Dorner's Case: A Bad Film in Los Angeles

The criminal odyssey of Christopher Dorner, or Black Rambo as some have called him, ended on Feb. 12 in the San Bernardino Mountains at the Big Bear ski resort, located two hours from Los Angeles. Barack Obama was delivering his State of the Union address when, at the same moment on the other side of the country, some 200 special forces attacked the holiday cottage where the former cop had taken refuge. A shootout erupted shortly before a sheriff was killed — the fourth and final victim of the madman. Dorner in all likelihood shot himself in the head. But it was the method chosen to counteract — an assault grenade, which caused the cottage to catch fire while he was surrounded on all sides — that stirs controversy.

All this started on Feb. 3 with the discovery of a lifeless body of the daughter and the future son-in-law of a former commissioner. The following day, Dorner, the killer, published a long manifesto on Facebook in which he swears to clear his name and promises to conduct “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” against the Los Angeles Police Department. Frightened, America discovered the angelic smile of the former Navy reservist trained in survival techniques and desperate to avenge his former colleagues. In 2008, Dorner had indeed written a report accusing his supervisor of beating a homeless person in a police station. After a botched internal investigation, he was dismissed from the LAPD.

Manhunt

On Feb. 7 in Riverside, a suburb of Los Angeles, Dorner killed a police officer and injured two others. The manhunt began. 50 senior police officers were kept under close protection, and others patrolled undercover in order not to risk being identified. Dorner achieved his goal: To terrorize the LAPD. In five days’ time, it would be the final assault.

In his manifesto, the former cop also denounced two evils, which he says have always been gnawing away at the LAPD: corruption and racism. Nobody has forgotten the terrible Rodney King situation or the sinister exploits of the Rampart Division, which was involved in many scandals relating to police violence in the 1990s and 2000s. So, of course, the paranoid rants of Black Rambo were met with an immediate echo in Latin American and African American communities: A flood of letters of support were sent to the Los Angeles Times and tribute pages appeared on Facebook.

Beatings

If you were to believe one resident of South Central district, where the major riots of 1992 occurred, nothing has really changed over the last 20 years. The police, he said, are not there to protect blacks, but to harass and, if necessary, kill them. Another resident does not doubt for a second that Dorner had been illegally dismissed and swears that beatings of homeless people by the police remain commonplace.

The LAPD has however, made significant efforts to make amends. White police officers no longer make up a third of its workforce, whereas in 1991 the cops who crossed the young Rodney King were all white. The Dorner file will be reopened in an attempt to shed light on his dismissal. In the black community, voices, although not very numerous, are being raised to request that the madman is not seen as a hero, but as a murderer.

It will take a lot more for the LAPD to improve its image. The extreme brutality in the way that the fugitive hunt was carried out is unlikely to help. On Feb. 7, two Latinos who were delivering newspapers on a Toyota pickup were injured by police who had mistaken them as Dorner! And we have seen circumstances surrounding the counteraction questioned, even if the gunman was in possession of an arsenal. In short, many gray areas remain. We have not heard the last of Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer who became their own worst enemy.