City Council Closed Session Agenda that is littered with lawsuits against Fullerton and its lawless police department. If ever there was a department in need of an ethics unit it would be the FPD – over which Bankhead has refused to provide civilian oversight since 1988.
In the past few months the media has learned of FPD personnel charged, convicted, or alleged to have participated in grand theft, credit card fraud, kidnapping and sexual battery, assault, false arrest, and perjury, all culminating in the brutal bludgeoning death of a mentally-ill homeless man. And Mr. Ethics? Silent as a graveyard.
A word of advice, Mr. Bankhead. Time to get going establishing that ethics unit where it will do the most good. In your own department.
And by come home to roost I mean a veritable pile-up of embarrassing and expensive lawsuits we will all have to pay for.
Check out the slew of new legal threats against the city on this week’s agenda, ironically followed by salary and pension negotiations with the unions whose members caused these problems in the first place. I wonder if Bankhead, Jones and McKinley will make that connection. Highly doubtful.
And don’t forget that City Manager Joe Felz is going to take another swing at getting that raise. God Almighty, who is minding the store?
Correction: Felz raise didn’t make it on to the agenda for some reason.
Thus speaketh the frightened rabbits at the anti-recall website, a site so lame and amateurish that I will be regularly featuring its idiocy.
The operators of that site, Mssrs. Alexander, Ellis, Ackerman, and of course the Three Bind Dinosaurs are positively terrified of protesters wearing scary masks. Well, here’s another one, courtesy of our Friends at The OC Weekly.
Stop it kid, you're scaring poor old Bankhead, Jones and McKinley.
FYI, the Kelly Thomas Concert on Saturday was chock full of Fullerton families, including kids who were learning all sorts of positive lessons in humanity and citizenship.
The ironic thing is that the Three Blind Dinosaurs want you to forget the values they have established in Downtown Fullerton: drunken, brawling, lawless, fecal, condom-strewn, that’s DTF. Are these the “family values” being peddled by Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley? Guess so.
Well, old dudes, hope that fact doesn’t upset your lunch of Metamucil and oatmeal.
I keep hearing persistent rumors that the Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz has had discussions with high level County officials about the possibility of abolishing the Fullerton Police Department and replacing it with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
Apparently the hook is not just the recent revelations of FPD misconduct, perjury, cover-up, crimes high and low, a spokesman caught blatantly lying, and the attendant PR curse that the department has visited upon itself. There is an issue of huge cost savings. And I mean huge.
While the prospect of getting honest, competent and respectful police services from the Sheriff’s Department is probably only marginally more likely than with the FPD (and there’s no way in the world it could be worse), extrapolating from current costs in contracted cities, using the OCSD could save the taxpayers of Fullerton as much as $13,000,000, per year from the FPDs bloated budget of $37,000,000.
That’s a whopping 37%, and $13,000,000 could go to a lot of things Fullertonians hold near and dear.
In this era of government fiscal constraint brought about in large measure by irresponsible decisions by dimwits like Don Bankhead, Dick Jones and PatMcKinley, to hand out exorbitant pay and benefits to “public safety” employees, everything should be on the table.
Yes, it would appear so. CNN is reporting today yet another instance of wrongful arrest and brutality by our friends at the FPD. The case involves assault and phony DUI arrest for which there was no basis.
Of course the purported victim, Edward Miguel Quinonez, has a lawyer: Garo Mardirossian. Geez, Garo may as well open up a Fullerton office. Here is KCAL passing along the news:
UPDATE: FYI, KCAL WE INTERVIEWED THIS WITNESS AND POSTED IT ON AUGUST 8 – 5 WEEKS AGO! HERE’S THE LINK.
Yes it’s been a long, long time. When he first climbed the steps to his throne and surveyed his Fullerton domain the year was 1988. Ronald Reagan was president.
Don Bankhead has been on the Fullerton City Council for 23 years. With a few weeks off for bad behavior – an unnecessary Utility Tax and subsequent recall in 1994 – this monument to sub-mediocrity has been demonstrating his dubious mental faculties every other Tuesday night since dirt was young.
I will always fondly remember when Dick Ackerman referred to him as Don Blankhead. Now how many times did Don hear that as his fellow Fullerton cops chuckled at the dunderhead behind his back?
So now let’s take a moment or two to review Mr. Bankhead’s singularly inept career in Fullerton.
Back in 1988 Bankhead tried to get the job of Fullerton Chief of Police. He failed when the council chose somebody else. Ironically, Dick Ackerman who was on the Council then, was well aware of Blankhead’s utter incompetence. And so, out of spite, he ran for the city council: Lo and Behold he won! On the city council he believed that no one would would laugh at him anymore. And he believed people would laugh with him instead of at him. He was wrong.
Bankhead also suddenly revealed what he never told anybody when he interviewed for the Chief job, or even when he ran for County Sheriff in 1990: that he was a virtual cripple from a series of earlier alleged mishaps that, if true, would have made Inspector Clouseau look like an Olympic gymnast. His scam made the news, but the nice people in Fullerton were too polite to say anything. But we all knew.
In the past ten years he has smiled that dim, senile smile as he turned downtown Fullerton into a booze-soaked battle field that costs the taxpayers of Fullerton $1.5 million every single year, all to the benefit his cynical and parasitical “supporters.” He had the effrontery to claim that without his interventionist Redevelopment Fullerton itself would be a ghost town! He tried to lie his way out of that idiocy. It didn’t work.
or to put it another way:
A darling of the cop union he voted for the bank-breaking 3@50 pension formula that has created a massive and permanent unfunded liability for the taxpayers of Fullerton; he continuously voted for the illegal 10% utility tax on the water ratepayers of Fullerton, money that has gone to pay his own bloated pension.
Of course Bankhead was propped up every step of the way by his “public safety” union allies for whom he performed such acts of generosity with our money.
What Bankhead doesn’t want anyone to know is that in the course of his political career he has pulled down hundreds of thousands of dollars snoozing through footling meetings of various agencies and commissions about which he knows absolutely nothing – but for which he applied the same rubber stamp he has wielded so disastrously in Fullerton.
Although Bankhead is a Republican, and supposed to be some sort of conservative, the inescapable fact is that he is big-government in a big way. And if big-government could help him or his developer buddies score big, so much the better. After all who was really watching? FFFF, that’s who. Here we busted Bankhead for blowing $1200 staying at a four star Long Beach Hotel, on our dime – a mere 25 miles from his house in Fullerton!
This year, finally, the extent to which Bankhead has aided and abetted an incompetent and criminal police department has finally surfaced, and the extent of the damage this simpleton has caused Fullerton has become crystal clear.
Will Bankhead become the first man in California history to be recalled from the same office? Let’s work for it!
Don Bankhead, this is your life: a sad, belabored death march of cognitive meltdown, incompetence, lackeydom, and buffoonery. Fortunately your quarter century misrule is coming to a merciful conclusion. Fullerton is finally waking up and finally deciding that it wants real leaders – not clownish cartoons – on its city council.
Word has it that Mayor Pro Tem Don Bankhead was not so happy to see volunteers gathering signatures to recall him from office outside of Ralphs supermarket on Harbor Blvd. earlier this week.
Petition gatherers say that he and the Mrs. suggested that they shouldn’t be there and were then seen to be speaking to a store manager inside. A couple of days later the signature gatherers were told by both the manager of Ralphs and the manager of the shopping center that they were not welcome there, and had to leave. Volunteers collecting signatures in front of Albertsons on Raymond Ave. were told the same thing.
Fortunately Fullerton Recall Coordinator Chris Thompson knew that petitioners have the right to collect signatures on some private property as long as they are not causing a disturbance. The California Supreme Court upheld this right in something called Pruneyard vs. Robins, that basically holds that any place that is normally open to the public, like a mall or shopping center, is covered by free speech rights, even if it is private property.
Thompson called the city of Fullerton and had none other than City Manager Joe Felz and the city attorney confirm that the signature gatherers had a perfect right to collect signatures in front of both Ralph’s and Albertsons. Thompson then met with police officers at Ralphs, who agreed. One of them even gave the signature gatherers his card and told them to call him if they had this problem again.
Don Bankhead, who has no problem giving away millions of dollars in public land to developers is suddenly bothered by a couple of people collecting signatures in front of a busy supermarket. I guess he hasn’t learned much since the last time he was recalled from the Fullerton City Council 17 years ago.
An alert Friend reminded us today of a story that came to light last fall and that has eerie overtones of the subsequent Veth Mam case we have previously reported. The story is told in the OC Register, here.
Wouldn't hurt a fly...
The facts are simple. Even though an eye-witness ID’d another guy in a line-up, the Fullerton police arrested Emmanuel Martinez who unluckily just happened to be in the vicinity. Of course Fullerton “Officer” Miguel Siliceo told a hearing judge that he had indeed got the right guy and Martinez was locked up in the County jail for five long months awaiting the inevitable railroad job.
Martinez’s luck changed for the better when he got a public defender, Denise Crawford, who bulldogged the case. When audio evidence surfaced that proved Siliceo was telling tall tales, the DA, mirabile dictu, dropped the bogus charges against Martinez.
So Emmanuel can thank his lucky stars that he didn’t actually go on trial like Veth Mam, and then end up in state prison. And “Officer” Siliceo is lucky, too. Lucky he never had to perjure himself in front of a jury, and lucky he works for a police department where incompetence, and worse – felonious behavior are just par for the course.
How about the truth, if it's not too much trouble?
Of course the story wouldn’t be complete without the bland statement by FPD spokesassclown Andrew Goodrich that the cops work “diligently” to arrest the right people and generously let ’em go if exculpatory evidence surfaces. Gee, thanks, Andy. Of course no mention is made by Goodrich of FPD hiding exculpatory evidence in the first place; nor is perjury; and of course there is no apology to the victim of FPD malfeasance. Wouldn’t want to undermine public confidence in our Heroes, now would we?
Uh, oh! Some semi-literate chucklehead is not happy with FFFF! We received an e-mail from an under-educated police apologist who wishes that we would turn our attention from the Fullerton Police Department record of bogus traffic tickets, theft, drug-abuse, credit card fraud, kidnapping, kidnapping and sexual battery, kidnapping, abetting suicide in the city jail, and, of course, the Kelly Thomas homicide; and instead focus on “what the fullerton police does (sic) for you to keep you and your fellow fullerton citizens safe.”
Safe, huh? Safe from what? The greatest threat to our “fellow Fullerton citizens” these days seems to come from the FPD itself.
Anyway, enjoy the amusing version of “The Truth” as penned by some poor, high school drop-out:
Trying harder to think just isn't going to help!
Privacy: You may publish this, but protect my identity
Subject: The Truth.
Dear Whatever bastard is running this blog, Whoever you are you have no idea what the fullerton police does for you to keep you and your fellow fullerton citizens safe. You and your and other sons of bitches have warped the Kelly Thomas “murder” into a wormhole of un-needed conflicts and issues. And then when i thought that you guys could not steep lower than that you verbally attack and threaten the officers and thier families, what nerve do you have. How would you like it if I threatened the safety and well-being of you and/or your family.
Just Remeber…….How Would You Like It?
Oh, yes we will “Remeber” the next time we and our and other sons of bitches “steep” even lower.
