The “Investigation.” Yeah, Right.

As has been pointed out previously on this blog, there are rules for us and then there are rules for the police. Stuff that they do would land us in jail with a hefty bail; they get paid administrative leave and walk the streets free men.

Those six guys over there won't talk to me. I've done all I can do...

Here’s another example of the distorted double standard: the so-called “investigation” of the Kelly Thomas death being concocted by our Do-nothing DA. We are told by the cop apologists to patiently await that magical moment when Mr. Rackauckas unveils the fruits of his labors.

I honestly can't remember...

But what might those labors have involved? We have been told that the investigation didn’t start until two days after the homicide. Two full days. Did the cops turn in their bloodied uniforms for analysis? Did they turn over their Tasers for forensic examination of finger prints and blood samples? Have they produced recording devices? Was the homicide scene secured for examination? Anybody want to take odds that none of this has occurred?

Ahm a doctah! Them injuries was slight...

I’m pretty sure if you or I bashed somebody’s head in all that evidence would have been secured, post haste, and we’d be cooling our heels in Theo Lacy, slam-bang, and no bail for you, buddy.

Are we supposed to scared?

But this is our new police state, brought to us courtesy of geriatric assclowns (thanks for the use, Joe S.) Jones, Bankhead and McKinley. It wasn’t enough for them to put the City’s finances at risk through extravagant pension giveaways. Oh no! They oversaw a veritable culture of corruption in the Fullerton Police Department, the depth of which the citizens and taxpayers are only now beginning to see.

Oh, and yeah. In this culture some of these miscreants believed they could get away with murder.

 

Voices of Fullerton Establishment Speak

Unchained Melody…

And what they are saying is pretty pathetic.

Yahoo News led off today with the doings in little Fullerton, California, here, related to the stories of police brutality against Veth Mam and of course, Kelly Thomas. Here’s somebody called Mike Ritto, President of the Downtown Business Association, moaning about the hurt put on local retailers:

“They’re telling people, ‘Don’t go to Fullerton.’ Nobody here did anything wrong. Why should the retailers suffer?” said Ritto, speaking of the protesters who have packed public forums and marched outside the police station every Saturday for a month.

Ahem. Nobody here did anything wrong? Why should the retailers suffer? Uh, dunno, Mike. Maybe it’s the bad karma associated with devil’s deal downtown Fullerton has made with an out of control police force.

I can mindread, and yes they thought they had the right man!

Naturally we hear from FPD spokeszit Andrew Goodrich, who, inexplicably, remains spokeszit despite a string of lies and half-truths that would have made a NAZI Ministry of Propaganda functionary’s heart sing:

Goodrich, the police spokesman, said allegations that the officers in the Mam case perjured themselves were false because they believed when they testified that they had arrested the right person.

Oh, really? False charges of perjury? Really, Andy? You really want to go there? Of course the charges are perfectly true; either that or your union pals are so f-ing incompetent that they belong in institutionalized care somewhere. Which is it?

See that guy over there? He didn't do it.

And here is Deputy DA Rebecca Reed, casually explaining that the whole Mam story told by the cops was pluasible:

“I thought it was reasonable that Veth Mam had been involved in this altercation before filming,” she said. “The video did not show the whole story.”

Say what? No, Becky, the laws of time and space were not suddenly suspended by the evil Mam. What she meant to say was: “we are told to go along with the cops story, no matter how ludicrous it might be; we have no compunction about charging and prosecuting an innocent man; we don’t give a damn about justice; my only concern is that this loss is going to hurt my record.”

The Phone Call. Was it Made? If So, By Whom And Why?

Oh, you haven't seen the last of me...

From the very beginning of the Kelly Thomas beating death at the hands, Tasers, fist and feet of the Fullerton Police Department, that department’s spokeshole, Sergeant Andrew Goodrich told the public that the fateful incident was intiated with a phone call: a phone call to the dispatcher stating that somebody was breaking into cars in the vicinity of the Transportation Center.

From the get go, the story sounded absurd to people who knew Kelly Thomas and who averred that Thomas wasn’t violent or a thief. And of course to a public that has come to understand that Sergeant Goodrich seems incapable of telling the smallest bit of truth, the idea that there was a call at all became a matter of doubt.

Tellingly, the police have issued no information about this mysterious phone call and who made it, and so far they have given no indication that they have the slightest iota of evidence that anybody was breaking into cars at all.

This is important, because it lends credence to the idea that the phone call, if there was one, was made in collaboration with the police themselves. This could implicate both caller and cops in a conspiracy. A conspiracy to do what? Since the result of the incident was the bludgeoning death of a harmless man, that question is almost to horrible to contemplate. But at the very least the facts lead to the reasonable deduction that the conspiracy, if it existed, was meant to deprive Kelly Thomas of his civil rights – a violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment right, to be specific.

Of course making a false report to the police is some sort of crime (although Goodrich has yet to make an honest report to the public, which seems to be A-OK to his higher ups and the City Council). So somebody should be in big trouble for that alone.

Was there a call? If so, who made the call and why? I don’t know, but I admonish the Do-nothing DA and the Federal investigators to find out. You can bet Ron Kelly’s attorney Garo Mardirossian and his investigators will. Soon.

Time to come clean.

Rusty’s Flatulence

The other day FFFF noted the eerie silence of the offspring of former Fullerton activist Ralph Kennedy when it came to the bludgeoning murder of the homeless man, Kelly Thomas at the hands of the Fullerton Police Department. We cynically noted that Rusty Kennedy’s OC Human Relations Commission relies upon the goodwill of police departments to lobby County government to continue funding this useless organization. Sharon Kennedy, who continues to publish the moribund and yellowing Fullerton Observer seems to have lost her moral compass, too.

The Kennedy siblings are not important themselves except that they are representative of Old Liberalism in Fullerton, and its total disregard for the killing of a completely helpless human being by the cops.

Here is Rusty expending three minutes of verbal gas saying absolutely nothing and trying as hard as he can to avoid speaking the truth: that the Fullerton Police deliberately killed a harmless, mentally ill man. Enjoy the end where Mr. Kennedy offers the services of his impotent operation, as if the cops who committed this crime against Kelly Thomas simply needed some sensitivity training courtesy of the Human Relations Commission.

Rusty, like his Collaboratin’ pals, obviously have been bought and paid for. But I promise one thing. When Kennedy comes hat in hand to the Board of Supervisors next spring I will be there to help pull the financial plug on this worthless hypocrite.

The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight? Or Worse?

Honesty continues to be an issue...

The crapola gets even deeper! Check out these sources:

OC Register: Fullerton PD: ‘We may have arrested the wrong guy’

KTLA: Video Ignites Another Controversy for Fullerton Police

LA Times: Fullerton police review video, acknowledge arresting wrong man

FPD spokeshole Andrew Goodrich is now peddling bull so fast it has crept up over his hip waders and into his britches.

His latest rasher of shit is the story that cop Kenton Hampton roughed up and mistakenly arrested the wrong guy last October. He and his buddies cooked up a story in their reports and had the DA prosecute Veth Mam for obstruction of justice. Of course the jury saw the same video we posted here and acquitted Mam.

Goodrich’s latest fib is that the cop accidentally nabbed the wrong guy – someone who didn’t jump on a cop’s back. But anybody viewing the video knows that’s just bull. Check it out. You can see Hampton roll up and confront the crowd. Hampton clearly had no knowledge of anything that happened previous to his arrival. He set his eyes on a guy he saw video recording the altercation and hit him in the face, then starts throwing him around like a rag doll.

Goodrich wants us to believe that in the chaos of the moment the brave boys in blue picked on the wrong guy. Well that’s just a bald-face lie.

Now Mam has a lawyer. The same lawyer as the dad of FPD fatal beating victim Kelly Thomas. FPD is looking at assault and false arrest; and Fullerton’s self-insurance fund looks to get even smaller.

For some reason the DA hasn’t prosecuted the FPD liars including an officer named Frank Nguyen, for perjury, but that charge may be coming soon, although the incompetence of DA spokesholetress Susan Schroeder does not inspire confidence. Let’s hope somebody impresses upon our do-nothing DA the importance of being honest on the witness stand. After all, isn’t he telling us we can’t see the Thomas murder video because it might taint witnesses. Hah!

P.S. The DA supposedly had the video in their possession a month before the June/July trial and decided to try this dog of a case, anyway. I don’t know who made this expensive decision, but here’s the roll call of DA personnel who worked on the case at one time or another:

Susan Lee

Rebecca Reed

Stephen Cornwell

Andrew Bugman

Elizabeth Zuber

Who Says Six Cops Can’t Beat A Man To Death?

Mess with me and I'll call in my posse...

Our knucklehead city councilman and former police chief Pat McKinley, for one. He wants us to believe that it was physically impossible for six cops to simultaneously beat Kelly Thomas to death on that hot July 5, 2011 night at the Fullerton Transportation Center. Of course he has reason to want us to believe that since he is the one who hired the six thugs in question, one of whom failed an LAPD physical.

Is that what happened? I have no idea since McKinley, Goodrich & Co. refuse to release the city’s video for fear of “tainting” eyewitness testimony. But check out this sickening video of a guy named Craig Prescott and his seven friendly jailers going to town on him in an 8×8 cell:

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick and tired of the jackasses we have in charge of this city. They have become habitual and casual liars and still think they can get away with it.

The Double Standard

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.

The Dead Kennedys

We may not always have agreed with the liberal activism of Fullerton’s Ralph Kennedy, but there’s no doubt that the engineer-turned-civil-rights-activist was the real deal – a committed believer in social justice who was willing to take unpopular stands on behalf of the causes for which he advocated.

In its obituary of him in 1998, the Los Angeles Times wrote: “He was one of those rare people who saw things as they should be. He wasn’t willing to sit in his comfort while others in the world were suffering. He always felt like he needed to dig in and do something to bring about justice, to take action, to risk his own comfort in order to make things better.”

But Kennedy’s two children – Sharon Kennedy, who is publisher of the Fullerton Observer, which Ralph and his wife, Natalie, founded in the 1970s; and Rusty Kennedy, head of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, which claims to advocate for concepts similar to those advocated by the elder Kennedys – are frauds. Their actions (or inaction, really) following the brutal slaying of Kelly Thomas by Fullerton police thugs shows how they have become lapdogs for the political establishment, which is the very opposite of the behavior displayed by their Dad. Unfortunately, modern liberals usually defend government power and abuse — they don’t stand up for the poor and downtrodden any more.

The Observer has run various news stories about the Thomas killing at the hands of cops, but the stories read like articles hatched in the Fullerton PD’s press department. There is no sense of outrage and an unconscionable reliance on official explanations and official sources. (It’s as if Ralph Kennedy, known as a crusader against housing discrimination, took at face value the official government explanations of why black folks were treated as second-class citizens in the old days. “Don’t worry, folks, Gov. George Wallace and his able team of government officials will get to the bottom of it!”) The Observer, promoting the lame efforts of Rusty and his commission, runs a story that declares: “The Orange County Human Relations Commission is responding to community requests for help in the tragic beating death of Kelly Thomas. On behalf of the Commission, Rusty Kennedy endorsed the idea of an outside, independent investigation of police practices and procedures in the case and more broadly across the department. He gave City Manager Joe Felz an evaluation of Michael Gennaco for the LA County Office of Independent Review. The Commission has worked with Gennaco in hate crime cases and most recently in setting up an OIR in Orange County, which is now staffed by Stephen Connelly, one of Gennaco’s proteges.”

The Observer and Kennedy should be denouncing this brutal attack as a hate crime and staging sit-ins and other demonstrations. Instead, they are joining the official whitewash and telling us to trust these not-so-outside investigations. Connelly has not produced a single serious investigation since he became the head of the supposedly independent commission that operates basically at the behest of the Sheriff. You might as well ask Dick Jones to produce an outside investigation.

Fortunately, this blog is filling in the role that lapdog players such as the Fullerton Observer play. Fortunately, Orange County residents are starting to learn that the Human Relations Commission is a way for limousine liberals to live large on other people’s money while pretending to stand up for the principles that true liberals such as Ralph Kennedy actually stood up for.

Views on The City Manager

The deep end of the pool was awful scary...

Since he was promoted on an interim basis last year I have believed that former museum director Joe Felz was in way over his head. His role in handling the Kelly Thomas homicide has been fuzzy, at best. He seems to have been prepared to let his underling, Chief Sellers make the decisions (or choose not to make any decisions at all) and let police union boss Andrew Goodrich be the official voice of Fullerton – passing half-truths, irrelevancies, or outright lies.

My guess is that Felz abdicated the authority given him by the City Council and handed it over to Pat McKinley.

The only thing I’ve heard from Felz was a lame-ass attempt to play word games by saying no settlement offer was made to Ron Thomas, father of the victim. Of course that was such a sniveling  lie that it alone should have earned Felz a half-hour stay in Jay Cicinelli’s basement Taser room.

Here’s an observation made by one of our commenters “Do you know”:

One person the citizen’s of Fullerton are letting fall under the radar is City Manager Joe Felz. The mayor and city council of Fullerton are largely part-time figure heads. The real power in the day to day operations of any small city is in the hands of its city manager. The city manager is also the boss of the chief of police. The chief of police does not even have the power to terminate an employee. The chief can suspend, or place officer’s on administrative leave, but they can only recommend termination. The city manager is the only one with the power to permanently remove an officer from their employment.

Chief Sellers initial inaction in this case is every bit the fault of Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz, as there is no way he did not know what is going on. Chief’s of police throughout California are on the phone with their city manager’s several times a day over one issue or another. City manager’s get their daily marching orders from regional heads of the California League of Cities. Since Chief Sellers did not take action in the early stages of this case, City Manager Joe Felz is every bit as culpable as Chief Sellers. Possibly more.

I’m inclined to agree. We are always told what a nice guy Joe Felz is. Maybe so. But it looks like he’s turned over the keys of the City of Fullerton to a rogue police department.