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’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.
UPDATE: Please note Coffman’s admission: “This year, my first citation”. So he obviously took on this assignment to harass citizens out of the sheer joy of it. And there you have it. Your tax dollars at work.
The other day we shared a video here of the Fullerton Police Department’s PR disastrous anti-honking ticket strategy. Of course it was justifiably greeted with a hail of scorn and outrage and was ridiculed across Southern California as blatant harassment of peaceful protesters. Egad, another FPD humiliation. Another day another embarrassment!
Oh, well, I guess when you don’t have a sense of shame it’s impossible to be shamed.
What went unmentioned in the video was the identity of the well-fed cop who handed out the ticket to the protester who had the temerity to honk for justice for Kelly Thomas. Well, I know who this churlish individual is.
No surprise! That’s Fullerton Police Officer Association President, Barry Coffman – the head union goon who got The Three Blind Mice McKinley, Bankhead, and Jones elected in the first place, and then watched in satisfaction as these three clowns handed over Fullerton to his union comrades.
Barry says he is smirking because he gets so much job satisfaction. But Barry won’t be smirking for long. Whatever the DA does there will be Federal and civil lawsuits coming FPD’s way, and likely punitive damages against the McKinley Six. And that’s not going to be hushed up as usual. And he’s got an anti-recall campaign to finance with three elderly orangutans who have finally been exposed as utterly incompetent.
Okay, there seems to be confusion about the term “repuglican” as often used here on FFFF. The term does not refer to a political party, but rather a personality type within the GOP. The Dems have their own version, no doubt, but since we are a red county we are stuck with the ‘pugs. Please read the following post from October 2009.
Repuglicanism has always been a target of our blog because it seeks to empower, and enrich the grifters who put imbeciles like Bankhead, Jones and McKinley in charge of doling out government welfare to the high rollers. It also seeks to defend the all-important status quo above all else.
– Joe Sipowicz
This morning we received the following e-mail from a Friend:
Dear FFFF, some of your posters keep using the term “Repuglican.” I am not sure if this is simply a typo or if you mean to use this unusual term. Can you please clarify? Thanks.
Sure. Be happy to. This locution is no accident. It is a fusion of the words Republican and repugnant, from which you may draw the obvious conclusions.
We apply the term to describe local Republicans of the same ilk, although the issue of “neo-conservativism” is largely irrelevant here. These individuals are people who pursue the politics of partisan affiliation for its own sake, but also for what they can get out of it. The main thing, the only thing, really, is to stand for the Party (as a convenient vehicle for self-promotion, of course!), and of course to oppose the Other Party. Issues themselves mean almost nothing except as way to promote themselves in the wider context of promoting the Party. Inner conviction means little; philosophical beliefs mean little – except for getting and hanging on to the strings of political power in order to pull and persuade them in your direction.
Repuglicans love big business interests because those are the guys with the money; the high-rollers who will enable your “conference” in Maui.
A red bastion in a blue state, OC is chock-full of Repuglicans – who use the local municipal and County governments for their own advancement and enrichment. The Legislature is hopelessly Democrat, but this does not mean that the doors to fun and profit are completely closed to Repuglicans. Especially if they hang around long enough.
Fullerton City Councilman and former Police Chief, Pat McPension ain’t sayin’ much these days, at least nothing that isn’t getting him in even deeper in the City’s cover-up of the Kelly Thomas homicide at the hands for six Fullerton cops on the sultry night of July 5th.
But take a quick trip to Fullerton Stories and listen to then candidate Pat McPension in the fall of 2010.
Enjoy Pat’s list of repuglican endorsements, including DA Tony Rakauckas (!) and also the rear guard of decrepit liberalism in Fullerton, Molly McClanahan and Jan Flory.
Also enjoy Pat’s observation that it’s a good thing when nobody shows up to public meetings! Check. It’s a lot easier to cover-up what you’re doing when nobody is around (except “journalists” who regurgitate City Hall press releases and toss up softball questions). And of course nobody will be there to call you out on the serial misdeeds of your police department. The one you were in charge of for 17 long years. Remember, Pat? Yes, when you hired thieves, thugs, pill-poppers, sexual predators, kidnappers, perjurers, one-eyed LAPD rejects, killers of unarmed homeless people (and who knows who else) to patrol the mean streets of Fullerton.
Suffer through McPension’s bogus concern about out-of-control public employee pensions, and reflect upon the sad fact that in eight months on the City Council he hasn’t uttered so much as a tiny squeak on the subject.
In 2010 Pat promised to “hit the ground running.” Boy, that sure turned out to be a big elephant splat on the pavement in 2011.
