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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

State of the Union?





It appears that the very strange case around Christopher Dorner has come to an end. Or perhaps not.

Above, the scanner recording of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's standoff with Dorner, who was cornered at a cabin at Big Bear Lake, California. After a deadly shootout, the cabin then caught fire, apparently set by the police (see video at the bottom of this post). About two hours ago, CNN reported that the person inside the burning cabin tried to leave, and was "pushed back inside." Anderson Cooper later modified this to say that Dorner was pushed back inside by police fire. Below is a taste of the confusion in reports and online chatter.

In the audio record of police communications above, the cabin fire begins about 25 minutes into the recording (the audio source is here). For a time, the public access to the police scanner went dead, which bizarrely coincided with the State of the Union Address.






















Initial reports stated that the body was too burned to be identified and would take several days of tests. Now CNN is reporting that there was no body found. No one can condone the horrific, violent criminal path Dorner (allegedly) took. But then again, no one wants to watch a man (allegedly) burning to death in a house just before the State of the Union Address.

"Burn that fucking house down. Burn that mother fucking [house down]. [News anchor:] Police officers understandably upset." Video Source: Youtube.

Addendum: This morning, The Guardian is trying (here) to determine the authenticity of the above video and whether or not the police set fire to the cabin. The debate on Twitter is turning strangely political. Dorner's path into madness and murder, his guilt if true, is indefensible. His actions remind me of the character V, conceived by Alan Moore; Moore's story, V for Vendetta, was not about the conflict between left and right but about anarchy versus fascism. In his vendetta against the LAPD, Dorner had crossed over into anarchy. Dorner became an anarchist. Moore deliberated over the rightness and wrongness of his character's actions - a character who rises up against a corrupt, totalitarian regime - in the end, he concluded that the character's actions were not defensible and the character had to die.

Did Dorner's anarchy mirror a fascist turn in the LAPD? Or were the LAPD operating in a professional manner in a deadly and difficult situation? The basic duty placed before the police is to stand on the line of law enforcement, between what is right and what is wrong. Whatever the crimes of their suspects, the police have legal, systemic standards and procedures by which they must abide, or they equally risk the violence, oppression or lawlessness of the criminals they hunt.

One basic question must be that if the police did start the fire - which still is not confirmed - and they deliberately prevented Dorner from escaping (in order to conceal compromising information? in vengeance?), then they crossed that line. No matter how evilly provoked, the police must stand on the side of right. In the system as we understand it, that means they bring accused murderers before the courts.

Video Source: Now This News.



 
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9 comments:

  1. pblfsdaFebruary 13, 2013 at 1:50 PM

    If Dorner reacted to fascism in the LAPD it was not from a "turn" on their part; the LAPD have been a national embarrassment to law enforcement in this country for over a century. Criminal behavior on their part, often rationalized after the fact by fabricating charges against their victims, goes back further than the Zoot Suit riots, certainly before Dorner's lifetime. Dorner's real crime was naivete. If he had violated police policy by going to the media to complain about another officer kicking an already subdued mentally ill man in the head, instead of following policy and going quietly to internal affairs as he did, not only would he still be alive but the two women erroneously shot by the LAPD while pursuing him would be alive as well.

    I'm just dreading the next, inevitable stage of this fiasco in which the LAPD are unable to prove conclusively that the man in the cabin was Dorner and dismiss the public's concerns that this is really an important, basic part of essential police procedure.

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  2. LC DouglassFebruary 13, 2013 at 8:07 PM

    This is a disturbing case. It is also tragic that it came to this.

    Re the police: I don't want to make light by referring to pop culture, but I keep thinking of Rolo Tomassi in 'L. A. Confidential.' That film ends with police whistleblowers in a small house, and the police set the house on fire, if I recall. 'Vice' has a piece today on why people are conflating Dorner's case with their dislike of the LAPD's history.
    http://www.vice.com/read/chris-dorner-helps-america-remember-that-they-dislike-the-lapd

    I also recall a strange case about an NYPD whistleblower, Adrian Schoolcraft?
    http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/19/nypd-whistleblower-says-he-was

    The MSM are presenting this story in a cut-and-dried fashion. Lone lunatic has job problems and turns on heroic police.

    Many twitter commenters are arguing that they don't condone what Dorner did, but they feel this case 'doesn't feel right'; of course, what do they know? The internet is awash in conspiracy theories. Anything that runs up against established authority finds a home somewhere online.

    As far as the police were concerned, I found myself wondering from the police perspective what it would mean to try to wait Dorner out through the night, and how deadly that would have gotten, running around on that mountain in the darkness. I think they felt a siege was untenable.

    The question remains: did they exhaust every possibilty to avoid killing him? Where do they draw the line in scary situations like that? Is it possible they killed him deliberately? He believed they would kill him, did not expect to see inside of a courtroom.

    As for Dorner's work problems: I wondered why he did not just walk away. If he was so disillusioned, he could have moved to another country and with his experience, gotten work in private security. He claimed that he chose to be an American, and it seems that statement for him meant that he would not walk away from this situation.

    Another aspect is how mental health issues are treated in the United States. How on earth did it reach this point, if he had - by his own admission - suffered from depression for years and apparently received no treatment? Finally, I also kept thinking of Dorner's wish for that church congregation: may you die from the flames and only the flames.

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  3. pblfsdaFebruary 14, 2013 at 12:05 PM

    The comment about the flames comes from the tendency for people like the Westboro Baptists to perceive themselves as victims when they face repercussions for attacking others. The phrase "...and only the flames" represents the hope that they will understand that their punishment will come from God's displeasure and that they won't be able to rationalize that they are being persecuted by evil men.

    As for avoiding a nighttime siege, I would think that of all the cities in the country, Los Angeles should have the least problem with staging a stand-off at night. After all, if police can legally commandeer vehicles for a chase, how difficult can it be to find a fleet of portable floodlights in Hollywood?

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  4. LC DouglassFebruary 14, 2013 at 8:48 PM

    Yeah, but they weren't in LA. They were in the forest up by Big Bear Lake, as the video above shows. The police who took Dorner down were the San Bernardino police, and I am not sure where LAPD assisted them or not. I heard a report to that effect, but that may have been confused reporting.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bear_Lake,_California

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  5. pblfsdaFebruary 16, 2013 at 1:23 AM

    From the fine folks who brought you the O. J. Simpson trial... Yes, unfortunately we're probably going to be hearing about destroyed evidence and contradictory testimonials for the next three years. And God help the San Bernardino officer whose official report records deviations from policy. He or she may be the next corpse.

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    Replies
    1. LC DouglassFebruary 16, 2013 at 11:20 AM

      I certainly take your point. The MSM have been very odd in how they reported this, especially given the live police feed transmitted by KCAL 9 (above) in which they say 'burn the motherfucking building down.' That snippet was not available on published versions of the feed, but the Guardian confirmed that someone who listened to the feed in real time actually did hear the police saying this. That suggests that they are lying about not intentionally burning the cabin and the MSM supported them in that lie. In so doing, they actually proved Dorner right.

      But I hesitate to condemn the entire police department en masse; even Dorner, in his deluded rage, acknowledged that there were embattled officers trying to do the right thing. An unquestioned dismissal of the LAPD as whole makes their jobs and lives that much harder. The question is not how we can distrust established authority totally, even when largely warranted; but how can we find, support, promote and reward the decent people who have not given up and are working in the system to try to make it better?

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    2. AnonymousFebruary 22, 2013 at 3:10 PM

      ToB, I see wish to give these people the benefit of the doubt, and not be biased. That shows you are a nice person who would like to approach things with balance. The LAPD is undeserving of your effort. It's not the symbol for the general idea of "the police" and civic order, as CNN would have you believe. pblfsda is right, it's a very corrupt organization that lost its way years ago. And CNN is horrible for other reasons.

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    3. LC DouglassFebruary 22, 2013 at 5:08 PM

      It certainly looks that way, Anon. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think one thing that will happen over the next few decades is the appearance of brand new types of institutions, which will fuction alongside or in place of older rotting ones.

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  6. LC DouglassMarch 2, 2013 at 7:40 AM

    This NYT article discusses problems with police lying in courtrooms:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-under-oath.html?_r=0

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