For paranoia, sheer cynicism and demonstration of unbridled self-interest there’s nothing that can beat this “playbook” created by the law firm of Lackie, Dammeier & McGill for use by their clients: cop unions.
See how many of these tactics strike you as familiar in Fullerton. Paranoia, cynicism and self-interest. Check, check, check.
Lackie, Dammeier & McGill
Former Cops Defending Current Ones
In gearing up for negotiations, hopefully your association has developed some political ties with members of your governing body. Now is the time those political endorsements, favors, and friendships come into play. When negotiations reach an impasse, the association will have options which may be utilized simultaneously, or one before the other.
Political Option
As most association leaders already know, associations should be selective in their battles. However, this does not mean that the association should roll over for everything either. Association respect (by the employer) is gained over years of actions or inactions. Associations who rarely, if ever, take things to the mat or challenge the employer gain little respect at the bargaining table or elsewhere. The flip side is also true. Those associations that battle over every minor issue may be seen as an association that simply cannot be pleased, so why bother. While it is a fine line, somewhere in the middle is where you want to be. The association should be like a quiet giant in the position of, “do as I ask and don’t piss me off.” Depending on the circumstances surrounding the negotiations impasse, there are various tools available to an association to put political pressure on the decision makers. A few things to keep in mind when utilizing these tools are the following:
Public Message
Always keep this in mind. The public could care less about your pay, medical coverage and pension plan. All they want to know is “what is in it for them.” Any public positions or statements by the association should always keep that focus. The message should always be public safety first. You do not want wage increases for yourselves, but simply to attract better qualified candidates and to keep more experienced officers from leaving.
The Future
Also keep in mind that once the fight is over, you and your members will still be working there. Avoid activities where one or just a few members are involved who can be singled out for retaliation. Always keep in mind your department policies and the law. You should be in very close contact with your association’s attorney during these times to ensure you are not going to get yourself or any of your members in trouble. For associations in the Legal Defense Fund, please keep in mind that concerted labor activity should always be discussed with the LDF Trustees prior to the activity to ensure coverage.
Let the Debate Begin
Again, the ideas listed below are not in any particular order. Just as in your use-of-force guidelines, you can start with simple verbal commands or jump to a higher level, based on the circumstances.
Keep in mind that most of these tools are not to deliver your message to the public but are designed to simply get the decision makers into giving in to your position.
- Storm City Council – While an association is at impasse, no city council or governing board meeting should take place where members of your association and the public aren’t present publicly chastising them for their lack of concern for public safety.
- Picketing – Plan a few well organized picketing events. Keep these events spread out to avoid burning out your membership.
- Public Appearances – During impasse, the association should make known at every significant public event, such as parades, Christmas tree lightings, the Mayor’s Gala and any other event of interest to the decision makers, that the association is upset about the lack of concern for public safety.
- Newspaper Ads – Again, keep the message focused on “public safety.”
- Billboards – Nothing seems to get more attention than a billboard entering the city limits which reads that crime is up and the City could care less about your safety.
- Websites – GardenGroveSucks.com was a big hit.
- Job Fair – Getting your members to apply at a large local agency, which causes an influx of personnel file checks by background investigators always sends a strong signal. Keep this for last, as some of your members may ultimately leave anyway.
- Work Slowdown – This involves informing your members to comply closely with Department policy and obey all speed limits. It also involves having members do thorough investigations, such as canvassing the entire neighborhood when taking a 459 report and asking for a back-up unit on most calls. Of course, exercising officer discretion in not issuing citations and making arrests is also encouraged.
- Blue Flu – This one is very rarely used and only in dire circumstances. As with all of these, please consult your association’s attorney before even discussing this issue with your members.
- Public Ridicule – Blunders by the City Manager, Mayor, or City Council members or wasteful spending should be highlighted and pointed out to the public at every opportunity.
- Referendum / Ballot Initiatives – Getting the public to vote for a wage increase is seldom going to fly, however, as a pressure tactic, seeking petition to file a referendum on eliminating the City Manager’s position for a full time elected mayor may cause the City Manager to rethink his or her position.
- Mailers – Again, the message should be for “public safety” in getting the public to attend city council meetings and to call the City Council members (preferably at home) to chastize them for their inaction.
- Campaigning – If any members of the governing body are up for election, the association should begin actively campaigning against them, again for their lack of concern over public safety. If you are in a non-election year, make political flyers which you can explain will be mailed out the following year during the election season.
- Focus on an Individual – Avoid spreading your energy. Focus on a city manager, councilperson, mayor or police chief and keep the pressure up until that person assures you his loyalty and then move on to the next victim.
- Press Conferences – Every high profile crime that takes place should result in the association’s uproar at the governing body for not having enough officers on the street, which could have avoided the incident.
Of course, other ideas that cops come up with are very imaginative. Just keep in mind, the idea is to show the decision makers that the public favors public safety and it will only harm their public support by not prioritizing you and almost equally as important, to let them know that next time they should agree with you much sooner.
If you are going to get involved in politics developing a thick skin is essential. If you can’t take the heat, well you know. Here is Jan Flory attacking Travis Kiger for having the temerity to be “webmaster” for the award-winning FFFF blog.
It’s interesting to see how Jan Flory thinks this blog has some issue “strong, older women” (i.e. her). That’s wrong, of course.
It couldn’t possibly be that our antipathy with Mrs. Flory is because she has always been a mean, vindictive harpy with a trail of votes that have cost the taxpayers of Fullerton a fortune, now could it?
Okay this post is not about Jan Flory discussing anything remotely “sexy” because the thought of that…well, never mind.
The post is about her latest Facebook scribblings in which she opines on a subject near and dear to the hearts of Fullerton reformers: the illegal 10% tax on your water that the City collected for the past 15 years. $27,000,000 worth.
First I’ll start by stating what you could have already guessed. Jan Flory does not want you to get a refund of the theft. In her world-order the taxpayers are meant to be milked, not refunded.
Her assertion that the collection was “illegal” the past three year is a bad lawyer’s half-truth that amounts to a bald-faced lie, of course. It has been illegal for 15 years, six of them on her watch as a council person. The City has a legal opinion that it is only obligated to refund three-year’s worth of the theft. Not the same thing, is it? Of course Mrs. Flory is desperate to disassociate her name with the tax. Too late. She is on record in the 90s as having known it was wrong and doing it anyway.
Mrs. Flory and her ilk love footling committees, especially when they are selected by ozone brains like Jone, Quirk, McKinley and Bankhead. Even better are the “consultants” selected by staff who give them their marching orders. The “report” cooked up by the water rate consultant was so evidently bogus that it hardly needs to be restated. But I will: their goal was to gin up as much phony cost as possible to keep the bureaucrats greedy little fingers on that 10%. Flory may think this gives her cover, and under the old Culture of Corruption it would have. Not any more.
The 10% was expressly collected to cover specific City staff costs associated with the water utility. However, it turns out that those departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund. Which is why I am happy to refer to the tax as an illegal theft.
And another point: it’s real easy to say that the illegal tax should be refunded to the Water Fund for capital improvements. That’s convenient, but immoral. The tax that was collected had nothing to do with infrastructure. Nothing. True infrastructure costs should be rolled into an effective rate for water transmission, a correction of years of mismanagement by Mrs. Flory and her cohorts that still needs to be done. Confusing these two issues is simply a convenient way for the perpetrators to hide their crime and their dereliction.
Now, let’s address the issue of the reserve funds, a subject that Mrs. Flory wants people to believe she knows something about. There is no need to empty these accounts to pay refunds. No, indeed. I find it remarkably disingenuous for anybody to assert this, especially given just two of City manger Joe Felz’s most recent “cost saving” measures.
First there was the egregious relocation of former Redevelopment personnel into General Fund departments for which they had no apparent expertise. Most recently the City contracted out your graffiti removal services for $120,000. Yay! Big savings, right? Wrong. The city employees were simply reassigned to other jobs in the Engineering Department that were vacant. Net cost savings? -$120,000.
The City just missed an opportunity to shave a million bucks off its payroll costs. Of course, my point is that the General Fund is far from depleted.
Finally, in closing, I would submit that Mrs. Flory knows more about witching hours than any of us. However, if she doesn’t like staying up that late every other Tuesday night, then she has no business on a city council. And it’s really too bad that the Council is scheduling special meetings to attend to the people’s business.
Mrs. Flory’s little rubber stamp has been put away and locked up.
I don’t know. That’s his story, anyway, and because he has a lot of gang tats and an old affiliation with a Fullerton barrio gang, his story is sure to be challenged.
Here’s the synopsis.
On August 11th, Fullerton resident David Tovar was riding his bike on Valencia Ave. when an unknown truck sped up behind him. Fearing for his safety from the unknown persons in the vehicle, Tovar veered off. The truck chased him down an alley just east of Harbor Boulevard, and then across Harbor and rammed him from behind. He was knocked him off his bike, his head striking the concrete curb. He was unconscious. He later discovered that the driver and passengers were undercover Fullerton cops in an unmarked car who pursued him because he had no light on his bike!
Well, that’s his story.
Here’s an interview with Tovar.
Naturally, we here at the FFFF City Desk, are in hot pursuit of any witnesses, so stay tuned! If anybody in the vicinity of Harbor Blvd. and Ash Ave. on August 11th saw this incident, we would like to get your story.
We will also be inquiring about any such event logged in by the FPD and see if any of this story might be true.
Too bad it’s not 1971. Too bad for Jan Flory, that is.
See, her vision of a know-it-all government, whose “expertise” the citizenry is obliged to (shut up and) obey was much more prevalent then. But a decade of suffocating inflation, ever-escalating taxes and ballooning interest rates got people thinking about things.
By the time Mrs. Flory was first elected to the Fullerton City Council in 1994, the world had changed a lot, although she hardly knew it. And by the time she was fired by the voters, in 2002, she was as obsolete as the horse and buggy.
You need only observe her behavior during the past year to witness a mind soaked in a nasty vindictiveness as her “esteemed” idols, the Three Bald Tires, were driven from office themselves for incompetence and dereliction.
Where was Flory when an innocent man was murdered by the cops? Where was Flory when the City paid out $350,00 to two victims of Albert Rincon’s sexual batteries? Where was Flory when FPD employees were looting the evidence room and ripping off Explorers; or beating up, arresting and prosecuting innocent bystanders?
I’ll tell you where Flory was. She was snuggling up to the Three Hollow Logs in their secret sound-proof bunker.
If Mrs. Flory thinks posting her mindless musings on a Facebook page means that she is in any way more useful than a lost shoe, she has another think coming.
And we’re not going to give Fullerton back to the decrepit mind-set of Flory, Jones, Bankhead and McPension and their incompetent, arrogant ilk.
As Doc HeeHaw would say: Nuh uh!
Want to see and hear what a real local hero has to say about Kelly Thomas and the FPOA Blueshirts? Check it out:
I don’t know about you, but I think if we had a few more Baxters and a few fewer Florys we would have had a whole helluva lot less trouble around here in the past year.
What does it say about your “movement” when you need to bribe people with free food to show up?
Members of Kelly’s Army, showed up to Fullerton City Council meetings because it was the right thing to do. Members of the FPOA, however, believe it is necessary to entice followers to show up to council meetings with Tommy Burgers.
This could be because they know that ultimately their “I ♥ FPD” is really just about protecting their Culture of Complacent Corruption, where hardly any bad deed goes punished.
Well, go ahead and fill up, guys. The gravy train won’t keep running forever.
Wolfe is gone. So are Ramos and Cicinelli. The other three cops involved in the Kelly Thomas beating death, despite violating policy, have had their jobs saved by a watery Gennco report and an acting police chief eager to do damage control in the ongoing struggle to deny the obvious: a Culture of Corruption in the FPD.
The other three cops: Blatney, Craig, and Hampton. Hampton. Now why does that name sound familiar? Let me think.
Oh that’s right! He’s the fine fellow who assaulted a bystander who made the mistake of trying to video record a downtown Fullerton incident involving the FPD. Poor Veth Mam never knew what hit him. Fortunately a bystander picked up Mam’s phone and continued the video. Watch as Hampton throws Mam to the ground, swings him around like a rag doll, and sits on him.
But the story was far from over. Mam was arrested and jailed on charges of assaulting the cops! The DA was fine with the story Officer Frank Nguyen cooked up which was so obviously contradicted by the video that Mam was eventually unanimously acquitted by a jury.
So were there any repercussions? Of course not. According to spokesman Andrew Goodrich, the cops really and truly thought they had the right man, even though it’s obvious in the video that from the time Hampton arrives on the scene and his immediate attack of Mam he can have known nothing of any alleged previous assault on a cop.
Now that’s mad excessive!
Jan Flory is running for Fullerton City Council. Jan Flory used to be on Fullerton City Council. Jan Flory is hoping that nobody remembers her disastrous decisions on Fullerton City Council.
Oops! Too late.
In one of the costliest misjudgments in Fullerton history, Mrs. Flory joined her fellow council members in approving the horrible, retroactive 3@50 pension formula for the City’s “public safety” employees that was a massive gift of public funds and created a huge unfunded pension liability that eats up a bigger percentage of Fullerton’s budget every year.
Bankhead, Flory, Clesceri, Jones and Norby. At least Norby apologized for his blunder. Flory never has. She even made the motion to approve the gargantuan giveaway!
View the agreement
Of course the excuse Don Bankhead and Patdown Pat McPension used was that without the benefit Fullerton couldn’t recruit the best and brightest. You know, cops like Ramos and Wolfe and Cicinelli, and Rincon, and Mater and Mejia and Major, and well, you get the idea.
Of course Mrs. Flory never got around to explaining how giving away a retroactive benefit to current employees would improve future recruitment.
Being on a city council for eight long years can create an embarrassing trail of disastrous decision. Our job will be to remind the public of Mrs. Flory’s string of expensive votes.