What is PORAC? The Peace Officers Research Associaion of California is a statewide cop lobby whose contributions go to provide legal aid and comfort to cops, good and bad. We learned about this “research association” last winter as it made a $19,000 contribution to the anti-recall campaign, a failed effort to protect the political hides of the three cop union puppets on the Fullerton City Council. PORAC is also paying the legal bills for the two Fullerton cops, Manny Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, who have been charged with the killing of the mentally ill homeless man, Kelly Thomas.
Now PORAC has a new project: promoting the dubious political fortunes of Sharon Quirk-Silva. Check out the list of supporters on her website.
Now that’s a fine collection of educrats, far left leaning politicos that have helped tank California, and of course, unions that greased their skids. But really, Sharon, PORAC? Can you really be that clueless? Or is it just desperation?
All this talk about Fullerton cop union boss Barry Coffman has resurrected fond memories of the hilarious video we shared last fall, after the notorious FPD Excessive Horning harassment episode. It seems that good ol’ Barry was one of the principle performers in Dan Hughes’ circus. Enjoy once more:
A Friend forwarded this e-mail purportedly sent to Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz. Personally, I don’t mind having a beer or four for lunch before returning to the gun store, but I don’t wear a badge.
Please look into allegations that officers of the Fullerton police attended a training class on Oct. 18th, Tuesday and during their lunch break drank beers at Roscoe’s in Fullerton before returning to training.
Officers drank beer in front of LT Crum and his Sgt’s and none of them took any action for this obvious policy violation..
I apologize for the anonymous email, but I’m afraid of retaliation.
Here is a fun e-mail sent out Wednesday by Fullerton cop union boss Barry Coffman. Yes, indeed, Barry is singing the blues, as well he should be. On Tuesday he discovered that the city he thought his union had bought and paid for just wouldn’t stay bought. Here’s Barry’s sob story:
Dear FPOA Member,
Last night we witnessed that the City of Fullerton can be bought. The citizens of Fullerton, or a least a small percentage of them, have spoken and decided that a change was needed. By now I’m sure you’re all aware of the city council recall and know what I’m talking about.
I suspect that besides the changing of the guard on the city council, there will be many other changes that will affect the city’s employees from the top all the way down to the bottom of all the bargaining units. The new city council will want to establish some sort of reform with us to save money.
Of course it’s still too early to tell what these changes will be but there are some ideas that are floating around that aren’t out of the realm of possibility of happening. First and foremost, our contract takes us through 2014. Remember we added an additional 1 year extension that only WE can choose to utilize if we so desire that would make us safe through 2015. My guess is that we will probably pull the trigger on the extension but we’ll wait and see how things are two years from now.
The city could also ask us to re-open our current contract and renegotiate. I’m fairly certain their reason wouldn’t involve us getting a raise or some other increased benefit. I would always be open to hear what the city has to say but we signed a contract and I feel the city should honor its end of the deal as we would.
I spoke with our attorney Rob Wexler about the city trying to null and void our contract before it expires. He said that the only way for this to happen is if the city declares bankruptcy. This very thing happened in 2008 with the City of Vallejo, CA. They filed Chapter 9 bankruptcy citing one of many reasons being employee contracts and their inability to pay them along with retirees. Their POA took the city to court stating the city purposely created a fiscal crisis to break their contracts with the association. The POA lost and now has a new contract with fewer employees.
Could something like this happen here in Fullerton? Maybe, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
There has been a lot of talk about the Orange County Sheriff’s Department coming in to take us over as a contract city. It’s my understanding that the sheriff’s department would want to have a legitimate city council vote or city manager requesting a cost pricing for their services. They will not do a pricing just because someone asks them to. Again our contract will come into play since they would not want to interfere with it and get involved with what would surely be a fight between our association and the city.
Another issue would be the City of Fullerton trying to become a charter city. I don’t know all the pros and cons or intricacies of a charter city but my understanding is the rules change somewhat when it comes to local versus state control regarding local affairs. The City of Costa Mesa has been trying to become one. They want to be able to control their employee’s wages by outsourcing much of their city services to private companies or other agencies at usually lower cost.
Could something like this happen here in Fullerton? Maybe, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
If you haven’t been following the news in San Diego and San Jose, you probably should. The voters in San Jose successfully passed a measure that would help curb retirement cost. Employees would be required to contribute significantly more towards their current retirement formula or choose to opt out to a retirement plan which would offer fewer benefits. San Diego voters passed a ballot initiative that would replace guaranteed pensions with 401(k) style plans for most new hires. I’m sure both ballot measures will be challenged in the courts and we’ll have to wait and see how they turn out.
Could something like this happen here in Fullerton? Maybe, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
No one really knows what will happen over the course of the next few years. A few of the soon-to-be city council members have made it perfectly clear that they want to put our associations in check and have us pay more towards our retirements and anything else they can. Depending if they want to play by the rules and meet and confer as required, we could see ourselves tangled up in a legal battle like many associations across the state.
So as I close this message of doom and gloom, I don’t want to create a panic. We are a professional organization and we still have a job to do. Let’s keep up the great work we do and not fuel the argument that we are just running amuck out there. We know that’s not true and no other agency would be able to provide the same level of service to the citizen of Fullerton.
If you have any questions or concerns, you know how to get a hold of me.
Be safe out there,
Barry fpoapresident@gmail.com — Barry Coffman-President Fullerton Police Officer’s Association
Reform of a corrupt police department? Could something like this happen here in Fullerton? Maybe, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
Echoing the sentiments of his boss and apparent mentor, Acting Police Chief Dan Hughes, Fullerton cop union leader Barry Coffman says those who characterize the FPD as having a corruption problem are misinformed. Here are his exact words from a Register article.
“I think they are misinformed,” Coffman said about anyone saying the department has had corruption. “They don’t know what corrupt is. … They take this Kelly Thomas incident and say there has been a cover-up. Just because they didn’t get information when they wanted it, they conclude there is corruption.”
Predictably, Coffman chooses to gloss over the long string of malfeasance perpetrated by members of the FPD, mostly card-carrying members of his own union. See, Barry is suddenly confronted with the very real possibility that Fullerton might consider outside offers to take over policing in Fullerton, offers that could save as much as $10,000,000, annually.
Well, Mr. Excessive Horning has a selective and self-serving memory. I don’t. Here’s what I remember from just the past year:
Albert Rincon – Accused of multiple sexual assaults. City styles two cases for $350,000.
Todd Major – Fraud. Ripped off Explorers.
Kelly Mejia – Grand theft.
Miguel Siliceo – misidentification of suspect. Wrong guy spends 5 moths in jail.
Vince Mater – Charged by DA with destruction of evidence in jail suicide case.
Manuel Ramos – Accused of assaulting disabled man in June, 2011.
Kenton Hampton – Accused of battery and false arrest against Veth Mam and Edward Quinonez. Cooked up story to attempt to convict Mam. Jury acquits Mam.
Frank Nguyen – bogus testimony in Mam case.
Robert “Go home or go to jail” Kirk – Threatens law abiding citizens with jail for watching the FPD at work. Later spotted in the “excessive horning” debacle.
Perry Thayer – accused of roughing up downtown visitor
Cary Tong – ditto
April Baughman – stole from the FPD property room for two years before getting caught. Hmm. No accomplices? No inventory?
Andrew Goodrich – peddled falsehoods about the Kelly Thomas killing that were never retracted.
Barry Coffman(!) – proud participant in Dan Hughes’ excessive horning scam.
Tom “Tango” Basham – allegedly the watch commander the night of the Thomas murder, and player #1 in the subsequent cover up.
Christopher Wren – off the hook in the Rincon assaults, but plead no contest to “false imprisonment” against some kid in the IE – bargaining down battery charges. Anger management took care of his legal problems. Ours are still pending.
Dan Hughes – boss of all the above
Etc., etc.
Of course the “incident” with Kelly Thomas stands in a class by itself for malicious, incompetence, and murderous thuggery. We will always remember the names Ramos, Wolfe, Cicinelli, Blatney, Craig. Oh and let’s not forget our old friend Hampton.
The bloated Ramos. Hard to tell where the cop ends and the night begins.
UPDATE. From KNBC: “Sgt. Jeff Stuart, a Fullerton Police Department spokesman, did not return a call seeking comment.”
Now that’s not very good way to improve communication with the community, now is it?
– Mr. Peabody
Over at the OC Weekly, ace reporter R. Scott Moxley has written a post detailing an incident between Fullerton cop Manny Ramos and a 58 year old disabled guy named Mark Edwin Walker. It appears the gist of the thing is that last June 21, two weeks before he instigated the Kelly Thomas murder, Ramos, without provocation or cause, confronted Walker outside an Albertson’s in Fullerton, threw the man to the ground, stomped on him and tossed him in jail, charged with public intoxication, resisting arrest, or some other such nonsense.
Subsequently a judge threw the case out and Walker lawyered up. Of course this is all Walker’s story and it may be self-serving; but it also sounds a heckuva lot like the Veth Mam case. Who’s a jury going to believe now?
Acting Chief Dan Hughes has been trying real hard lately to peddle the notion that he is in charge of a new and improved Fullerton Police Department, even though when you get right down to it there really wasn’t all that much to fix – just some irritating communication problems.
Although the scribes at the OC Register have apparently bought into this malarky, others who have seen the veritable conga line of crime perpetrated by the boys and girls in FPD blue, are a long way from being convinced. After all, the first step toward recovery is admitting the problem right?
Which is all preliminary to the point of this post.
Our FPD deep cover source informs us that Hughes is pressing to have three of the cops who ganged up on Kelly Thomas, and who stood around as he gasped his last breaths in the gutter, return to active duty. That would be cops Hampton, Blatney, and Craig. Of course he needs the DAs assurance that these goons won’t be prosecuted for anything. Which is why he came out with all that BS about how he and his boys were part of the “prosecution team” and why Tony Rackaukas praised the FPD for all their hard work for the benefit of Lou Ponsi. Looks like that deal’s done. It’s all about damage control now, and surely the City’s highly paid lawyer Michael Gennaco chipped in to help exonerate the three accomplices though his double top-secret report.
We have also been informed that although he is formally being fired, a back room deal is in the works to reward Joe Wolfe, the thug who started the murderous beat down on Kelly Thomas, with a nice, fat disability claim if he goes quietly. Of course we’ve been told that Wolfie re-injured his shoulder in the “tussle”, most likely bashing Kelly’s face with his elbow. That ought to good for a hundred thou’ of our money, give or take. Nice.
Not long ago I discovered this anonymous note on my vehicle:
Below is a retirement flyer of a recently retired FPD lieutenant – some guy named Tom “Tango” Basham. Somebody thinks he’s a “top cop.”
Was this the man who was on duty back at the station on July 5th 2011 and who remotely watched the murder of Kelly Thomas? Was he the guy who later let the perps watch the video and write, then re-write reports?
Has this retired cop now been hired back by Acting Chief Dan Hughes as a paid double-dipper? If so, what for, and for how much? In 2011 this valuable piece of manpower pulled in over $148,000, so his pension, of course, is already huge.
Nope. It’s a reminder of how a one-eyed cop was hired by the City of Fullerton to patrol our streets with badge, gun, taser and who knows what else.
Here ya go sonny...
It is now pretty common knowledge that Jay Cicinelli was put on a disability pension by Bernard Parks, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department following a horrific shooting of the six-week rookie cop. Smart move. Among other injuries, Cicinelli lost his left eye.
But Cicinelli’s dream of being a policeman was not to end so quickly. For he had an ally in the figure of Mike Hillman, a gung-ho cop’s cop – the type whose worldview divides people into two groups: cops and everybody else; and Hillman was determined to put the one-eyed cop back on the streets somewhere – anywhere.
Hillman’s thoughts turned to little Fullerton, California where his one-time boss in the LAPD, Pat McKinley, had been appointed police chief. And what followed was a decision so incompetent and self-serving that it eclipses all of McKinley’s other disastrous personnel decisions – and that’s saying a helluva lot.
Should be considered armed and dangerous...
McKinley hired Cicinelli, gave him a badge, fire arms, and the keys to a patrol car, a decision so reckless and with such blatant disregard for the safety of the public and his own policemen, that he should have been immediately fired.
But he wasn’t, of course, and nobody else seemed to care. And Cicinelli remained on the force, a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. And when it finally did, the result was a dead man and a series of huge civil payouts to the man’s family. The first payout was for $1,000,000. More are coming.
Meanwhile, the miscreant who hired Cicinelli and all the other thugs, goons. thieves, con men, pickpockets, kidnappers, perjurers, destroyers of evidence, and sex offenders is sitting on our city council, voting on the settlements his employees caused, that will have to be paid byus.
It’s not easy to do damage control when you keep inviting more questions that you are pretending to answer. Of course when you are dealing with the incurious stooges at the OC Register maybe you believe you’re getting away with it.
The latest episode in the FPD PR campaign is an attempt by Acting Chief Dan Hughes to deflect criticism by acknowledging the error of letting his cops watch the Kelly Thomas murder video before writing their reports, a thing he finally admits he’s never heard of before.
Hughes said he argued against letting the officers watch the tape, in part because civilians suspected of misconduct would not be given the same opportunity. He said he did not think it was illegal or unethical, but did fear it would erode public trust in the investigation. “That was a mistake from our department,” he said.
Here we see Danny Boy defending himself: he argued with some unnamed somebody, somewhere, somehow, against letting the killers watch the video, but we are meant to believe that he was overruled. But by whom? Chief Sellers wasn’t there. Was he contacted? He was Hughes’ only boss. Was it a fellow captain? If so what was that man’s name? Lou Ponsi doesn’t seem to be very curious. Of course there is the very real possibility that Hughes is just lying to protect himself well after the fact. And notice that the mistake was made by “the department” an entity that can’t be disciplined.
Eleven months after the fact Hughes would have us believe he was oh, so concerned about the severity of the incident. And yet we now know that last fall, many weeks after Hughes had seen the video and heard the audio, he was insinuating to protesters that the after they actually viewed the video their outrage would be mollified. Hmm.
The rest of the story is just a pathetic attempt to take credit for the investigation and ultimate prosecution of Ramos and Cicinelli. Read this tripe and try not to barf:
But even as the officers collected their thoughts, crime-scene technicians and detectives were picking over the scene of the bloody confrontation with Kelly Thomas as if it had been an officer-involved shooting, Hughes said. The criminal case now facing two of those officers, he said, was built in large part on the police work done by their own department.
And more:
But, he said, it was Fullerton police work that put Fullerton police officers in criminal court. He pointed to the words of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas: “They went to the scene, they preserved the evidence, they did all the things they were supposed to do.”
A video of the confrontation spliced with audio from the officers’ recordings, produced by the Fullerton police, was the centerpiece of a recent preliminary hearing for Ramos and Cicinelli. They were ordered to stand trial, Ramos on charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, Cicinelli on charges of involuntary manslaughter and excessive force.
“It doesn’t matter who the defendants are,” Hughes said. “We are part of the prosecution team.”
Oh, brother, what a load of unadulterated bullshit passed along by the compliant scribes at the Register. Nobody “picked over” anything. We’ve already shown pictures of cops trampling all over the crime scene, and as far as collecting evidence is concerned, the only things collected were the cell phones and camera film of witnesses who happened to record the murder. The idea of the FPD investigating itself is utterly comical.
And, ultimately it’s still all about “poor communication,” really. Not much worse than a little bad luck if you think about it.
“I don’t believe there was any intention at all to mislead our community,” Hughes said. But, he added, “we should have did a better job” of communicating – a common theme in his account of the aftermath of Kelly Thomas’ death. In the future, he said, he and his top commanders will handle public communication duties during major incidents.
The department, he said, “did a very poor job of communicating to the community.”
Unfortunately the slug who was tasked with public communication, and who failed so dismally either through incompetence or malice, was actually just promoted a few weeks ago. What’s that Dan, we can’t hear you?
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out just a couple of the of the other instances of biased writing by the pathetic little fool, Ponsi. We have seen the obnoxious description of the cops “collecting their thoughts” as opposed to, say, “getting their stories straight.” You can’t note how Thomas is described as “rangy” a term that is certainly more threatening than “skinny,” because this has now been removed out of the post. But there is still the utterly objectionable use of the phrase: “As the confrontation escalated,” a literary device meant to deflect responsibility for the crime from the cops Ramos and Wolfe to some unknown cosmic force. Things just happen.
