It never rains, but it pours, as some folks say. It seems that the City of Fullerton has been hit with yet another lawsuit, which likely means more payout from us and more pelf for the City’s contracted attorney, Dick Jones (no, the other meat head).
Lou Ponsi of the OC Register, writes about the lawsuit, here.
It transpires that a 58-year old Fullerton High teacher and motorcyclist named Jeff Rupp was wiped out at the intersection of Euclid and Malvern in early 2011. He died from his injuries and the family has brought a wrongful death suit against the City. The basis of the suit is that the intersection is deficient and dangerous. A $2.9 million claim by the family was denied by the City last year.
Well, the intersection is dangerous. No doubt about it. It’s got that funky flashing yellow left turn arrow which is confusing the first time you see it. Anybody turning left in either direction had better be careful; and anybody going straight through had better be careful, too.
Still, it’s pretty hard to lay the beatdown on the taxpayers of Fullerton because of bad drivers.
Teri Sforza of the OC Register has done another piece on Fullerton’s fraudulent 10% water tax and the equally fraudulent study commissioned by the City Council to justify keeping as much of the tax as they can. Naturally the consultant ginned up some phony rent value for City owned property that water reservoirs sit on! In fact the bogus rent topped $1.3 million, a figure so absurd that even Mayor Sharon Quirk took offense. It’s a good thing Ms. Quirk is running for the State Assembly or she might not be so concerned about the wear ratepayers getting ripped off in an illegal scam. Whatever. At least she finally seems to have somebody who knows what’s going on advising her.
Reflecting on the FPD career of Albert Rincon, the man accused of serially sexually assaulting women in the back of his patrol car, made me think about the creep that hired him, and the standards that were applied to the recruit.
We have seen from the facebook page of “Albey Al” a preening, self-absorbed, utterly shallow weasel. Okay that’s bad enough. What makes Albey Al Rincon’s presence on the Fullerton police force even more revealing is the virtual illiteracy of a grown man who can not spell, let alone write complete or even intelligible sentences. This begs the question of what sort of standards Pat McKinley applied to his recruits. After all, he hired Rincon, just like all the others.
But are there no basic academic qualifications required to be a Fullerton cop? Apparently not.
Narcissism and ignorance are a bad combination, and the complete lack of moral scruples rounds out the McKinley recruit profile. Now give ’em a badge and a gun and let ’em hit the streets of Fullerton! McKinley has yet to disavow Rincon as some sort of “alien;” and why should he? They are kindred spirits.
McKinley set the FPD bar so low that even a morally vacuous, messed up ignoramus like Albert Rincon could slither over it. Despite the pleas from FPD apologists about all the good cops employed by the department, we are justified to question that claim, given the mere presence of Rincon on the force; somebody thought he was not only fit for duty, but that he deserved to stay on duty after all the charges leveled against him.
The really dangerous thing is that the FPD and anti-recall crew don’t want us to talk about Rincon. Or Mater. Or Major, or Mejia, or Hampton, or Thayer, or Tong, or Baughman, or Nguyen, or Solario, or Siliceo, or any of the other police department employees who have given the City a series of black eyes. They want the public to think that a couple cops maybe, just maybe, got a little over-excited one hot night last July, and that Kelly Thomas’ death is a lone example of miscreance being exploited for political purposes.
Well, despite Acting Chief Hughes protestations, there has been and still is a Culture of Corruption in the FPD. The fact is that McKinley’s twisted chickens are finally coming home to roost. The repercussions will be prolonged and painful, emotionally and economically. But after June 5th McKinley will just be an noxious footnote in Fullerton’s history. The clean up will take a while.
So reports the LA Times, right here. It seems that the family of Dean Francis Gochenour believes the FPD’s treatment of their family member left a lot to be desired. Gochenour entered the FPD jail alive on the night of April 14, 2011. He left it dead on April 15th. Gochenour is claimed to have committed suicide by strangling himself with his shirt.
"To Swerve and Deflect"
What adds interest to this tale is the fact that FPD arresting officer Vincent Mater apparently smashed his DAR right after Gochenour’s death. Suspicious folk believe he did it to destroy incriminating evidence about his arrest of Gochenour.
In a true man-bites-dog story, Officer Mater is being charged by the DA (finally) on charges of destruction of evidence. This is a misdemeanor charge, but you really have to wonder if there isn’t more lurking beneath the surface of this story.
Guess what, Friends? Last month the City of Fullerton got sued again – stemming from an FPD incident in 2005. We have thoughtfully attached a copy of the complaint, below.
According to the complaint, some dude named Ernest Benefiel took some sleeping pills in a locked bedroom. Naturally, Benefiel fell asleep. His elderly father, concerned, called the paramedics because he thought his son was depressed. So far so good.
Unfortunately the paramedics called the good folks at the Fullerton Police Department who arrived on the scene, and because they learned that Benefiel owned a gun, decided to turn the place into some kind of hostage stand-off situation – even though there was no hostage. Some time elapsed and the cops, perhaps, became bored. To get Benefiel’s attention they deployed a flash grenade outside the guy’s window, followed a dozen shotgun “bean bags” blasts through the same window. Benefiel was hit by one of the rounds and finally woke up from his pill-induced slumber; and, thinking he was under attack from criminals, fired a pistol shot out the window and hit a street sign.The cops then started blasting blindly into the room.
A while later Benfiel finally got his bearings and climbed out the window and surrendered peacefully – even though he had committed no crime.
Now you would think that upon mature reflection the cops’ superiors would have recognized how their out-of-control underlings unnecessarily escalated a pretty harmless situation into a SWAT stand off, and just let the whole thing go. But no! The cops and the DA decided to prosecute Benefiel for firing on a police officer. In fact, they tried him twice, and each time the case was overturned on appeal.
Meantime, Benefiel had spent over five years in jail for the heinous act of simply defending himself. And now the taxpayers of Fullerton are staring at yet another FPD civil suit settlement.
If you read the complaint you will notice an inescapable fact: according to a police training expert FPD tactics violated procedure on the use of the flash grenade, the shot gun bean bags, and blindly shooting projectiles.
And who was boss of the FPD at the time and supposedly accountable for the actions of his boys? That’s right. Former Chief and current councilman Pat McKinley.
Jeez, that was such a long ago...
Fortunately we can help make sure this incompetent clown is not around after June 5th to vote for anymore settlements that would hush up embarrassing revelations about the Culture of Corruption he created while head of the Fullerton Police Department.
Here is City Councilman Don Bankhead, who wants to propose changes to the recommended City position on High Speed Rail. For a while he seems to think he knows what he’s talking about.
Oops. Now we’ll never know what Bankhead thought was necessary to delete before his screen went dark.
I have it on good authority that anti-recall team captain Dick Ackerman has been diligently hounding OC Register personnel to start flogging the wonderful deeds accomplished by the Three Rotten Eggs, Dick Jones, Don Bankhead, and Pat McPension.
Will it work? It’s hard to see how. Two of the three are career public employees with massive inflation-linked pensions; Jones was the drum-beater for the abortive pension spike of 2008 only stopped by Shawn Nelson; Jones and Bankhead have approved of an illegal 10% water tax every year for 15 years; and all three have been reliable water bearers for whatever idiocy was put in front of them by the city bureaucracy.
Ackerman has millions of reasons to fight the recall of the gents who are in the process of handing his client a deal worth millions in government subsidies, but the editorialists at the Register have no reason to promote these clowns.
True, Ackerman is drinking buddies with a couple of the Register social columnists – the same ones that went out of their way to pass on the smears of Ackerman against Chris Norby, and to promote the useless, carpetbagging Ackerwoman.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Ackerman’s efforts to promote the unpromotable, gains traction.
The Fullerton FPD Culture of Corruption just got a new inductee into its Hall of Shame today, as reported by the OC Register’s Sean Emery, here.
It seems that FPD employee April Baughman, 52, is cooling her heels in the County jail, alleged to have swiped cash from the FPD property room for – get this – two freakin’ years!
The money quote comes from our friend “Acting” Chief Dan Hughes who is quoted as saying:
“When there are violations of public trust or actions which result in the reduction of confidence in the police department, disciplinary action will be taken swiftly and decisively.”
Uh, yeah, Dan, sure. Whatever you say. At least we didn’t have to read such inane bullshit as spoken by the otiose Sgt. Goodrich, although he probably wrote it.
Too bad swift and decisive disciplinary action wasn’t taken against the thugs who killed Kelley Thomas until ten weeks after he was murdered.
Just gimme a minute, here.
This latest humiliation begs two questions. One, how could there have been no accounting of property room inventory over this period without the collusion of at least one other miscreant; and two, how much will the Culture of Corruption created by Pat McKinley and tolerated by sleepwalking councilmembers Don Bankhead and Dick Jones end up costing us?
And naturally we are left to ponder the previous assertion of Acting Chief Hughes: anyone who believes there is a Culture of corruption in the FPD is either lying or misinformed.
Newsflash, Chief: we are not lying and we are not misinformed.
Our crazy, ever more left-leaning affiliates at the Orange Juice Blog reported on a story here, about 2nd District Supervisor John Moorlach and his quest to give himself another term in office (there is currently an eight consecutive year limit). His proposal was to amend the County Charter to impose a lifetime limit of three full terms, thereby increasing his tenure by 50%; and he asked his colleagues on the Board to place it on the June ballot.
The proposal was defeated 3-2 with only our own Supervisor, Shawn Nelson supporting the idea letting the voters take a swing at it.
Of course the Moorlach Plan was seen for the self-serving nonsense it was. When so-called conservatives start to confuse their own interest with the public good, it’s waaaaay past time to go. Unfortunately, Moorlach is one of those big idea guys whose big solutions to solve intractable problems just need a little more time to percolate. And then more time. And when the expensive idea ultimately fails we are left to ponder the linguistic and logical gymnastics that convert defeat to victory, or a darn good try, at least an attempt to do something.
What the Supervisors should put on the ballot is a two-term lifetime limit and have done with it. That way we can cycle through losers like Jim Silva, Todd Spitzer, Cynthia Coad, Tom Wilson, and all the other miscreants who agreed to massive retroactive pension spikes, and not have to worry about any of them ever exercising their incompetent misrule in the County Hall of Administration again.
