Author: Joe Sipowicz

Posted onThe Cost of Defeat

Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 1: A Recap

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thief

For 40 years the City of Fullerton has added a 10% tax to your water. The ostensible purpose was to pay for general city costs necessary to deliver water, like the City Manager and the City Attorney. In the beginning the rate was a small 2%. Then in 1970 the City Fathers realized nobody was watching and they bumped it to 10%. But the fee had nothing to do with infrastructure or anything else withing the purview of the Water Utility.

For the first 27 years it was just a scam – the City departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund – the 10% was just pure high-fat content bureaucratic gravy, ripped off from unsuspecting water users by ignorant and lubricious politicians and administrators; then in 1996 Proposition 218 was enacted, requiring that objective studies, approved in public, be the basis of these charges. At this point the annually rubber stamped water tax became illegal; but it was still there, happily rising whenever the cost of the water commodity itself went up – from 1997-2012.

In 2012 the City itself acknowledged the magnitude of the ill-gotten revenue – over $27,000,000 since 1997, a sum that went into the General Fund to pay for salaries and benefits of employees who have absolutely nothing to do with the procurement or transmission of water, as well as other fun stuff – like council junkets to four start hotels.

Last year, the previous council majority made a commitment to return as much of the graft as possible. The new council? Don’t hold your breath. Mrs. Flory, one of architects of the ripoff, and someone who, arrogantly, has never even bothered to proffer an apology for her heist, has claimed that the City can’t afford refunds of even the minimum amount prescribed by law.

Well, we’ll see how this plays out. In the meantime, stay tuned for Part II: How to Phony Up A Report.

 

 

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Posted onChronic Failure

Excuses, Excuses

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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.

fatcops-300x198

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 onChronic Failure

Hail to the Creep

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The Best and Brightest?

Back after a month in eastern Nevada, I picked up some information about Fullerton’s cop union president.

We first met Barry Coffman on these pages as the carb-packing ticket writer for “excessive horning,” a charge made up by the FPD as tickets were being handed out to honest citizens honking their horns in support of Kelly Thomas murder protesters outside the Fullerton Police Station. That strategy was organized by then Captain “Danny” Hughes who got to act as both bad cop and good cop all by himself by thoughtfully tearing up the tickets he himself had ordered handed out. Hughes and Coffman. What a team.

But back to the egregious Coffman, himself.

I have it on good authority that Coffman was re-elected  as head man of the Fullerton Police Officer’s Association, proving that being an otiose fathead who won’t even stick up for one of his own members is no obstacle to leadership in the FPOA.

Coffman had no opponent; apparently another cop challenged Coffman and was told he couldn’t run without naming a Vice President candidate. Whether or not such nonsense is actually memorialized in the FPOA by-laws in anybody’s guess, but I would bet not. Yes, the FPOA resembles nothing so much as a small, corrupt banana republic.

 

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Posted onAbout Us

Sharon Quirk, Poor Little Rich Girl and The Myth of the Union/Corporation Dichotomy

by 269 Comments on Sharon Quirk, Poor Little Rich Girl and The Myth of the Union/Corporation Dichotomy

I was struck the other day by a post on the Voice of OC(EA) about Sharon Quirk that started out with Q complaining that there is now a target on her back by the GOP who want their Republican seat back. The rest of the post is the typical mush-drivel we’ve come to expect of the local media so I’ll let that pass.

What intrigued me was the absurdity of making yourself out to be a target by the very sorts of people who got you elected. What am I talking about? Check out this post from OC Political. Quirk got almost $300,000 funneled into her campaign account over the course of 18 days – laundered through various county Democrat Central Committees, including obscure Del Norte County – 800 miles away.

As expected, a lot of it came from public employee unions. But a lot of it also came from giant corporations like AECOM, Blue Shield, AEG, and of course, our good friends at Disney. So it would appear that Quirk was obviously looked favorably upon by these corporate behemoths, despite their subsequent attempts to distance themselves from their odd gifts to distant Democratic County Central Committees.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

The whining lefties are forever complaining that the lavish benefits, pay and massive pensions showered upon public employee unions are somehow a necessary counterbalance to all the misfeasance and excessive compensation of those greedy private business exec bastards. Of course it was always a false choice, but that falsity has never been made clearer by the fact of big corporations bellying up to Quirk’s bar.

The fact of the matter is that big corporations like big government. They are comfortable with it; they profit from it. Whether Republicans or Democrats are at the helm matters not a whit. Think big corporate subsidies, tax loopholes, and onerous regulations that chase small businesses out of business and you will start to get the picture. Big business likes balanced government budgets, and if that takes raising taxes on the rest of us, so be it. The very last thing they want is a small government advocate like Chris Norby. Think OC Business Council and you will understand that these people have no interest in anything other than a smoothly run plantation. You and I are the coolies that make the thing run for the benefit of our overseers.

Or to put it another way, the public employee unions and the big corporations both regard the taxpayer the same way: we are just pigeons to be plucked.

It’s actually rather amusing that Sharon Quirk is trying to gin up sympathy for her re-election against the big, mean Republicans, even before she is sworn in. Her dim-witted supporter may fall for that. She really doesn’t have anything to worry about.

Just ask Mickey Mouse.

 

 

 

 

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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

Whatever Happened to April Leanne Baughman?

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To swerve and deflect

Haven’t heard that name lately? How about her alias, April Leanne Wilson?

She’s the FPD employee who (miraculously, considering the caliber of the detectives who work there) got caught last March stealing from the the evidence room at FPD Central. Here is Ms. Baughman’s court record.

Right now she’s free on bail after having ripped off more than $50K from the till.

To a certain extent you have to cut April some slack. After all, when you look around and see a culture of chaos, corruption, incompetence it must be hard for a person of marginal integrity not to give in to temptation.

According to police spokesholes, Baughman had been at it for quite some time. Which begs the inevitable question, who the Hell was in charge? Either nobody was doing inventories and audits, or the egregious Baughman had one or more accomplices helping her out. Will there be any accountability? Want odds?

Either way it’s another black eye for the department and its “leadership” who would have us believe everything is hunky dory at Commonwealth and Highland.

And before you feel obliged to credit the FPD for nabbing one of their own, consider what would have happened if Baughman were not a civilian employee. Would we ever have heard anything from the Culture of Cover up?

 

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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 onChronic Failure

The Idiot

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What happens when a supposedly professional detective makes up his own “evidence” as the basis of fabricated claims and a Public Records Act request?

Well, he ends up looking like a damn fool.

This clip is entertaining for several reasons. First we see what a buffoon FPD detective Ron Bair is; second we get to see a calm evisceration of this fool by Bruce Whitaker; third we get to enjoy the cop-lackey Doug Chaffee step on his own weenie defending the indefensible.

Doug Chaffee thinks its “chilling” for Bruce Whitaker to “interrogate” an  FPD cop who has made wild and completely false charges against him.

Hmm. I think its chilling that a liar and fact-fabricator like Bair can actually become a detective in the first place with the opportunity to interrogate anybody. Looks like the Culture of Corruption has a new poster boy.

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Posted onChronic Failure

Chaffee Spills The Beans

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In his desire to promote Chief Danny, Fullerton Council Mole, Doug Chaffee went a bit too far. First he indicates that six cops have been disciplined and some have been fired! Oh, oh. That’s a violation of POBAR, isn’t it? Our trolls are always saying so.

Will The Mole Man’s comments result in a lawsuit by the rogue cops? Let’s hope so. Little Doug can explain what he meant.

What is even more astounding is that Chaffee acknowledges fourteen disciplinary actions by “Acting Chief Danny,” an incredible figure when you consider that some of the bad behavior that we already know about hasn’t even been acknowledged. In other words, Chaffee admits that at least 10% of the force has been disciplined for behavior no doubt well known and protected by a great many more members of the force – including sanctimonious pricks like Jason Shone, the Internal Affairs sergeant.

Chaffee thinks it’s “remarkable” that corrupt cops got “disciplined.” Of course we have no idea what that means, or even if it’s true. What kind of twisted culture exists when the elected authority finds that disciplining bad cops is “remarkable?”

I don’t know about you, but to me that sure sounds like a Culture of Corruption.

 

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