More
and more stuff about this case is coming out
Former
LAPD Captain Called The Fugitive Ex-Cop's Firing 'Very, Very Ugly'
11
February, 2013
Ex-cop
Christopher Dorner allegedly killed the daughter of a former LAPD
captain and her fiancé before declaring
war on the department in
an online manifesto.
That
former captain, Randall Quan, became a lawyer after he retired and
represented Dorner in a disciplinary hearing that led to his
termination.
The
LA Times reported late last night on
that firing case,
in which the department alleged that Dorner issued a false report
that his training officer kicked a mentally ill suspect.
Quan
insisted during a 2008 board of rights hearing that Dorner had done
the right thing by reporting his supervisor's allegedly abusive
behavior.
He
called the case against Dorner "very, very ugly," the Times
reported, citing a hearing transcript.
"This
officer wasn't given a fair shake," Quan reportedly said during
the hearing. "In fact, what's happening here is this officer is
being made a scapegoat."
A
three-member disciplinary panel unamiously ruled against Dorner,
finding he reported his training officer, Teresa Evans, because he
feared she would give him a negative evaluation.
It's
not clear why Dorner would have had a vendetta against the man who
defended him.
Quan's
daughter, Monica, was an assistant basketball coach at Cal State
Fullerton and just 28
years old when she was killed on Sunday, Feb. 3. Her
fiancé, Keith Lawrence, was 27.
Dorner
allegedly went on to shoot three police officers, killing one of
them. He's still at large and was last believed to be in the Big
Bear area 100
miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Wanted: Dead, Not Alive:
The LAPD is Afraid of What
Renegade Cop Chris Dorner
has to Say
10
February, 2013
Let’s
not be too quick to dismiss the “ranting” of renegade LAPD
officer Chris Dorner.
Dorner,
a three-year police veteran and former Lieutenant in the US Navy who
went rogue after being fired by the LAPD, has accused Los Angeles
Police of systematically using excessive force, of corruption, of
being racist, and of firing him for raising those issues through
official channels.
By
all media accounts, Dorner “snapped” after his firing, and has
vowed to kill police in retaliation. He allegedly has already done
so, with several people, including police officers and family members
of police already shot dead.
Now
there’s a “manhunt” involving police departments across
California, focussing on the mountains around Big Bear, featuring
cops dressed in full military gear and armed with semi-automatic
weapons.
Nobody
would argue that randomly killing police officers and their family
members or friends is justified, but I think that there is good
reason to suspect that the things that Dorner claims set him off,
such as being fired for reporting police brutality, and then going
through a rigged hearing, deserve serious consideration and
investigation.
The
LAPD has a long history of abuse of minorities (actually the majority
in Los Angeles, where whites are now a minority). It has long been a
kind of paramilitary force -- one which pioneered the military-style
Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) approach to “policing.”
If
you wanted a good example to prove that nothing has changed over the
years, just look at the outrageous incident involving LAPD cops
tasked with capturing Dorner, who instead shot up two innocent women
who were delivering newspapers in a residential area of Los Angeles.
The women, Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71
(now in serious condition in the hospital), were not issued any
warning. Police just opened fire from behind them, destroying their
truck with heavy semi-automatic fire to the point that it will have
to be scrapped and replaced. The two women are lucky to be alive
(check out the pattern of bullet holes in the rear window behind the
driver’s position in the accompanying photo). What they experienced
was the tactics used by US troops on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan,
not the tactics that one expects of police. Their truck wasn’t even
the right make or color, but LAPD’s “finest” decided it was
better to be safe than sorry, so instead of acting like cops, they
followed Pentagon “rules of engagement”: They attempted to waste
the target.
LAPD
officers fired on this car with clear intent to kill (check out the
bullet holes behind the driver-seat position). Trouble was, it was
the wrong make and wrong color, and instead of Dorner, it was two
Latino women, one of whom is now in serious condition from her
wounds. No warning was given before the barrage.
Local
residents say that after that shooting, which involved seven LAPD
officers and over 70 bullets expended, with nobody returning fire,
the street and surrounding houses were pockmarked with bullet holes.
The Los Angeles Times reports that in the area, there are “bullet
holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs.”
In
roofs?
What
we had here was an example of a controversial tactic that the
military employed in the Iraq War, and still employs in Afghanistan,
called “spray and pray” -- a tactic that led directly to the
massive civilian casualties during that US war.
We
shouldn’t be surprised that two brown-skinned women were almost
mowed down by the LAPD--only that they somehow survived all that
deadly firing directed at them with clear intent to kill.
The
approach taken by those cop-hunting-cops of shooting first and asking
questions later suggests that the LAPD in this “manhunt” for one
of their own has no intention of capturing Dorner alive and letting
him talk about what he knows about the evils rampant in the
10,000-member department. They want him dead.
When
I lived in Los Angeles back in the 1970s, it was common for LAPD cops
to bust into homes, gestapo-like, at 5 in the morning, guns out, to
arrest people for minor things like outstanding court warrants for
unpaid parking tickets, bald tires, or jaywalking.
Police
helicopters also used to tail me -- then an editor of an alternative
news weekly -- and my wife, a music graduate student, as we drove
home at night. Sometimes, they would follow us from our car to front
door with a brilliant spotlight, when we’d come home at night to
our house in Echo Park. It was an act of deliberate intimidation.
(They also infiltrated our newspaper with an undercover cop posing as
a wannabe journalist. Her job, we later learned, was to learn who our
sources were inside the LAPD -- sources who had disclosed such things
as that the LAPD had, and probably still has, a “shoot-to-kill”
policy for police who fire their weapons.)
Friends
in Los Angeles tell me nothing has changed, though of course the
police weaponry has gotten heavier and their surveillance
capabilities have gotten more sophisticated and invasive.
It
is clear from the LAPD’s paramilitary response to the Occupy
movement in Los Angeles, which included planting undercover cops
among the occupiers, some of whom reportedly were agents provocateur
who tried to encourage protesters to commit acts of violence, and
which ended with police violence and gratuitous arrests, as in New
York, that nothing has changed.
In
other words, Dorner may be irrational, but he ain’t crazy.
A
black military veteran, Dorner joined the police because he
reportedly believed in service. Unable to go along with the
militarist policing he saw on the job, he protested through channels
and was apparently rewarded by being fired. Now, in his own violent
way, he is trying to warn us all that something is rotten in the
LAPD, and by extension, in the whole police system in the US. Police
departments almost everywhere in the US, have morphed, particularly
since 9/11/2001, from a role of providing public safety and law
enforcement into agencies of brutal fascist control.
As
Dorner says in his lengthy manifesto (actually quite explicit and
literate, but described as “ranting” in corporate media
accounts), in which he explains his actions and indicts the LAPD,
“The enemy combatants in LA are not the citizens and suspects, it’s
the police officers.”
That
could be said of many US police departments, I’m afraid.
Example:
Last fall, I had the experience of trying to hitchhike in my little
suburban town. A young cop drove up and informed me (incorrectly, it
turns out) that it was illegal to hitchhike in Pennsylvania. When I
expressed surprise at this and told him I was a journalist working on
an article on hitchhiking, he then threatened me directly, saying
that if I continued to try and thumb a ride, he would “take you in
and lock you up.”
When
I called a lawyer friend and said I was inclined to take the officer
up on that threat, since I was within my rights under the law
hitchhiking as long as I was standing off the road, he warned me
against it, saying, “You don’t know what could happen to you if
you got arrested.”
And
of course he’s right. An arrest, even a wrongful arrest, in the US
these days can lead to an added charge -- much more serious -- of
resisting arrest, with a court basing its judgement on the word of
the officer in the absence of any other witnesses. It can also lead
to physical injury or worse, if the officer wants to lie and claim
that the arrested person threatened him or her.
If
I had been in Los Angeles, I would most likely have been locked up
for an incident like that. Forget about any warning. You aren’t
supposed to talk back to cops in L.A. And if you are black or Latino,
the results of such an arrest could be much worse.
I
remember once witnessing LAPD cops stopping a few Latino youths who
had been joyriding in what might have been a stolen car. There was a
helicopter overhead, and perhaps a dozen patrol cars that had
converged on the scene, outside a shopping mall in Silverlake. I ran
over to see what was happening and watched as the cops grabbed the
kids, none of whom was armed, out of the vehicle and slammed them
against the car brutally. It was looking pretty ugly, but by then
neighbors from the surrounding homes, most of them Latino, who had
poured out onto their lawns because of the commotion, began yelling
at the cops. One man shouted, “We see what you’re doing. These
boys are all healthy. If anything happens to any of them after you
arrest them we will report you!”
The
cops grudgingly backed off in their attack on the boys, and took them
away in a squad car. I don’t know what happened to them after that,
but they were most certainly saved, by quick community response, from
an on-the-spot Rodney King-style beating that could have seriously
injured them, or worse.
As
things stand right now, with the LAPD gunning for Dorner, and wanting
him dead and silenced, not captured, the public has to worry that it
has more to fear from the LAPD than it has to fear from Dorner
himself. At least Dorner, in his own twisted way, has specific
targets in mind. The LAPD is in “spray and pray” mode.
Chris
Dorner, in happier days, now a fugitive on the run from the LAPD
"manhunters"
Hopefully,
Dorner will realize he can do more by figuring out a safe way to
“come in from the cold” so he can try to testify about LAPD
crimes, than by killing more cops. If he does manage to surrender,
he’d better have a lot of support lined up to keep him safe while
in custody.
It’s
already clear that a lot of people in the LAPD want him dead.
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