Hunting Humans in California

Was An Ambush Set For Christopher Dorner in Torrance?

Another element of the LA Times’ well-mannered coverage of the Christopher Dorner case that struck me was the incident in which police officers on the lookout for Dorner’s pickup truck shot up a vehicle driven by two newsies delivering the LA Times to homes in Torrance in the wee morning hours.

Here, as they say, are the relevant grafs:

The seven officers were working a protection detail Feb. 7 near the home of a high-ranking LAPD official who was a potential target for Dorner when they riddled the women's blue Toyota Tacoma truck with bullets after mistaking it for Dorner's gray Nissan truck.

The shooting occured after the officers received a radio call that a pickup truck had exited the freeway and was heading their way. 
…
Jonas [lawyer for the two women] told The Times that the police officers gave "no commands, no
instructions and no opportunity to surrender" before opening fire. He described
a terrifying encounter in which the pair were in the early part of their
delivery route through several South Bay communities.

Hernandez was in the back seat handing papers to her daughter, who was driving. Carranza would briefly slow the truck to throw papers on driveways and front walks. As bullets tore through the cabin, the two women "covered their faces and huddled down," Jonas said. "They felt like it was going on forever."

In an interview with The Times, Beck said the gunfire occurred in two bursts: The first came from an officer positioned down the block from the LAPD official's residence, and the second when Carranza accelerated away from the gunfire and toward other officers.

Jonas estimated that the officers fired between 20 and 30 rounds. Photographs
of the back of the truck showed at least two dozen bullet holes. Neighbors,
however, suggested there were more shots fired. The street was pockmarked with bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs.

The LA Times deferentially declines to connect the dots but, reading between the lines, the term that leaps to mind is “ambush”.

If the motive was to deter an attack by Dorner with a conspicuous police presence, to my admittedly non-expert opinion, the LAPD could have simply ostentatiously parked three police cruisers outside the official’s house.

If, on the other hand, the idea was to lure Dorner into revealing himself by concealing evidence of police presence (and, for that matter, keeping the lid on the news that the LAPD already suspected Dorner in the Irvine shootings and had discovered his on-line manifesto with its list of proposed victims; as far as I can tell the LA Times only publicly named Dorner as a suspect the morning after the Torrance fiasco), then moving on Dorner after he hove into view on his mission of vengeance, that might explain why there were units on either side of the newspaper delivery truck as it approached the residence.

And, if the idea was simply to light up Dorner’s truck with a few dozen rounds from two sides in a kill box without prior warning, that looks something like an ambush.

Again reading between the lines, I would say that the LA Times and public opinion in general are willing to cut the LAPD a certain amount of slack.

Dorner was apparently a dangerous guy, a murderer, and he was stalking cops.  Since Dorner was an ex-cop himself, you can add the element of “LAPD cleaning up its own mess” omerta.

There has also been no publicized outcry over the the San Bernadino Sheriff’s Department’s use of incendiary tear gas shells to short circuit the siege in Big Bear instead of trying to wait Dorner out.

However, if those two women had died in that truck—parenthetically, no thanks to the LAPD that they lived, since one would think 20-30 rounds should have finished the job—there might have been more discussion of the downside of giving law enforcement a free hand to deal with Dorner.

And there is the awkward question of whether Dorner’s murderous behavior in San Bernardino County—such as the apparently unprovoked shooting of Riverside police officer Michael Crain and a trainee while their patrol car was stopped at a traffic light--was caused in part by his perception that the cops had a shoot-on-sight hunting license for him.  Maybe, maybe not. Guess we’ll never know the answer to that one.

I suspect—well, at least, I hope—that the report that the seven officers involved in the pickup truck incident have been removed from the field pending an investigation indicates that the LAPD is going to make sure that officers and their bosses treat the Dorner case as a one-off, and not a precedent.

How We Kill

Christopher Dorner and "the burner"

The tactics employed against Christopher Dorner by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department are attracting an awkward amount of interest since an audiotape surfaced with law enforcement officials referring to a munition as a “burner”.

As in (all quotes from the Feb. 15, 2013 LA Times report titled “As Dorner fired, tactics got toughter”):

“We’re going to go forward with the plan, with the burner,” the unidentified officer said, according to a recording of police radio transmissions reviewed by The Times.

…

   “Seven burners deployed,” another officer responded several seconds later, according to the transmission which has circulated widely among law enforcement officials. “And we have a fire.”

I was interested in this issue because of an incident in Burma where Burmese police cleared an encampment of protesters trying to block expansion of a China-invested copper mine project.

The tear gas munitions fired into the protesters’ tents apparently caused severe burns to some of the protesters for reasons that are apparently not completely understood.

So I corresponded with an expert on police tactics and learned that there is indeed a munition commonly called “incendiary CS [CS standing for the inventors of the tear gas compound, Ben Corson and Roger Stoughton] gas” or, in day-to-day argot, “the burner”.

The tear gas chemical, 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, is actually a solid at room temperature, not a gas, and it doesn’t disperse quickly and thoroughly, as a gas would.  To be effective, the CS chemical has to be melted, dissolved in a solvent, or micropulverized and then mechanically dispersed.

In the burner scenario, the shell contains CS solution and an explosive charge which generates intense heat in order to aerosolize the solution and evaporate the solvent, so that the CS instantaneously precipitates in a cloud of solid particles, saturates the target area, and rapidly incapacitates the subject/victim.

Intense heat is a fundamental feature of the incendiary CS gas shell.

If the shell used in the Dorner case was the similar to the munition employed in the disastrous siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco or the MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia, an accurate description of the “burner” would be “thermal grenade with some tear gas added”.

With incendiary CS, fires are considered to be well-nigh inevitable if anything combustible is around.  So, the “burner” is only used as a last resort by law enforcement.  

Of course, there is considerable skepticism that the circumstances of the Dorner siege—he was alone, barricaded in a cabin, and surrounded by law enforcement officers—demanded that the SBSD fire seven “burners” into the cabin instead of waiting him out.

I don’t think the arguments put forth by defenders of the operation could withstand the scrutiny of a middle school forensics team.

Here they are, courtesy of the LA Times:

   “What difference does it make if one of the officers puts a … round in his head, drives the armored vehicle over his body when they are knocking the building down, or he dies in a conflagration?” said David Klinger, a use-of-force expert at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and a former LAPD officer. “If he is trying to surrender you can’t do any of those things … But if he is actively trying to murder people, there’s no doubt that deadly force is appropriate and it doesn’t matter what method is used to deliver it.”

  

 Geoffery Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina who also specializes in police tactics, agreed.

   

“I don’t understand what the big deal is,” Alpert said. “This man had already shot two officers and was suspected of murdering other people. He wasn’t responding in a rational manner. The actions you take have to remove the threat and if it requires extreme measures, then so be it.”

I might point out that the arguments advanced by these two distinguished scholars both reference rules of war, not policing.  I guess we can chalk this up to the further militarization of US security culture post-9/11.

In wartime, any force that is not actively engaged in surrender is fair game.  This was the justification for the “turkey shoot” on the “highway of death” —the attack on Iraqi forces as they were withdrawing from the front lines after Saddam Hussein had accepted the UN resolution and a ceasefire had been declared, and the concurrent “Battle of Rumaili”, a five-hour air and artillery bombardment carried out by General McCaffrey’s forces against helpless units of the Iraqi Republican Guard boxed in on the Rumaila Causeway on their way back to Baghdad.

It is different for accused criminals in the United States.  Some kind of trial/sentencing/due process thing is supposed to intervene before someone can be killed for not surrendering.

Mr. Alpert, while upholding the proud tradition of South Carolina higher education, is further off base.  Despite determined efforts by the United States to stretch the boundaries, under international law a pre-emptive strike is only permitted in the case of an imminent threat, not the past or potential threat represented by a guy barricaded alone in a cabin surrounded by dozens of law enforcement officers with guns.

As to the issue of who was “responding in a rational manner” that day…

The thought processes of the San Bernadino County Sheriff’s Department—which had lost one of their own to Dorner—are probably reflected in an alleged transcription from the radio chatter that the LA Times demurely declined to reproduce, but was reported by the no-holds barred NY Post:

“Burn this motherf--ker!” one officer shouted …Amid sounds of gunfire, voices can be heard shouting, “Burn it down!” and “Shoot the gas!”

Bitter Vengeance: Zero Dark Thirty and a Killing Spree in Southern California

The Los Angeles Times delivers the news, and the post-modernist goods.

First, Zero Dark Thirty

We’re in the final weeks of Oscar voting, which means that the Los Angeles Times—home paper for most members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—is able to fatten its bottom line by running ads touting the various Oscar contenders.

On Thursdays, there’s the insert “The Envelope”—a supplement that runs during awards season and features puff pieces and human interest stories on the various nominees nestled in ads placed by the movie studios to tout their Oscar offerings.

However, Hollywood types don’t necessarily have the 7-days-a-week subscription.  Many of them only take the weekend package, which includes the crucial Friday Calendar (i.e. Arts and Entertainment) section.  Crucial because most movies open on Fridays, and that’s when the reviews run.

Since we’re in the Oscar home stretch, the Friday Calendar section is stuffed with full-page and three quarter page color ads for the Best Picture Oscar nominees.  

On my way past the ads to the comics, I was brought up short by the full page ad for Zero Dark Thirty.

As should be evident to anyone with a forebrain, the studio and creative team is fighting back mightily against the “torture lover” stigma that has apparently crimped ZDT’s Best Picture hopes.

Kathryn Bigelow got to make her case in a cover story for Time; screenwriter Mark Boal took to the LA Times and almost every other media outlet to advertise his abhorrence of torture and his concerns about the McCarthyesque tinge to Senate calls to investigate the movie’s depiction of torture in the hunt for bin Laden (a hot button issue for Hollywood, with its bitter and shameful memories of the House Un-American Activities Committees investigation of movie industry leftists in the 1950s, and the subsequent blacklist).

Anyway, for the Friday Calendar section, somebody decided to pull out all the stops in order to wrench the focus away from the people getting tortured in the movie to the…Passion of Maya!

Under the usual tombstone listing of critic encomia, there is a black and white picture of Jessica Chastain looking vulnerable and sorrowful…with an apparently Photo-shopped tear trickling down her cheek…all the way to her jawline!

Available only in the print edition!  Because, as you can see from the left, the tear, though clearly visible on the full page ad, doesn’t lend itself well to digital reproduction.  Accident...or design?

Now, one of the best and bracing parts of the movie, to my mind, was that Jessica Chastain didn’t cry.  She was an unapologetic, vengeful, vindictive hardass when it came to hunting bin Laden, with an intensity that was unsettling, unnerving, and rang true to my idea of the kind of person who is 110% gungho on a career of hunting humans on behalf of the government.

Well, if this desperate piece of overreach sinks ZDT’s Oscar campaign, I guess this ad might be remembered as The Bitter Tear of Kathryn Bigelow.

The other fascinating story in today’s print edition of the LA Times could be found on the front page, albeit obscured by a full-page wrap promoting Argo for Best Picture.

The Southland (as we refer to Los Angeles and its environs stretching south to Orange County and west to the Nevada border) is transfixed by the horrific story of a killing rampage allegedly carried out by one Christopher Dorner.

Dorner is African-American, so for the purposes of the yahoos who populate Yahoo! News comments, I suppose he can be slotted into the Scary Black Man With a Gun or SBMWAG category.  

Since he served in the military, we could amend the classification to SBMWAG  And Advanced Weapons Training or SMBWAGAAWT.

However, the most interesting and disturbing part of the story is that Dorner is an ex-cop allegedly targeting cops and their families because of his resentment at getting kicked off the force four years ago.  Make it SBMWAGAAWT Shooting Cops or SBMWAGAAWTSC.

He allegedly shot the daughter of the police captain who defended him (unsuccessfully) at his hearing, and her husband, as they sat in a parked car in Irvine down in Orange County.  Then he apparently turned up almost a hundred miles away and wounded two cops and killed another in two shootouts in Riverside County.  

The response of the police has been an understandable combination of anger and fear as they have combed the southern reaches of the state searching for Dorner, and stationed units to protect the families of officers possibly targeted.

Dorner appears to have abandoned his vehicle—a blue Nissan Titan pickup truck—and is testing his survivalist skills in the hilly terrain of the national forest around Big Bear Lake.

The pickup truck was featured in a couple paragraphs deep in the story:

As news of the shootings crackled across police radios before dawn, the hunt for Dorner’s Nissan Titan pickup truck intensified.

   About 5:20 a.m. in Torrance, two women were delivering the Los Angeles Times from their blue pickup when LAPD officers spotted the truck.

   The police apparently mistook the truck for Dorner’s and riddled it with bullets. The women, a mother and daughter team, were rushed to a hospital.

   The mother, who is in her 70s, was shot in the shoulder. She was listed in stable condition. Her daughter was injured by shattered glass.

   Hours later, the truck — perforated by numerous bullet holes — sat on the street near the home of an LAPD official who was cited in the manifesto and was under LAPD protection. Beck said the department was investigating the circumstances of the shooting.

   “Tragically, we believe this is a case of mistaken identity,” he said.

…

   About 25 minutes after that shooting, Torrance police opened fire after spotting another truck similar to Dorner’s at Flagler Lane and Beryl Street. No one was reported hurt.

   “If I had a [Nissan] Titan, I would park it today,” said Walter Howe, 60, at a Torrance Starbucks.

The LA Times thoughtfully declined to splash photos of the bullet-riddled pickup truck driven by its delivery folk on the front page.

But the actions of the Torrance Police Department, motivated by an undefinable combination of murderous panic and homicidal rage, brought home the idea that, in certain circumstances, the veneer of control, competence, and fairness that reconciles many Americans to the activities of the security state can be stripped away in a matter of hours.

When that happens, it’s a matter of blood, not just tears.