The
State of the Union Amidst the Ashes of Extrajudicial Death
The
Execution of Christopher Dorner
by
GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER and MIKE KING
13
February, 2013
If
the murder of Oscar Grant on an Oakland transit platform marked the
dawn of the Obama era, the cold-blooded murder of former Naval
reservist and Los Angeles Police officer Christopher Dorner might
just mark the end of whatever optimistic hope people can muster in
his administration. Whether an innocent young man just trying to get
home, shot in the back after being racially profiled and slurred, or
a man driven to his breaking point after being fired from a similar
police force that operates according to its own warped morality and
overarching objectives, the state of the union is a powder keg whose
wick has gotten shorter due to decades of looking the other way.
Just
minutes before Barack Obama began his state of the union address, San
Bernardino County Sheriffs, knowing full well what they were doing,
burned Christopher Dorner to death. From police brutality and racism
to political unaccountability, from lack of economic opportunities to
the extrajudicial murder of anyone deemed an enemy of the state,
Dorner’s life and death offers us a much clearer picture of the
state of this union than last night’s speech or media commentary.
In
the years between the murder of Oscar Grant and Dorner’s last
stand, March of 2009 to be specific, we were among those observing
the case of Lovelle
Mixon
in Oakland, a parolee who decided he was not going to return to
prison, opening fire on police at a traffic stop, killing two. Police
went in to execute Mixon, not expecting that he would be holding an
SKS. Two more cops died as a result. The logic of Dorner’s
desperation, and the chain of events that led to his ultimate death,
parallels Mixon’s; proud men without hope, cornered, deciding to go
out fighting.
Neither
man was a self-understood revolutionary and it would be inaccurate
(or perhaps too accurate a reflection of the dearth of revolutionary
activity in contemporary society) to try and declare otherwise.
However, the material conditions that produced Dorner, as with Mixon,
are not uncommon. The meaning and the effects of their actions speak
volumes about the depth of racialization, criminalization and
hopelessness in Obama’s supposed “post-racial” America.
LAPD
Endgame: Street Justice on a Snow-Capped Mountain
The
scene could not be more surreal: the remains of a cabin south of Big
Bear still smoldering, the President delivered his State of the Union
Address. To be fair, they had yet to confirm that the person they
were incinerating in a cabin near Big Bear actually was
Dorner.
Earlier in the day, San Bernardino County Sheriffs received a call
reporting a stolen vehicle driven by someone matching a description
of Dorner. If the experience of the past five days is any indication,
this narrowed it down to Black men, Asian women, and skinny white
men. The $1 million dollar reward offered for information
leading to Dorner’s capture or death, also offered a measurable
rubric for the value of the lives of police officers, as
traditionally rewards in homicide cases are closer to $20,000.
In
the gathering of hurried interviews some interesting truths from the
public made it into the TV news. An MSNBC reporter asked a witness:
“Where you worried when you learned that Christopher Dorner was so
close to your house?” But the witness responded “Actually, I was
just afraid of the cops.” Given the unrestrained violence unleashed
in recent days by the LAPD, this sentiment is perhaps unsurprising,
but demonstrating a degree of hubris matched only by an utter absence
of ironic intent, LAPD
chief Charlie Beck said,
evidently with a straight face, “To be targeted because of what you
are… that is absolutely terrifying.” To which many
nationwide responded
with an audible guffaw: welcome
to the club.
An
interview with the man who was allegedly carjacked by Dorner said
that, while police had told the man not to tell the whole story, he
reported that Dorner had simply said “I don’t want to hurt, take
your dog and go.” When sheriff’s deputies found the
vehicle yesterday, the driver allegedly retreated into a cabin, at one point re-emerging amid the smoke of a diversionary device to exchange more than 100 rounds of fire with deputies. Two police were injured, with one later dying. Police quickly established a large perimeter, closing highways around Seven Oaks, south of Big Bear up to twenty miles away.
Establishing
the perimeter also seemed to mean keeping the media at an arm’s
length. While press helicopters had been providing live shots of the
cabin in which Dorner was allegedly holed-up, the SBSD quickly
requested that media withdraw to roadblocks miles away and that news
choppers cease to transmit live video for fear of providing strategic
information to Dorner himself. The
San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department requested
that media outlets and individuals cease and desist from even
tweeting about the manhunt and shootout.
Even
more astonishing than the request was the immediate compliance: press
outlets abruptly ceased to tweet about the developing story, and duly
retreating to the roadblocks, abandoned their task of reporting the
news and waited for it to be fed to them. To paraphrase but one of
many incredulous observers, we speak of press blackouts in China, but
all the police had to do here was ask nicely and the press complied
without batting an eyelash.
With
a voluntary media blackout in effect, the Twittersphere, punctuated
with a plethora of indignant and sharply worded refusals to comply
with the police, became one of the only sources of developing news.
What we know about what happened thereafter owes almost entirely to
those who scoured the web for scanner feeds from the San Bernardino
Sheriff’s Department and intently followed the story these feeds
told.
“The
Burn Plan”
Shortly
after 4pm Pacific Standard Time, the cabin was engulfed in flames,
with CNN helicopters broadcasting plumes of black smoke from a
distance of five miles. A single gunshot is reported from within the
house. A narrative quickly emerged among the mainstream media, which
we should recall was conspicuously absent from the scene, that police
agencies had only deployed tear gas, and that perhaps Dorner himself
had set the fire. Soon, what seems to be a cache of ammunition is
exploding sporadically.
But
for those of us listening to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s
Department radio frequency, there was little question what had
occurred. Nearly a half hour prior, officers had referred to “going
ahead with the plan with the burner,” with another adding that the
plan was to “back the Bear down and deploy the burner through the
turret.” (Live audio during the preceding shootout seems
to confirm this intention).
Soon, the message was straightforward and expected: “Seven burners
have deployed and we have a fire.” No surprised tones, no
suggestion that the fire be extinguished.
In
fact, there was the exact opposite: a female voice on the scanner
repeatedly asks if the fire crews should be allowed to approach, and
is told that it’s not time yet, that we need to wait until all four
corners are engulfed, then that we need to wait until the roof
collapses. At one particularly repulsive point, those on the scene
realize that the house has a basement, and an authoritative male
voice indicates that the fire crew would not be called until the fire
had “burned through the basement.” They were going to let him
die.
References
to the 1993 massacre at Waco, Texas, the murderous 1985 bombing of
the MOVE Organization in Philadelphia were immediate, and will serve
as opposing frames for Dorner’s death in the days and weeks to
come.
A
murder? An assassination? A lynching? An execution.
State
of the Union: Flammable
This
is a day of a million possible metaphors, but central among these
should be the image of the burning house. In an effort to distinguish
what he called the “house negro” from the “field negro,”
Malcolm X had once observed that the two responded differently when
the master’s house caught fire: “But that field negro,
remember, they were in the majority, and they hated their master.
When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try to put it out,
that field negro prayed for a wind.” While the metaphor may
seem a strange one, given the fiery death of a man some have compared
to a runaway slave. But as many Americans choose to gaze, mesmerized,
at the glowing embers of the Dorner saga rather than watching the
State of the Union, it’s worth wondering: whose house is really on
fire? And who is praying for wind?
The
eclipsing of the State of the Union, with some networks
airing a split screen of the President’s speech alongside images
from Southern California, or omitting pre- and post- speech coverage
to report on Dorner’s likely death (a speech given in the context
of ongoing war and occupation, unending recession and social crisis
and a heated debate about, well, gun control) speaks volumes about
our society, the conditions which produced Dorner and has helped
produced a surge in mass killings generally. Persistent racist
policies couched in the language of security, and failed imperial
ventures with war tactics re-imported into American policing, are
routinely covered over by the trite conflicts of celebrities, whether
they be Kardashians or Congressmen.
Dorner
was not just a product of a racist police department, he also no
doubt adored his ‘fifteen minutes,’ stealing time from the
President he nevertheless supported during the biggest planned speech
of the year. Although Dorner’s actions were not driven by a radical
consciousness, they are ‘as American as cherry pie’ in an
apolitical vacuum that (at least on the surface) resembles Oliver
Stone’s Natural
Born Killers
far more than the political contexts of the 1960s.
As
Obama was taking to the lectern, police agencies were insisting that
they had not set the fire that killed Christopher Dorner, and the
compliant media were parroting this clearly implausible message. As
members of Congress stood and sat on cue to rapturously applaud the
Commander-in-Chief, more than 14,000 people have liked just one of
the Facebook pages in support of Dorner, some because they know what
racist policing is like, some because ours is a time of resisting
injustice by any means, and some simply for the joy of backing an
outlaw to the grisly end.
Dorner
was not a radical, but his short war was not simply the story of
broken man or of individualistic vengeance. The issues of brutality
and racism perpetually covered up by a corrupt police department
created the insurgent Dorner and resonated with many people who
endure the reality of urban policing on a daily basis. The sympathy
and the support Dorner received is a clear indicator of the very real
and deep structural inequalities that helped forge the path of
Dorner’s life and his fiery death. The great radical historian Mike
Davis concluded
a recent article
on Dorner with a peculiar question: “Does anyone cheer Dorner?”
What is peculiar is that, for better or worse, there’s no denying
that the answer is “yes.”
There’s
no telling what sort of a fire they could start tomorrow.
George
Ciccariello-Maher is
assistant professor of political science at Drexel University. He is
the author of We
Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan
Revolution and
can be reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu.
Mike
King is
a Ph.D candidate in sociology at UC Santa Cruz, and can be reached at
mikeking0101(at)gmail.com. Both study policing and counterinsurgency.
Christopher
Dorner License: Driver's ID Found Alongside Burnt Body In Cabin
13
February, 2013
BIG
BEAR LAKE, Calif. (AP) -- An official briefed on the investigation
tells The Associated Press that a wallet with a California driver's
license with the name Christopher Dorner has been found in the rubble
of a cabin.
A
charred body was also found inside after a shootout and fire.
Authorities
believe the remains are those of the former Los Angeles police
officer, but they have not been formally identified.
The
official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing
investigation and says the charred body and personal items were found
in the basement of the burned cabin. The area is in the San
Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles.
Two
sheriff's deputies were also shot, one fatally. Dorner is also
suspected of earlier killing a young couple and a police officer, and
wounding two other officers.
THIS
IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information.
AP's earlier story is below.
To
read the “official” version of events GO
HERE
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