My name is Amy Parker, and I’m the General Secretary of the California State University, Fullerton chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), also known as Titan YDSA. On April 16, I – along with many other members of Titan YDSA and several other concerned residents of Fullerton – attended a meeting of the Fullerton City Council, where they voted to reauthorize Fullerton’s military equipment use policy.
We came Tuesday night, many of us for the first time, to work to make this community safer. Even in Fullerton, systemic over-policing and the over-deployment of force are still a problem; lower-income and more diverse communities in Fullerton are constant subjects of police encounters. The use of far more force than was necessary has even started to have ripple effects; Alejandro Campos Rios, a Buena Park resident, got killed because our police department over-responded – executing the man, who was unarmed at the time of his death, with five beanbag shotgun rounds to the chest.
Fullerton has always been a leader in working to make our city safer through reasonable restrictions on the police. In 2011, after Kelly Thomas was killed, our city pushed through many changes to help keep the community safe, including large amounts of demilitarization. In 2020, the Police Department, in collaboration with the City Council, changed the official response to peaceful protests to be no police response, eliminating the previous dangerous standard of sending out North County SWAT to every minor public action.
Upon hearing that Fullerton was voting on reauthorizing its military equipment use policy, we in Titan YDSA knew that there was a potential to move Fullerton – and other cities – forward in protecting the public from excessive use of force by police. Across Orange County, there has been a high amount of conservative backsliding, from Orange Unified outing trans students to attempts in Irvine to limit the ability of the public to protest. The two cities least affected by this have been Santa Ana, which is already dealing with other issues with their police, and Fullerton. We are in the position to help change the trends of police holding of military equipment; if we change, the surrounding cities can change, the county can change, and maybe even the state at large can change.
Voting no wouldn’t have made Fullerton the first city to fully demilitarize its police. In preliminary compliance with AB 481, Antioch City Council passed a resolution banning all police use of military equipment. While they later passed an AB 481 policy, it kept out several of the provisions that Fullerton included – such as the “emergency” provision, which allows Fullerton PD to completely disregard all acquisition and use rules as long as they inform City Council within 30 days. In response, the crime rate in Antioch hasn’t gone up; it’s plummeted – from nearly 5000 arrests per year a decade ago to only 1000 a year now, with calls for service and police reports also falling in kind.
Fullerton PD insists that it doesn’t use what “most people” would consider military equipment – but that is plainly false. In the City Council meeting, they revealed that they do use armored personnel carriers – carriers they put to use often, as they’re used in the official recruitment video for the department. Drones are deployed throughout the city for surveillance, generating Fourth Amendment concerns. “Long-range acoustic devices” – commonly known as LRADs – are also possessed by Fullerton PD and are tools that, in our context, can only really be used against protests and other large crowds.
Beanbag shotguns are also included in the policy. The department insists that they’re “less-lethal” (not “less-than-lethal,” or as Councilmember Shana Charles insisted, “non-lethal”), which is of very little solace to the dead. We aren’t the only city to have people get killed by these weapons; from Sun City, Kansas, to New South Wales, Australia, to Clear Creek, Colorado, too many innocent – and generally unarmed – people are dying as police decide they can use these “tools” with impunity. We may have temporarily suspended the usage of these until the investigation – which was taken over by the state Department of Justice – is concluded; however, not passing the policy would have made this prohibition permanent, keeping the city safe.
From Kelly Thomas to Alejandro Campos Rios and all the other dangerous interactions that we and other residents of the city have personally had with police, we know just how much power the police already have. This type of equipment is ready for immediate deployment in our city, and it is just not necessary. Mutual aid agencies – like the OC Sheriff – are ready to respond to any mass act of violence in our city; we simply don’t need all this equipment, much of which is incredibly expensive, on hand at all times.
I call on the City Council to reverse its decision to pass this policy. It wasn’t even passed by the full Council – Mayor Nick Dunlap was absent, and Mayor Pro Tem Fred Jung (who was in attendance via Zoom) left prior to the item coming up on the agenda. Regardless, this decision is not permanent, and the City Council can undo it – whether in a few meetings or when it has to be reauthorized next year. Let’s keep this city safe and do what’s right so that there’s no more bloodshed by our police on Fullerton’s streets.
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Categories: Community Voices, Local Government, Local News
We need more police with more authority. They can’t keep anyone safe any longer because they might hurt someone’s feelings. As for the Kelly death, hello his own family didn’t want him around, but boy they had their hand out with a lawsuit. We’re so tired of hearing from know it all students who know nothing. You just think you do. Get another 30 years on you and you will see what life is about. Ya for Fullerton police. I’d rather see our streets fixed but know it all students don’t know anything about them
If you think you don’t know what life is about, please reconsider; you don’t know all of what I’ve been through. I’ve been a direct witness to murder, in multiple bomb and shooting threat lockdowns, been a victim of grand theft, and have had many more experiences in kind. My positions are not in spite of these, but rather in facing the reality that police militarization can only further endanger a community. Reasonable utilization of equipment and, when unfortunately necessary, force is not something I, or anyone else there that night, opposed; what we opposed was Fullerton PD spending the money of the taxpayers on absurdly excessive equipment, often dangerous to even the most law-abiding of citizens, when mutual aid organizations in horrendous scenarios exist (OC Sheriff for instance, which maintains even more absurd quantities of equipment Fullerton can draw from when necessary; hell, in the worst of cases, FPD could loan from the National Guard armory in Fullerton).
“We’re so tired of hearing from know-it-all students who know nothing. You just think you do.”
Hear! Hear! Amen! It takes real hubris to believe that you know it all and to be so disrespectful and petulant to everyone you disagree with at such a young age. These Baby Marxists need to look at the planks in their own eyes before they complain about the splinters in everyone else!
Maybe Amy can school us on what Democratic Socialism is. I would love to read an article in the Observer about that.
Bernie Sanders and AOC are Democratic Socialists.
Democratic Socialism opposes dictators and authoritarian governments and is not the same as “National Socialism” (of hitler’s Germany) which people are right to be scared of.
I think it is what countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and more have – a mixture of ideas of how to provide necessities of life for all people – and give workers fair pay instead of funneling huge profits to the top and creating working poor and a huge population of people with nothing left to lose at the bottom.
If Bernie Sanders and AOC are your heroes and best examples of brilliance, you’re already too far gone to save. You may love to read an article about them but 99% of the rest of the populace does not.
As said in another comment, I don’t support Bernie or AOC.
We know. Too far right for your tastes.
Bernie and AOC are not Socialists, they just play them on TV.
If the article I submitted gets published – that’ll provide an explanation
I agree that this issue should be brought back to the full council for a new vote as both Dunlap and Jung were mysteriously absent at this session.
Amy and her group made very good comments at the city council meeting and the letter above and the links to source material makes sense to why we should reign in purchase and use of military equipment.
The huge cost of this equipment is also a factor that was not discussed and should be looked at.
Anyone viewing the FPD recruitment video would not recognize Fullerton. The recruitment video alone will attract the wrong kind of personnel to the police department – the type we have already had to fire in the past for overly aggressive actions. (For perspective – compare Irvine’s police recruitment video.)
The “Voice of OC” published several interesting stories about the issue of police department use of military equipment. Fullerton Police Department’s Community Policing plan is the way we should be heading. And a look at what kinds of calls the police department actually gets should be looked at. We need to support our police officers with better training not military weapons.
I find it oddly ironic that you and your lot would have the police department less able to deal with situations while one of the tactics in your kit is to be disruptive when you don’t get your way. The screaming and yelling you and your fellow “students” did the other night after you didn’t receive the outcome you wanted, I would liken to what a 5 year old does when they don’t get their way.
At which point the meeting had to be set in recess and you were all escorted out by the police. Funny no mention of this in your piece above.
I would just suggest that in the future, if you would like to play adult that you try harder to conduct yourself as such.
Your points made were not bad, but your behavior screams (no pun intended) otherwise.
> At which point the meeting had to be set in recess
Given after a few seconds we all started voluntarily walking out, setting the meeting into recess was completely unnecessary – in fact, since they cut the video at that point, I find it very concerning that they did so. Even the CSU Board of Trustees doesn’t recess their meetings when they have the entire room, with every seat filled, chanting against them – City Council had no reason to do so either.
> you were all escorted out by the police
This is not the case, we left voluntarily – and then were stopped outside by multiple officers, including Chief Radus, for a “conversation” once we left.
> I would just suggest that in the future, if you would like to play adult that you try harder to conduct yourself as such. Your points made were not bad, but your behavior screams (no pun intended) otherwise.
I can’t say I care very much about respectability politics when the Councilmembers and Chief decided to misrepresent our points and engaged in minimal actual discussion relating to what we brought up. Prior to this meeting I held several of the Councilmembers in decently high regard, but when you agendize something as serious as this policy on the consent agenda instead of the regular agenda, not respond to the actual points made by commenters, and instead respond to arguments we didn’t even make, that respect decreases. A legitimate dialogue – something back-and-forth, not “ruler over subjects,” and not under looming intimidation from police – is something where respect can be built, maintained, and shared, and if the Councilmembers are reading this, I’d encourage them to set that up – but several of them before and after the meeting presented the discussion after it was pulled from consent as “educating the public” and not “reconsidering the policy,” which doesn’t earn any respect in my view.
In summary: if City Council doesn’t want us to chant, stop giving us reasons to. I would much prefer to have a respectful dialogue with the Council focused on enriching public safety, but as long as that’s not provided (and no, the Chief’s community meetings are not “respectful dialogues”), we have no reason to return that respect. I sincerely hope we can build up those types of respectful dialogues before we hit the ballot boxes in November (or, in the case of Zahra and Charles, in November ’26).
You want to act like a baby, but can’t understand why you are not taken seriously? I have one suggestion for you, if you are interested in making real change, it’s hard to do from behind the podium. Getting a seat at the table is where real change can happen and you don’t get there though being a disruptive nuisance. If you are not worried about giving respect, don’t expect to receive any either.
“and instead respond to arguments we didn’t even make, ”
Oh, dear me, Amy. That’s the very nature of government and politicians: answering questions that nobody asked. It sorta even seems responsive to those who aren’t paying a lot of attention.
For sure – I just had hoped that, based on my previous interactions and discussions with Zahra and Charles, that they would be at least slightly better. Not much better but slightly. Guess not…
Politicians from any party are never slightly better, only worse. Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like public interest.
For those who missed the list of military equipment and cost of each item – here it is.
Total initial expense of military equipment purchases $1,429,454
(Ongoing additional yearly expense minimum $32,800)
•Armored Bearcat Vehicle
$225,000 + $5000 per year maintenance
•Mobile SWAT Command Truck
$60,000 + $5000 per year maintenance
•Mobile SWAT Command Truck
$245,550 + $5000 per year maintenance
•Mobile Command Vehicle
$306,135 + $5000 per year maintenance
•Crisis Negotiation Team Van
$222,035 + $5000 per year maintenance
•Black Van
$28,000 + $5000 per year maintenance
•(15) – M4 Rifles
$22,500
•(2) – Long-range sniper rifles
$2400
•(2) – 40mm multi-launcher
$6400
•Pepperball launcher
$600
•Long Range acoustic device
$8000
•(2) – Breaching shotguns
$1000
•(2) – Rip Rams
$800
•(2)- Rams
$800
•(2) – mini Rams
$1100
•Breachers kit
$700
•DJI Matrice 300 RTK
$11,349 + $2800
•(3) – Unmanned Aircraft Systems (DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Zoom)
$7485
•Unmanned Aircraft Systems (DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual)
$3350
•(2) – Unmanned Aircraft Systems (DJI Mini)
$998
•(160) Rifles (1- Mile shooting range)
$160,000
•(26) – Sponge Guns
$26,000
•(40) – Sponge Rounds
$1500 + more as needed
•(46) – Less Lethal Shotguns
$36,000
•(350) Beanbag rounds
$500
•(13) – Training guns (uses SIM paint rounds)
$7800
•(4000) – SIMS paint rounds
$3000
•(4) – Breaching Tool (ram)
$1400
•(4) – Breaching Tool (sledge)
$500
•(2) – Mobile Command Post
$20,000
•Shield Spike Hammerspike L1
$340
•(2) – Halligan
$400
•(2000) Rounds
$2000
•(2000) 9MM SIMS
$1600
•(37) Tactical Diversionary Device
$1760
•(102) Breaching Shotgun Shells
$703
•(500) Pepperball Projectiles
$1250
•(110) – 37MM/40MM Chemical Agent Ferret Projectiles
$2750
•(12) – SPEDE Heats
$313
•Flameless Tri Chambers
$42
•(94) – Pocket Tactical CS Grenades
$94
•(100) – 40MM Direct Impact Rounds
$2500
•Battery/Hydrauliic Handy Rescue System
$5000
There is also a vehicle mounted speaker referred to as a communication device in the required audits of their equipment, but commonly known as a “sound cannon” in the industry. It is capable of broadcasting debilitating levels of noise. It can be seen mounted to the fronts of their urban assault vehicles deployed to confront protests.
And only to confront protests! There’s no legitimate use for it otherwise due to the high effect it has on others who aren’t the target if you’re only targeting one or a few people. “We don’t have military equipment” as they maintain LRADs….
So far, they have only used the LRAD(s) as vehicle mounted speakers to communicate amplified vocal demands/commands to protesters, but they have the capacity to broadcast sound at levels that can cause permanent hearing loss. They should be described as such in the department’s annual inventory.
“In 2011, after Kelly Thomas was killed, our city pushed through many changes to help keep the community safe, including large amounts of demilitarization. ”
Please feel free to enumerate, including who told you this.
This came up in discussions with some councilmembers prior to the meeting. I don’t remember who said what and I’m still looking for the specifics.
Amy – The city hired Micheal Gennaco to investigate the Kelly Thomas killing and what changes should be made at FPD. He came up with 59 changes and FPD made all of them including adding homeless liaison officers and more police training on dealing with people with mental health issues.
However, the video of the killing clearly showed that Kelly wasn’t displaying any mental health problems – he was basically complying with the idiotic demands of an officer with power problems and was beaten to death for trying to escape after that cop promised to beat him up.
The city also created a Homelessness Task Force which recommended, among other things – including better police training – that Fullerton build a homeless shelter with wraparound services (mental, addiction, health, job search, permanent home search, etc) and invest in affordable housing so people wouldn’t end up trying to fend for themselves on the streets.
All this information used to be (and may still be) available on the city website.
Not sure any demilitarization was done since Kelly was killed with boots, fists, and several huge cops piling on top of him. But look for the Gennaco report.
Thank you for the diligent research!
Go talk to Hector Hernandez. Oh wait. You can’t. He was shot to death by the FPD and the incompetent cop who did it is still on the street. Gennaco was a front man, he is hired by police departments to limit the damage caused by bad cops. His only response to the KT murder was to scold Andrew Goodrich for lying. Goodrich got a promotion. You people will do anything to avoid holding police accountable.
The demilitarization of the police has never happened and has nothing to to with the murder of KT, just like that killing had zero to do with homelessness.
Gennaco also recommended adding police oversight by outsourcing it—to someone like him, which is exactly what the council did. Say, whatever happened to Gennaco?
Thanks for the greater clarification. I’m usually generally skeptical of what anyone in government says, and that includes the Councilmembers – but I guess even then I wasn’t skeptical enough…
And, so Zahra and Charles voted for this policy, right?
Unfortunately yes, they both did.
If Bernie Sanders and AOC are your heroes and best examples of brilliance, you’re already too far gone to save.
Can’t say I’m a fan of either of them.
I am a fan of both Bernie and AOC. The pair would be way better than the choices we have now for president and VP. Their ideas about how we can make the country work for everyone- in part by taxing people making over $400,000 a year fairly – and taxing corporations fairly – and universal healthcare – and fair wages for workers – gun control – sustainable energy – end of US support of weapons to Israel in Gaza genocide – and more – all great.
But – all this is off the local topic of whether we should spend millions to allow military equipment for our police department. We could use that money for road repair, or a decent homeless shelter.
The top 16% of earners pay 75.8% of federal income taxes in 2021. If that isn’t being taxed “fairly”, I’d hate to see what your warped socialist mind thinks is “fair”. Being a socialist, you’re probably not a big fan of facts or data. You conflate envy with fairness.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
Looks like someone accidentally exposed their alternate usernames…..
and here’s my question: what percent do the top 0.1% pay? and what is their effective tax rate?
The top 16% of earners pay 75.8% of federal income taxes. If you don’t think that is “taxing fairly”, I’d hate to see what you think is “fair”. Perhaps you conflate envy with fairness.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
The top 16% of earners pay 75.8% of federal income taxes. If you don’t think that is “taxing fairly”, I’d hate to see what you think is “fair”. Perhaps you conflate envy with fairness.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
The top 16% of earners pay 75.8% of federal income tax. You conflate envy with fairness.
taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal
I’m very grateful to all of those who showed up to meeting to express discontent over city council approving military-grade equipment for our pd. I wanted to attend this meeting but was unable to and felt so much disappointment when I’d heard that it was approved. The only comfort was discovering that I’m not alone in having concerns about our pd’s budget and acquisition of costly, unnecessary equipment that only puts the community at higher risk of violence. Thank you again to all of you who showed up, and also to Amy, for courageously writing this open letter, even though I’m sure she was aware she’d have to deal with backlash from obnoxious, I’ll-informed commenters. Keep up the good work, everyone! It’s much appreciated!