Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Yesterday we had some fun with a self-righteous, pearl-clutching visitor calling him/herself “Bertha Washington” who seemed peeved that her/his Heroes on the Fullerton city payroll were being impugned. It doesn’t seemed to have entered this empty cranium that perhaps, just maybe, these miscreants deserved a wee ladling o’ the disapprobation.
Today we entertain guesses from the Friends as to the identity of Dear Bertha.
Have at it!
Over at his website called Fullerton Stories some poor fellow named Davis Barber has felt the need to unburden his soul of lots of weighty thoughts, n’ stuff. Most of the rather embarrassing dissertation is another lame defense of the Fullerton status quo, and the attack on “protesters,” including FFFF, that we have become all too familiar with from City Hall cronies pretending to be journalists.
But there is one part of this coughed-up pabulum that just has to be read, and re-read, to be believed.
• Blame the messenger/Fullerton Police Sergeant Andrew Goodrich lied about, well, everything: FullertonStories.com does not agree. While there may be reason to doubt statements from Sgt. Goodrich, calling him a liar is un-called for and wrong. It’s his job to tell “the people” what he knows.
Surely this guy must be joking. Can’t this genius see the problem with his own assessment? Why in the world is there ” reason to doubt statements from Sgt. Goodrich”? Because he made up stories that were not true and passed them to “the people” via complacent boobs like Davis Barber. That’s called lying. And people who lie are liars. Quod erat demonstrandum.
On the subject of liars in 2011, and changing gears somewhat, one thing I would like to know is how Mr. Barber came into contact with the so-called homeless jewelry peddler named Richard Fritschie; the guy who popped up almost on cue, claiming to be an eye-witness to the Thomas murder and who tried to exonerate the cops of any wrong-doing. That whole thing stank like a rotting corpse.
Of course the DA’s description of events from the audio and video record proved that Fritschie was a liar, but the question remains – why?
Lots of people have wondered who set up that con man with his mark.
Guess so, but it seems to be oddly short, and it doesn’t appear to be for loud, sloppy drunks.
Yesterday, Brandon Ferguson of The OC Weekly posted a story about how he has been banned from the Slidebar bar, presumably for sharing the allegation that it was a Slidebar employee who made that fateful call that somebody appeared to be breaking into cars in the parking lot. That call, whoever made it, led to the cop torture and beating death of Kelly Thomas, a homeless man, last July 5th .
Of course no evidence has ever been presented that anybody was breaking into cars, and no evidence linking Thomas to any illegal act.
Incidentally, the other day Brandon Ferguson noted that The Weekly was getting the cold shoulder from FPD spokesphincter Andrew Goodrich, apparently because of Marisa Gerber’s Fringie® winning expose on the rampant Culture of Corruption in Goodrich’s department: you know, all that garbage he neglects to inform his employers (us) about. That got Marisa hollered at by the arrogant swine.
I’m really starting to like this Ferguson guy.
What’s that you say, Harpoon?
Here’s a story from CNN about how Egyptian military authorities subjected arrested women protesters to strip searches and “virginity tests.”
Here’s the money quotation from one of the charming gentlemen generals who run that unfortunate land:
“The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine,” the general told CNN at the time. “These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs).”
Now does that sound familiar? Oh, yeah, right. The She Bear at the Soroptimists. Maybe we should invite Amnesty International to Fullerton to check up on Chief McKinley and his She Bear.
Here’s a Lou Ponsi effort from The Register, December 21.
Describing ongoing investigations by a special consultant, Ponsi notes a second investigation, as described by outgoing “Acting Chief” Kevin Hamilton:
a second (investigation) is on “allegations of misinformation disseminated from Fullerton P.D,” Hamilton said;
Wow. I didn’t know Michael Gennaco had been directed to look into the disinformation campaign waged by the FPD in the aftermath of the Kelly Thomas killing. Maybe I wasn’t paying sufficient attention. It’s going to be really hard for Gennaco to whitewash the various and multiple deliberate falsehoods uttered by police spokeshole Andrew Goodrich.
After the killing, when the perp-cops were still on duty pretending nothing had happened, Goodrich began lying to the press. First was the characterization of Thomas as combative and violent, two assertions we now know were false; then there was the whopper about cops receiving serious injuries – broken bones in fact. Later Goodrich was forced to admit to squishy “soft tissue” injuries of some sort, although the broken bone lies and the mischaracterization of the beating death, alternatively as a “tussle,” “scuffle,” “confrontation,” or “fight” was perpetuated, and never corrected. In fact Register scribes still insist on avoiding the use of the phrase “beating death.”
Goodrich was also quick to note that Thomas had objects not his own in his possession, that he knew was nothing more than trash fished out of a train station trash can.
Goodrich whoppers in other cases surfaced this fall, too. Like the sad defense of Kenton Hampton and Frank Nguyen whose untruths were an attempt to convict the completely innocent Veth Mam of assaulting cops. After a jury unanimously acquitted Mam, Goodrich’s lame defense was that the cops did not commit perjury because they thought they had the right man, a story that requires us to substitute utter incompetence for outright perjury. Well, take your pick. It hardly matters anymore.
If Gennaco’s investigation really is legit, and if Goodrich wants to save his oily hide, he may have to finger somebody higher up.
In any case, let’s hope the new “Acting” Chief Hughes starts acting, and starts by putting the odious and arrogant Goodrich where he belongs – behind the wheel of a squad car; or better yet, pounding the Barf Beat in downtown Fullerton.
That is a rather provocative question, and it came up in a comments thread in another post. The comments were by frequent guest “Vernon Dozier” and our own one-armed gunslinger, Joe Sipowicz. Here’s what they had to say:
#48 by Vernon Dozier on December 22, 2011
There is zero, I repeat zero evidence that the entire Fullerton Police Department is corrupt. Some of the people on this blog have such hatred for police in general they will go after anybody in the department for no reason at all.
I think it’s completely reasonable to point out the faults of the police here, but it needs to be tempered with the GOOD that is done by the GOOD officers of the department. The morale is very bad at the Fullerton PD right now. An insider recently told me that numerous officers are considering employment with other cities. Who’s going to replace them? Who would want to work for Fullerton PD when certain residents – and commenters on this blog – automatically will hate them because of their career choice? The longer people continue with unsubstantiated trash talk, the worse this problem becomes.
Eventually it will get so bad, the only people willing to work for Fullerton PD are clones of Cicinelli and Ramos.
Do you really want that?
#49 by Joe Sipowicz on December 22, 2011
Vernon, your statement rests upon the definition of “corrupt.”
How can so many instances of law-breaking by members of the FPD have occurred without the knowledge and silent acquiescence of the whole crowd. I am not being flip here. We’ve identified around twenty cops with direct knowledge or participation in crimes/coverups. So what was Hughes doing? What was Hamilton doing? What were the rest of the 120 sworn cops doing?
That’s right, going along – for their FPOA brethren, their early retirement and their six-figure pensions.
Is that a form of corruption? You tell me.
Good point, counter point. Do good people look the other way when bad things are being done? Does that make them no longer good? Feel free to share your thoughts.
As to Vernon’s point about good cops not wanting to work in the current environment, that’s hard to argue with. However, I would think that good cops would want to work in an environment where honor really means something. Right now it’s all a sham and almost everyone knows it. And it’s not “trash talk” to call it like it is.
We need a new, zero-tolerance cop culture run by a chief who will not mistake protecting the institution with his real responsibility to the people of Fullerton. Hard to find? probably. Can our current council find the right man, or woman? Unlikely. But it’s a job that needs to be done and soon.
As the criminal, federal and civil lawsuit costs keep mounting, not even the most die-hard FPD defenders will be able to deny it.
Last night my compadre the Harpoon penned an angry response to words attributed to outgoing “Acting” Chief Kevin Hamilton that Fullerton was “a town under attack.”
It was a good try, but Harpoon missed the point. Fullerton is under attack!
Fullerton is under attack by a rogue police force that couldn’t control its own uniformed hoodlums, even if it wanted to. And apparently it doesn’t.
Fullerton is under attack by a sclerotic trio of antiquated imbeciles who will never take responsibility for their own failure of leadership.
Fullerton is under attack by a bureaucracy that has fraudulently duped the water rate payers for at least 15 years by tacking on a 10% tax on their water bills without a single effort to inform them about it. Every step of the way in this squalid scam the City Council nodded agreement, and said nothing.
Fullerton is under attack from the Redevelopment Army of jobbers, fixers, bag, men, whores, and other assorted camp followers who want to divert funds from necessary public use into the pockets of favored “developers,” consultants, and lobbyists. And our Three Sclerotic Tree Sloths? Bamboozled? Of course not. These supposedly staunch conservatives are hooked on the smack of Central Government Economic Planning like a street hype is to his junk.Jones even referred to Redevelopment money as candy to be handed out to deserving kids.
Think the threat is false? Even now the Three Dry Wells are pursuing a legal battle to illegally broaden Fullerton’s Redevelopment zone into areas where there is no blight, a basic legal requirement.
Fullerton is under attack by an ignorant, somnolent, rude, self-righteous Turgid Trio that has left the city’s infrastructure a mess, the citizens in fear of their safety, and budget reserves depleted.
Yes Fullerton is under attack. Harpoon got one thing right. We are Fullerton. And we’re fighting back
In case you missed it, the City Hall cheerleading Fullerton Stories website did a typical fluff post on the departure of Sylvia Palmer-Mudrick, the person who has been writing all those propaganda press releases that Jackie Brown, Barbara Giasone, and Lou Ponsi have been re-typing under their own names for the past twenty-five years. Good-bye Sylvia, enjoy your pension.
What caught my eye was the remarkable quote by four-month old “Acting” Chief (and soon to be massive pension recipient) Kevin Hamilton, who coughed up this oily hairball:
“Sylvia loves this town with all of her heart. She’s (recently) seen a side of Fullerton she’s never seen before … a town under attack.
“She continues to defend the reputation of this city, and she would give her life for this town,” Hamilton said.
A town under attack? Really?
And just who the in Hell do you think you are you jackass? It was your police force that robbed, beat up, perjured, sexually assaulted, and murdered innocent citizens. How goddam dare you claim that the City is under attack.Your filthy, corrupt department is under attack – by us, the citizens of Fullerton. We are the City, not you and your gang of thugs, hoodlums and pickpockets.
The old one lasted four months and the one before that hightailed it for the tall grass when the going got tough. Boy did he get going.
Anyway, the new man is 28 year FPD veteran Captain Dan Hughes, who was the boss of all those rogue cops we’ve been telling you about lately, so that’s a real bad sign right there. Was he part of the report write-and-rewrite perpetrated by the killers of Kelly Thomas? Such things are not for the public to know, and you can bet your last nickel City Manager Joe Felz hasn’t got the huevos to find out. Hughes also got kudos from folks for tearing up the “excessive horning” tickets of which he was seen orchestrating the issuance. ¡No bueno, numero dos!
Anyway II, the OC Weekly’s Brandon Ferguson tells about it here. Follow his link to the vapid Fullerton Chamber of Commerce website where its writer manages to scribble twelve paragraphs on Fullerton’s police chief carousel without a single word or even oblique reference to murders, perjury, assaults, sexual battery, theft, fraud, etc., etc. Too bad the Fringies® are over, or else we’d wave a real winner there in the stoogery category.
As if they didn’t have enough problems already, the Fullerton Police Department may have a new issue to grapple with: the wrath of the Almighty. According to Brandon Ferguson of the OC Weekly, a couple of Fullerton cops rudely broke up an annual celebration in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe over in an east-side alley. According to a witness one cop was heard to yell “I don’t give a fuck. You have to end this, or you’re getting arrested.”
¡Ay caramba! As they say, ¡No bueno! What’s next for FPD? Breaking down the doors of the church because the music is too loud?
The best part of the story is that apparently FPD spokes-stool Andrew Goodrich has decided to play hard to get with the Weekly in retribution for Marisa Gerber’s magisterial story of FPD law breaking and goonery. Important job tip, Andy: angering the media is no way for an under-employed PR jerk-off to make friends.