Chris Dorner positively identified

Lola

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/chris-dorner-identified-positive-id-big-bear_n_2690274.html

He was identified through dental records. :( :smh: He fucked up when he allegedly left with that couples truck. (I say allegedly, because who really knows the truth and we never will).



Chris Dorner Identified: Officials Positively ID Charred Remains Of California 'Cop Killer'

BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. (AP) -- Officials say burned remains found in a California mountain cabin have been positively identified as fugitive former police officer Christopher Dorner.

San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Jodi Miller said Thursday that the identification was made through Dorner's dental records.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

Karen and Jim Reynolds say they came face to face with fugitive Christopher Dorner, not on a snow-covered mountain trail, but inside their cabin-style condo.

During a 15-minute ordeal just a stone's throw from a command post authorities had set up in the massive manhunt for the ex-Los Angeles police officer, the couple said Dorner bound them and put pillowcases on their heads. At one point, he explained that he had been there for days.

"He said `I don't have a problem with you, so I'm not going to hurt you,'" Jim Reynolds said. "I didn't believe him; I thought he was going to kill us."

Police have not commented on the Reynolds' account, but it renews questions about the thoroughness of a search for a man who authorities declared was armed and extremely dangerous as they hunted him across the Southwest and Mexico.

"They said they went door-to-door but then he's right there under their noses. Makes you wonder if the police even knew what they were doing," resident Shannon Schroepfer said. "He was probably sitting there laughing at them the whole time."

The search for Dorner began last week after authorities said he had launched a deadly revenge campaign against the Los Angeles Police Department for his firing, warning that he would bring "warfare" to LAPD officers and their families.

The manhunt brought police to Big Bear Lake, 80 miles east of Los Angeles, where they found Dorner's burned-out pickup truck abandoned. His footprints disappeared on frozen soil and hundreds of officers who searched the area and checked out each building failed to find him.

The notion of him holed up just across the street from the command post was shocking to many, but not totally surprising to some experts familiar with the complications of such a manhunt.

"Chilling. That's the only word I could use for that," said Ed Tatosian, a retired SWAT commander for the Sacramento Police Department. "It's not an unfathomable oversight. We're human. It happens. It's chilling (that) it does happen."

Law enforcement officers, who had gathered outside daily for briefings, were stunned by the revelation. One official later looking on Google Earth exclaimed that he'd parked right across the street from the Reynolds' cabin each day.

The Reynolds said Dorner was upstairs in the rental unit Tuesday when they arrived to ready it for vacationers. Dorner, who at the time was being sought for three killings, confronted the Reynolds with a drawn gun, "jumped out and hollered `stay calm,'" Jim Reynolds said during a Wednesday night news conference.

His wife screamed and ran downstairs but Dorner caught her, Reynolds said. The couple said they were taken to a bedroom where he ordered them to lie on a bed and then on the floor. Dorner bound their arms and legs with plastic ties, gagged them with towels and covered their heads with pillowcases.

"I really thought it could be the end," Karen Reynolds said.

The couple believes Dorner had been staying in the cabin at least since Feb. 8, the day after his burned truck was found nearby. Dorner told them he had been watching them by day from inside the cabin as they did work outside. The couple, who live nearby, only entered the unit Tuesday. "He said we are very hard workers," Karen Reynolds said.

After he fled in their purple Nissan Rogue, she managed to call 911 from a cellphone on the coffee table. Police said Dorner later killed a fourth person, a sheriff's deputy, during a standoff, and died inside the burning cabin where he took cover during a blazing shootout.

While authorities have not corroborated the couple's account, it matched early reports from law enforcement officials that a couple had been tied up and their car stolen by a man resembling Dorner. Property records showed the Reynolds as the condo's owners.

As coroners work to confirm that the body found inside the cabin was Dorner, the San Bernardino County sheriff has refused to answer questions about how one of the largest manhunts in years could have missed him.

During the search, heavily armed deputies went door to door to search roughly 600 cabins for forced entry. Many of the cabins were boarded-up summer homes.

Authorities said officers looked for signs that someone had forcibly entered the buildings, or that heat was on inside in a cabin that otherwise looked uninhabited.

Helicopters had landed SWAT officers in a lot near the Reynolds' condo, and through the weekend they stood in plain view from the cabin, gearing up in helmets, bulletproof vests, with assault weapons at the ready.

According to the Reynolds, the cabin had cable TV, and a second-story view that would have allowed him to see choppers flying in and out.

Timothy Clemente, a retired FBI SWAT team leader who was part of the search for Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, said searchers had to work methodically. When there's a hot pursuit, they can run after a suspect into a building. But in a manhunt, the search has to slow down. "You can't just kick in every door," he said. Police have to have a reason to enter a building.

Officers would have been approaching each cabin, rock and tree with the prospect that Dorner was behind and waiting with a weapon that could penetrate bulletproof vests. In his manifesto posted online, Dorner, a former Navy reservist, said he had no fear of losing his life and would wage "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" and warned officers "you will now live the life of the prey."

Even peering through windows can be difficult because officers have to remove a hand from their weapons to shade their eyes. Experts said it is likely officers may have used binoculars to help examine homes from a distance, especially when dealing with a man who had already killed three people, including a police officer.

In many cases, officers didn't even knock on the doors, according to searchers and residents.

"If Chris Dorner's on the other side of the door, what would the response be?" Clemente said. "A .50 caliber round or .223 round straight through that door."
 
Although he was murdered by the police in a fucked up way, I still don't understand the support dude was given. You can't kill innocent people and be a hero in my book. If he just kept his war with the police and only the police, I could understand his "folk hero" status, but dude killed that couple. That was fucked up.....
 
Although he was murdered by the police in a fucked up way, I still don't understand the support dude was given. You can't kill innocent people and be a hero in my book. If he just kept his war with the police and only the police, I could understand his "folk hero" status, but dude killed that couple. That was fucked up.....

I don't either.

This dude is a cold blooded cowardly murderer, yet people are damn near worshiping him:smh::smh:

Millions of people have the same grips he has, but they didn't turn to gunning down an innocent woman and her boyfriend
 
<img src="http://www.counterpunch.org/images/header.jpg" width="600">



The Execution of Christopher Dorner


http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/13/the-execution-of-christopher-dorner/print


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.


 
i don't either.

this dude is a cold blooded cowardly murderer, yet people are damn near worshiping him:smh::smh:

Millions of people have the same grips he has, but they didn't turn to gunning down an innocent woman and her boyfriend

i agree......
 
How did they get free before the cabin burned down

What happened to the cleaning ladies that discovered him and called 911

According to the property owner those units was vacant. Why didn't she say someone was scheduled to rent the cabin that day?
 
Although he was murdered by the police in a fucked up way, I still don't understand the support dude was given. You can't kill innocent people and be a hero in my book. If he just kept his war with the police and only the police, I could understand his "folk hero" status, but dude killed that couple. That was fucked up.....

Ever since the selection of President Obama everyone has been extra sensitive about race. Hence one of the main reasons why he was selected; great red herring. From 2008 til now....if you attach a racial spin on ANYTHING ..it wil either earn you some sympathy or earn you some contempt. People read his questionable manifesto ...mainly talking about racism...and the rest is history.

OJ..same situation. People didnt give a fuck about OJ or the LAPD....it was mainly about deep rooted anger via racism. So to see a Brother..criminal or not...get away with fucking over White folks....it made a few people angry..but also made a few people smile. It was kinda like "payback"!
 
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heres the thing I don't get...if dorner was military trained, police trained and clearly thought of this for a while...

why wasn't he better prepared??

Where were the multple cars for a quick getaway? The money to sustain a protracted engagement, a number of safe locations.

It seems like things went to shit quickly considering he had all of this premeditated...:smh:
 
heres the thing I don't get...if dorner was military trained, police trained and clearly thought of this for a while...

why wasn't he better prepared??

Where were the multple cars for a quick getaway? The money to sustain a protracted engagement, a number of safe locations.

It seems like things went to shit quickly considering he had all of this premeditated...:smh:

he killed 4 people and was on the run for several days... how much more prepared do you want him to be?

you niggas watch to many movies. multiple cars for the getaway where the fuck is he going to get away to in a car? a stolen car at that.
 
could have been epic, one for the ages....some real life western told for years story, dude got lazy, and kept fucking up the plan

note to self if I ever go ape shit, over some dumb shit, release my manifesto AFTER I get a few more cops :smh::smh:


oh well, now LAPD can go back to killing civilians and no one will care
 
Ever since the selection of President Obama everyone has been extra sensitive about race. Hence one of the main reasons why he was selected; great red herring. From 2008 til now....if you attach a racial spin on ANYTHING ..it wil either earn you some sympathy or earn you some contempt. People read his questionable manifesto ...mainly talking about racism...and the rest is history.

OJ..same situation. People didnt give a fuck about OJ or the LAPD....it was mainly about deep rooted anger via racism. So to see a Brother..criminal or not...get away with fucking over White folks....it made a few people angry..but also made a few people smile. It was kinda like "payback"!

That's it and that's all.
 
he killed 4 people and was on the run for several days... how much more prepared do you want him to be?

you niggas watch to many movies. multiple cars for the getaway where the fuck is he going to get away to in a car? a stolen car at that.

I just thought with all his training and knowledge of police tactics he would have lasted longer than 8 days.:smh:
 
you niggas watch to many movies. multiple cars for the getaway where the fuck is he going to get away to in a car? a stolen car at that.

not to mention all the borders were surrounded..of course they wouldve lit him up and then some if he tried going thru the roadblocks
 
Ever since the selection of President Obama everyone has been extra sensitive about race. Hence one of the main reasons why he was selected; great red herring. From 2008 til now....if you attach a racial spin on ANYTHING ..it wil either earn you some sympathy or earn you some contempt. People read his questionable manifesto ...mainly talking about racism...and the rest is history.

OJ..same situation. People didnt give a fuck about OJ or the LAPD....it was mainly about deep rooted anger via racism. So to see a Brother..criminal or not...get away with fucking over White folks....it made a few people angry..but also made a few people smile. It was kinda like "payback"!

This


Sent from my Cerebrum.
 
Fuck that dumbass bastard! He was a waste of good functioning organs! Sure he got screwed at work, but who hasn't???? I don't go killing people who messed with me at work. Do you realize how many millions would have been wasted on a trial for this fool.
Bottom Line: He killed a fine looking woman too. You DO NOT KILL fine looking women in the U.S.A.
 
ah well guess itll be a matter of time till we see LL Cool J in DORNER: The REAL Story..

probably co-starring,say,terrence howard as one of his friends:"Chris,this has got to end.. TURN YOURSELF IN,MAYNE!!!" :lol:

charlie sheen as himself:"mr dorner..i urge you to call me..let's end this!"

channing tatum as whichever one of the officers who were killed

grace park as monica quan
 
I wish someone could do a "Bin Laden" and send a tape to the media implying that he's still alive just to fuck with the cops.
 
How do we know that he really killed that interracial couple or the first cop?
The people whom he kidnapped in the cabin did say that Dorner said to them that "He just wanted to clear his name!"
Clear his name for what?
When someone say's that "They want to clear their name" I'm under the impression that they were blamed for something that they did not do.
So could he have been set up by the LAPD for the murder of those people to punish him for being a whistle blower?
I'm just wondering.
 
How do we know that he really killed that interracial couple or the first cop?
The people whom he kidnapped in the cabin did say that Dorner said to them that "He just wanted to clear his name!"
Clear his name for what?
When someone say's that "They want to clear their name" I'm under the impression that they were blamed for something that they did not do.
So could he have been set up by the LAPD for the murder of those people to punish him for being a whistle blower?
I'm just wondering.

I don't put shit past 'em. It isn't far fetched.
 
Although he was murdered by the police in a fucked up way, I still don't understand the support dude was given. You can't kill innocent people and be a hero in my book. If he just kept his war with the police and only the police, I could understand his "folk hero" status, but dude killed that couple. That was fucked up.....

Yea I always thought I was missing something. Dudes made him out to be a hero when he wasn't killing the people who he claimed did him wrong.....he wasn't just bodying the police. He was bodying people that had nothing to do with it.
 
Yea I always thought I was missing something. Dudes made him out to be a hero when he wasn't killing the people who he claimed did him wrong.....he wasn't just bodying the police. He was bodying people that had nothing to do with it.

he allegedly bodied the couple and the daughter was related which made her an intended target.

there are too many people who are coming out now (the two who's car he took) whom he didn't harm or do anything to, to portray him as someone who was reckless or just out there killing random innocent people.
 
<img src="http://www.counterpunch.org/images/header.jpg" width="600">



The Execution of Christopher Dorner


http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/13/the-execution-of-christopher-dorner/print


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.





BS article.Mixon was a child molestor who shot two cops because he was about to get caught.Then he hid in a closet and shot two SWAT cops.Those cops were actually good dudes too.
 
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