A quick trip to Fullerton Stories reveals a statement by Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz that claims the City never made any “settlement offer” to the family of killer cops victim Kelly Thomas, who was brutally bludgeoned to death by six members of Felz’s police department on July 5th.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
This is just about the shabbiest deception the City has tried yet; verbal hairsplitting to try to dodge the fact that your scumbag lawyer Bruce Praet presented “unofficial” proposals (oh, no not a “settlement,” that can only be authorized by the Council) to the family of the victim. Well, goddam, that’s a distinction without a difference! Felz, shame on you for running this turd up the flagpole, and shame on some stooge named Davis Barber at Fullerton Stories for accepting and propagating this ludicrous trash as pertinent to anything. Maybe now Felz thinks no one will we be inclined to ask who was responsible for authorizing Praet to contact the family in the first place. Was it you, Joe? Or did you even know about it?
Probably the worst part is the not-so-subtle insinuation that Ron Thomas, Kelly’s dad has been intentionally misleading the public.
Soon there will be nothing but a grotesque smile...
Up until now I was willing to give Felz the benefit of the doubt – that he was just some poor former museum director dufus in waaaaaay over his head. Now it would appear that he was either completely out of the loop (bad) or, complicit in a nasty plot to discredit the Thomas family (worse) and protect the assess of some crooked cops.
On national TV our illustrious mayor tells NBC what he thinks of his constituents.
Well, he can run his mouth but he can’t hide behind his cronies and speech writers. Now the entire country knows what kind of idiot we have for a mayor.
The official investigation by The Authorities continues...
In the past few weeks these pages have been littered with a startling list of charges of criminal behavior by members of the Fullerton Police Department, starting with larceny, and evolving through credit card fraud, assault, charges of sexual battery, and of course the gang-homicide of a mentally ill homeless man.
I believe the public is perfectly justified in assuming the worst and that the stuff that has come out recently is indicative of a systemic problem. After all nobody, especially the local “journalists,” were paying the least attention. The issue can’t be deflected by the childish “not all cops are bad” nonsense. The problem is that no cops should be bad – and if any are they should be weeded out quickly and the failure analyzed immediately. After all, these individuals literally hold the power of life and death over you and me. Just like they held it over Kelly Thomas.
And all this begs the simple question: who in the Hell is in charge at FPD? The obvious answer is nobody, if one discounts the unsettling possibility that the cops are in charge of themselves.
Okay, but who should be responsible for making sure the cops are on the up and up?
A carbuncle on the butt of Fullerton (image from Ed Carrasco & our Friends at the OC Weekly)
Well, the first answer, of course, is the the Chief of Police, Mike Sellers. True, he inherited a department, such as it was. But he’s been here a couple of years now. Early on he promised publication of his departments policy on Taser use; that was just a load of unadulterated bullshit. After the Thomas killing occurred, during the initial period when he obviously thought he could skate by on business as usual, he took off on vacation. Seller’s nonchalance backfired. It backfired badly. He failed to get the cops involved off the streets, let alone putting them on leave; tellingly this only happened when the media finally became interested in the Thomas death. And this alone justifies his dismissal.
Of course theoretically the FPD answers to the civilian authorities. Which brings us to the Silent City Council Trio: Mssrs. Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley.
You're not homeless are you?
Don Bankhead is a former cop, and as such should be the most savvy of the three when it comes to understanding the propensity of cop culture to veer out of control. Every time he runs for office he makes sure the electorate knows he is ex-cop. But Bankhead, apart from dubious mental faculties is also a tool of the police union that has supported their boy for over twenty-two years: twenty-two years and numerous pension spikes and giveaways to the union.
The HeeHaw jokes ain't funny no more...
F. Dick Jones? When Jones is not berating his constituents from the dais he is mangling the scripts written for him by City staff. He has never seen a uniform he didn’t like, and was once heard to say: “you don’t get anywhere in Fullerton badmouthing the Fullerton Police Department.” From a political standpoint truer words were never spoken. But Jones is fond of bragging about his service in military; and the military is all about rules and regs so Jones had better start explaining how the FPD came to be what it is today – during his 15 years in office.
McKinley is on the left.
And finally we come to councilman Pat McKinley, former Fullerton Chief of Police, a repuglican cipher dropped on Fullerton by the GOP establishment. McKinley’s got some serious explaining to do since it was under his seventeen-year watch that the Fullerton FPD seems to have descended into the morass in which we currently find it. He was the one who apparently hired a one-eyed cop who was rejected by the LAPD, a cop who seems to be intimately connected to the Thomas murder. He was the one who left his command structure behind. He was the one who, instead of overseeing his department, spent his days inventing a vest that could be sold to his department.
McKinley makes well over $200,000 a year in pensions. Pensions racked up during years supposedly in charge of the Fullerton Police Department.
When someone refers to the gang of thugs that murdered Kelly Thomas as “The McKinley Six” they are right on the mark.
Finally, it seems to have escaped the notice of these three council chimps that even as they plead to the public to wait for “the Authorities” to develop their cover-up, er, investigation, their slimy lawyer is offering Ron Thomas $900,000 to just go away. The irony is pretty profound. But something tells me irony is lost on these three.
For some folks sexual fondling in the backseat of a car may evoke happy memories of teenage hormonal overload and good clean fun. But when you’re handcuffed by a police officer on trumped up charges only to be sexually groped by that cop, things take on a much more sinister character.
Night time is the right time...
Like sexual battery and federal civil rights violations, just for starters.
Here are the stories of two women who claim that Fullerton cop Albert Rincon, aided and abetted by Officer Christopher Wren essentially kidnapped them and sexually assaulted them in 2008 while they were in custody – in the backseat of Rincon’s patrol car, to be precise. Rather than rehash the story, I’ll let you read the complaint filed in federal court. Checkout pages 5 through 12 of 35 for the sordid details.
Three long years later the case is winding its way through the court system toward a November 2011 trial. The case found its way to the federal courtroom of Andrew Guilford, who knows all about pervy cops – having presided over the Michael Carona corruption trial. Check out the Joint Conference Scheduling Report:
Note #1: the City of Fullerton offered the victims $7,500 to settle; and the alleged victims assert that the City knew of Rincon’s prior history of sexual misconduct! I wonder what that history was.
Note #2: The DA never prosecuted the alleged victims for any crimes related to their arrests. Is Rincon a Brady cop?
Note #3: the City’s lawyer, Bruce Praet is the same charming individual who allegedly offered FPD beating-death victim Kelly Thomas’ dad a cash settlement before threatening to drag his mentally ill son’s name through the mud; and that before “all the facts were known,” an admonition the cops seem to think only applies to us citizens and taxpayers – not themselves.
Fullerton, this is your out of control police department; it is enabled and protected by majority of your city council. What the Hell are you going to do about it?
Last week Gov. Jerry Brown signed in to law two bills designed to drastically diminish, or at least change redevelopment in California. Assembly Bill x 126 eliminates redevelopment agencies (RDAs) altogether in municipalities across the state on October 1, 2011. It also prohibits RDAs like Fullerton’s from any new beginning any new activities or issuing any more bonds, loaning money, buying more property and number of other things they normally do. Once the RDA disappears, the City of Fullerton would take over all outstanding duties like debt service while the rest of the agency’s revenues are distributed to schools and other things usually underfunded by the diversion of tax monies to RDA districts.
That’s it. No more redevelopment except finish off outstanding projects and pay off the bond debts that make them possible. However, an alternative exists that would allow RDAs to continue. Gov. Brown also signed AB x 127, which would allow redevelopment agencies to continue as long as a significant portion of their property tax revenue is redirected to schools and other local agencies. On Tuesday night the Fullerton City Council is scheduled to decide which of these paths to take with Fullerton’s RDA. And yes, the redevelopment staff are recommending option #2, which would keep the agency they work for alive.
According the agenda item’s report written by the RDA staff Fullerton would have to pay an estimated “$ 6,259,348 million in FY 2011-12 and $ 1,472,788 million in FY 2012-13” to schools and everyone else, but it would still be worth it for the city to keep the RDA in existence. These figures are based on old numbers that don’t $ 29 of bonds issued by the RDA for housing last year, so the an appeal is planned. The recommendation is based on the idea that more money would be available for redevelopment oriented activities if the RDA is kept in existence.
FFFF readers, and anyone paying attention in town, will recall that last March, in anticipation of the Governor’s actions Fullerton’s RDA gave a laundry list of properties and other assets to the City of Fullerton to keep the state from grabbing it and selling it off to the highest bidder. But AB x 126 made this action retroactively illegal, meaning that the city has to give it all back to the RDA so the state can take it and sell it if the RDA is dissolved.
But wait, there’s more. In 2010 the RDA’s Low and Moderate Income Housing Fund still has about $ 35 million to spend, most of it form a 2010 bond offering. At the last council meeting developers lined up to explain why they should each get a piece of it (more on that in the days to come, I promise).
This image was included in a story at Fullerton Stories here and purports to be a 2009 police booking photo of recent Fullerton homicide victim Kelly Thomas that was, presumably, provided by the ever helpful FPD spokehole Andrew Goodrich. Well, this is certainly a scary looking dude: pretty buff and mangy, and sufficiently angry-looking to scare the good folks of Fullerton right back into complacency about the homicide of a mentally-ill homeless man.
The only trouble is that it isn’t Kelly Thomas at all.His parents say this isn’t their son. But we don’t need their expert opinion. Apart from a large nose that is completely different from every other picture of Thomas, Kelly’s hair was flaming red, a simple fact illustrated in every other picture of him in the Fullerton Stories piece.
My powers of observation are really stunning. And if you don't agree I'll have you stunned.
So what gives? Is this just a cheapjack trick by Goodrich & Co. to degrade the victim by presenting Kelly Thomas as a surly, muscular threat to Fullerton’s delicate residents? If so, the Fullerton Police Department has actually hit a new low, and given recent events that’s pretty goddam hard for them to do. But it’s just when you think you’ve hit the FPD basement you find out there are even lower levels.
I will await a comical explanation from the Good Sergeant Goodrich, but of course I won’t be holding my breath.
This weekend one of our Friends caught up with Mayor Dick Jones as he was exiting the library gala. This fellow was one of the folks protesting the police beating of Kelly Thomas a few hundred feet away. Apparently the protesters wanted the Chief, or anybody in authority, really, to make a public statement on the issue.
And so our mayor offered us this elegant excuse for the city’s stonewalling, before shuffling off to his vehicle: “You don’t start talkin’ about things if you’re trying to get the answer.”
We have nothing to hide. Now it's off to the Caribbean...
We received the following correspondence from a long-time Friend.
The controversy surrounding the recent beating death of Kelly Thomas, a local mentally ill homeless man at the hands of the Fullerton Police has been marked by the absence of Chief Michael Sellers. The FPD has instead relied on its regular spokesman Sgt. Andrew Goodrich for information about the case. This might be thought an appropriate channel of communication if this were anything like standard police work. It is not. Six sworn peace officers beat a man to near death (he died days later) in the parking lot of the Fullerton Transportation Center, and no explanation has been offered other than that the man offered physical resistance and that a thorough investigation will follow.
The brutality of the beating has left many in this city asking how it was that six trained police officers could not subdue a single unarmed man without killing him. Chief Sellers, who is reportedly vacationing, neither returned to Fullerton to appear before the press and public or even offered a written statement about the tragedy. His complete absence does nothing to assure the people of Fullerton that there is responsible leadership being exercised over the officers in his department.
Thanks to Friend Tony Serra for providing a link to a Sac Bee story about Anaheim’s former Mayor-for-Hire Kurt Pringle quitting the California High Speed Rail Board.
Could it be true? Sure looks like it. According to the story he wants Governor Brown to be able to appoint someone who represents his point of view. I wonder what that point of view might be. Ethics? Brown, who as Attorney General took note of Pringle’s conflicts of interest over many years may have asked him to go.
So Der Rat is jumping off Das Sinkingboot; timely, too, now that all the revelations of incompetence, waste, misinformation, and decreased funding are dragging the HSR to a well-deserved grave.
The funniest thing in the piece is the glowing valediction to Pringle from fellow HSR barnacle, Tom Umberg, who in the past has proved there is no moral morass too low for a politician to sink into, and who recently penned a pro-HSR op-ed piece in the Register that was so incompetent I’m not going to link to it to save Umberg any more embarrassment.
For all you folks out there that are thinking about dining and drinking, or drinking, or even art walking in downtown Fullerton, think twice before you venture into the battle zone. A few years back, your esteemed Mayor, Dr. Dick Jones, declared the downtown “unsafe,” and called it the “Wild West;” he said that “there are people down there that don’t look like me,” and called them “last week’s prison felons.” Here is Jones in all his befuddled glory:
So what did the city do? It looks like they spent one and a half million dollars per year to employ a collection of goons to work the downtown beat who, with exception of a uniform, may be hard to distinguish from the folks they go after – last week’s prison felons.
The original problem, created by Jones & Co. persists. And now I invite you to consider whether the remedy isn’t worse than the disease.
