Category: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Posted onChronic Failure

Excuses, Excuses

by 172 Comments on Excuses, Excuses

Ponsi2

OC Register excuse for a journalist, and notorious bad-cop-story-misser, Lou Ponsi, really outdid himself today with a ridiculous “story” about all the excuses his pals on the force heard from folks who wanted to dodge a traffic citation. Real tough, hard-hitting piece there, Lou.

I wonder if Ponzi will ever tire of writing stupid fluff pieces for one of the most notorious police forces in California. I also wonder if writing salacious cop-accounts of wanton females is the best story line, given the well-documented behavior of FPD serial sex batterer Albert Rincon, whose activities were essentially known, and condoned by the department.

Anyhoo, that’s all introductory to my own version of a real human interest piece, something of which we are all too familiar, by now. And that’s the excuses doled out by the cops themselves to try to explain away their own malfeasance – crap subsequently sucked up by drones like Ponsi. Enjoy.

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1. He was running.

2. He was fighting.

3. He disobeyed a legal command.

4. He was reaching for his “waistband” (whatever that is).

5. That donut was supposed to be jelly-filled.

6. We put our lives on the line every day.

7. Our belts weigh 80 pounds.

8. We die at average 53 years old.

9. We try to arrest the right guy.

10. He thought he was beating up the right guy.

11. That’s POBR covered. Can’t talk about it.

12. It was not just honking. It was excessive horning.

13. No, it’s not tax deductible, but give us your money anyway, you’ll get a decal.

14. The job stress hooked me on those pills.

15. I just set my bag of chicken on that iPad. After that I don’t know what happened.

16. I got mad at my DAR and smashed it against the wall.

17. We slammed his head against the bars as we removed the dead body.

18. Those ladies weren’t like you.

19. Just wait to see the video. You’ll change your minds. I’ve seen it 400 times.

20. There were broken bones.

21. There was only one, maybe two deeply involved.

22. He was breaking into cars.

23. He was high on PCP.

24. He was a gang banger.

25. I feared for my safety.

26. The 90 pound girl with the jack knife entered the 22 foot radius so we had to shoot her 18 times.

27. Ron Thomas was never a deputy sheriff.

28. He was just a smelly bum.

29. The free sandwiches and beers are just a small perk for an otherwise unrewarding job.

30. My second wife doesn’t understand me and my girlfriend just wants a chunk of that pension.

31. It was suicide by cop.

32. He was a terrorist.

33. It was just a bong from the evidence room. It’s not like i was going to use it or anything.

34. Once you take a guided tour of the station you’ll feel differently about everything.

35. it was really all just a misunderstanding.

36. They are either misinformed or lying.

And now, feel free to add your own.

 

 

 

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Posted onSomething Wicked This Way Comes

Have At It

by 245 Comments on Have At It
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Here’s how it happened. And no, I wasn’t there…

As expected, the new council voted 3-2 to begin “negotiations” with Dan Hughes to become Fullerton’s police chief.

Flory, Chaffee and Fitzgerald took their vote even as questions remain unanswered about Hughes’ role in the aftermath of Kelly Thomas murder, and accusations that Hughes himself was involved in an incident which is now the subject of a lawsuit against the City; and of course ongoing suspicion that Hughes has been an active part of the Culture of Corruption every step of the way.

Now watch ’em give away the store.

Oh, and yeah: you will not be getting a police oversight committee.

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Posted onChronic Failure

The Settlements

by 223 Comments on The Settlements

Yes, Friends, elections do have consequences. But you already knew that.

The results of the November election mean that the tepid and incompetent reign of Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz and City Attorney Dick Jones will continue as they preside over policies (or lack of policies) meant to evade accountability for your employees and electeds in City Hall.

Acting Chief Danny Hughes, the legacy boss of the FPD Culture of Corruption will soon see his title made permanent, even as the accusations by Ben Lira about Hughes’s direct involvement in cover-up and brutality, continue to  swirl.

(No, you will not get a refund in any part for the illegal $27,000,000 tax that City Hall stole from you. But in the larger scheme of things, that’s small change)

I want to talk about justice.

In our State the cops can do damn near anything they want with impunity. Our spineless politicians have given them wealth, influence, and most importantly, virtually no accountability to anyone. The justice system itself, run by District Attorneys surrounded by ex-cops, has little interest in pursuing justice against their own allies, even when this means coddling the very perjuring cops that have scuttled many of the DA’s own cases. And when the cops themselves actually commit crimes, the law enforcement establishment immediately springs into action to defend the indefensible.

Think about what happened to Veth Mam. An innocent man was assaulted, arrested and falsely prosecuted. Fullerton cops knew the real truth and lied under oath to hide the fact that they beat up and arrested the wrong guy. Were there any repercussions? Of course not. Remember the Martinez kid who spent five months in jail thanks to the Fullerton cops? Well, Goodrich said everything was just fine – a slight error. Trevor Clarke says the FPD beat him, gave him a few sadistic “screen tests” just for fun, threw him in jail, and robbed him for good measure. Ben Lira says Danny Hughes was one of the instigators. Will anything happen? Not very likely, is it?

Let’s let the Albert Rincon case be our guide: we know that Albert Rincon serially molested women in the back seat of his patrol car. We know because of the depositions of just two of his victims (there are said to be a dozen). But the obscenity of what occurred, and importantly the roles played by Patdown Pat McKinley and Mike Sellers in covering up the whole mess, and worse, putting the creep back on the streets shall never be known. Why? because there was a settlement; a settlement approved by by-then Councilman McKinley himself.

The lawsuit settlement is the mechanism to hush everything up, from brutal and sadistic cops and an immoral FPD leadership, to a feckless city manager and city attorney who condoned the Culture of Corruption. If you wondered how the FPOA and the FPD/City Hall crowd could share a common goal, this is it.

And the path to settlement is the route no doubt most favored by Garo Mardirossian, the lawyer who is representing a whole slew of FPD/FPOA victims of brutality and perjury. For a lawyer a big payday without having to risk anything is a gift. And co-incidentally the same result will be a gift for Joe Felz, Pat Mckinley, Danny Hughes, Barry Coffman and the rest of the gang.

Your new council majority of Chaffee, Flory and Fitzgerald will make sure that Fullerton returns to the normalcy where no bad deed goes reported.

Of course it won’t be their money that goes to pay off Veth Mam and Kelly Thomas’s relatives. It will be yours.

And you will be poorer but no wiser.

 

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Posted onChronic Failure

Barry Coffman: FPD Has A Cancer

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Yep, he said it. In reference to his own union member, Benjamin Lira.

Listen to the Barry Coffman interview on KFI, here. Scroll to the 23:40 mark and enjoy the Fullerton cop union boss try as hard as he can to bad-mouth a dues paying member of the FPOA!

First he says Lira is on the way out, a POBAR violation if uttered by anybody in authority; and of course after the embarrassing question about how come he isn’t defending his union member, and an awkward pause, we learn from Barry that Lira is a real malcontent, a cancer in the presumably healthy body tissue of the FPD. Which is pretty hard to swallow given the evident  Culture of Corruption in the department.

Comically, Coffman asks us who are we to believe, his own man, or the upstanding Michael Gennaco Report – a bucket full of pabulum coughed up by a paid hack in order to whitewash the felonious FPD and its command structure.

Say, what’s going on here? A union boss siding with management? Huh?

In response to the tricky question about how come his union didn’t bail out Ramos, Coffman (after another painful pause) exclaims that he and his boys just wanted the justice system to play out, a non-answer if ever there was one. He does admit that when the Thomas murder hit he and his fellow FPOA leaders were completely useless. We do know that they came onto this blog to post vulgar obscenities.

It’s hard not to relish the delicious double standard of the oh-so-ethical Barry C who never said a single word in public about Todd Major, Kelly Mejia, Albert Rincon, Vincent Mater, Kenton Hampton, Frank Nguyen, Cary Tong or any of the other FPOA miscreants whose behavior has been so amply demonstrated on these pages.

 

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Posted onChronic Failure

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

by 114 Comments on Justice Delayed is Justice Denied
The sands of time slip slower for some…

In California victims have rights, too. Unless the perps are cops, it seems.

The other day the defense team of three of the cops charged in the murder of Kelly Thomas asked for, and got a time extension on their own motion to dismiss. You can read about in the Register, here, if you don’t mind getting a bit nauseous.

It is now 17 months since Thomas was brutally beaten by six Fullerton cops and left in the Fullerton Transportation Center gutter to drown in his own blood as the six goons got their scratches band-aided.

The District Attorney sure doesn’t seem to be in any big hurry, either, which might make a cynical person question his real dedication to prosecuting these malefactors.

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Posted onChronic Failure

Vince Mater Gets Wrist Slapped For Destruction of Evidence in Fullerton Jail House Death Case

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I always hate it when the stooge press indicates that a “former cop” was convicted of something when the former cop was an active cop when he did what he did to get convicted.

And so I won’t say “former Fullerton cop Vincent Mater plead guilty…” Rather, I will say dirty Fullerton cop Vincent Mater who clearly had something to hide in the wake of the Dean Gochenour Fullerton jail suicide and who demonstrated as much by destroying his DAR plead guilty to day…

Here’s the text of the DAs press release:

FULLERTON – A former Fullerton Police Department (FPD) officer was convicted and sentenced today for destroying evidence by crushing his audio-recorder after an inmate committed suicide in jail following a driving under the influence (DUI) arrest by the defendant. Vincent Thomas Mater, 42, pleaded guilty to a court offer by the Honorable Frances Munoz to one misdemeanor count of destruction of evidence and one misdemeanor count of vandalism. Mater was sentenced to three years of informal probation and 60 days of community service. The People objected to the sentence, arguing for jail time based on the nature of the crime, destruction of evidence possibly related to an inmate’s death, and the defendant’s violation of his position of trust.

At the time of the crime, Mater was a police officer with FPD.  At approximately 9:45 p.m. on April 14, 2011, Mater conducted a DUI investigation after making a traffic stop of a vehicle being driven without its lights on in the dark. Mater was in uniform and driving a marked FPD patrol car. Mater arrested the driver, Dean Gochenour, upon determining that Gochenour was under the influence of alcohol.

Mater transported Gochenour in his patrol car to the Fullerton City Jail (FCJ) and turned him over to FPD jailers to be booked upon arrival. Throughout the duration of his contact with Gochenour, Mater wore an FPD-issued Digital Audio Recording device (DAR), which was activated and would have audio-recorded any statements made by Mater or Gochenour.

At approximately 11:30 p.m., inmate Gochenour committed suicide by hanging himself in a cell at FCJ. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office (OCDA) was subsequently contacted to conduct the custodial death investigation.

In the hours after Mater learned of Gochenour’s death, Mater destroyed his DAR by crushing it and removing the mother board and circuit board. The audio captured on Mater’s DAR of the defendant’s interaction with Gochenour could not be recovered as a result of the damage. Mater destroyed the evidence that would have been relevant to the OCDA’s custodial death investigation.

FPD investigated the case against Mater regarding the destruction of evidence and submitted it to the OCDA for criminal prosecution.

To read the OCDA’s full report on the custodial death of Gochenour, visit www.OrangeCountyDA.com and select “OCDA Report Custodial Death Investigation – Inmate Dean Gochenour” from the Investigation Letters tab under the Media Center. The report was issued March 13, 2012.

Deputy District Attorney Brock Zimmon of the Special Prosecutions Unit prosecuted this case.

I don’t know who “the honorable” Frances Munoz is, but I sure want to end up in her court if I ever get busted doing anything naughty. Probation and sixty days’ community service? Really? You or I would be looking at hard time. Oh, well we’ve always know there were rules and regs for us and a get out of jail card for the cops.

Did something fishy happen to Dean Gochenour before or after he was deposited in the FPD jail? Thanks to Mater we shall probably never know.

Oh, and yeah, Mater’s now a former Fullerton cop, although whether he was fired or permitted to walk away we will never know. That shall remain a mystery, too.

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Posted onDowntown Fullerton

The Culture of Corruption Has NOT Changed!

by 162 Comments on The Culture of Corruption Has NOT Changed!

First off, I’d like to thank a good and courageous Friend for sharing this alarming video with us.

I’m still sort of shocked to hear what Fullerton police Lieutenant Markowski said to a group of folks who took the open house tour of the police department last Saturday. Apparently, when she comes to work on Mondays there’s a desk full of complaints from women who claim they were abducted, raped, kidnapped telling horror stories of what happened to them. And thank God she can go review the video cameras, and that not everybody that comes to file a report is truthful. (And of course not everyone who receives a complaint or writes a report is truthful, either, as we now know).

According to Markowski there have been many, many cases that she worked where women report, “he pulled me out of this bar, he pulled he into this alley, he pulled me into his car, he did this that. And then I review the video the downtown video cameras which obviously we maintain and I review the video and I can clearly see that she walked voluntarily out of the bar with this gentleman that she was all over him. I’ve been able to save a lot of men from being accused of things that they absolutely didn’t do whereas if we didn’t have that video evidence these guys would be sitting in here getting ready to go to jail for crimes that they absolutely didn’t commit so they work very well for investigators.”

The idea that a cop by way of a video camera is now acting as district attorney, judge and jury in cases involving women who want to file  charges against one of downtown Fullerton’s army of drunken gentlemen is alarming.

I also find it very disconcerting that Markowski  found it appropriate to regale her visitors with this particular story, given the history of FPD cop Albert Rincon. According to Markowski this false accusation against DTF’s menfolk happens all the time, and it is routine for Markowski, who seems to have a low regard for some of DTF’s female guests.

Of course it is ironic in the extreme that Ms. Markowski makes no mention of her cameras and the story they told about the Kelly Thomas murder, or the assault and false arrest (and later false prosecution) of Veth Mam at the hands of Kenton Hampton.

 

 

 

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