For the Los Angeles Police Department, the allegations of departmental corruption and racism by a former police officer now accused of a revenge-fueled killing rampage are the words of a delusional man, detached from the reality of the huge improvements the force has undergone over the years.
“These are the rantings of a clearly very sick individual,” William J. Bratton, a former department commissioner, said. “It would be a shame if he was able to rally to his cause people who remember the bad old days of the LAPD.”
Yet for whatever changes the department has undergone since the days when it was notorious as an outpost of rampant racism and corruption, the accusations by the suspect— however disjointed and unhinged— have struck a chord. They are a reminder, many black leaders said, that some problems remain and, no less significant, that memories of abuses and mistreatment remain strong in many parts of this city. “Our community doesn’t need this,” said the Reverend William D. Smart, the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California. “We don’t need something like this opening old wounds.” “While there been a lot of improvements, there’s still room for improvement,” he said. “There is still one segment of our community that historically distrusts the police force.”
Indeed, in posts on Facebook and in interviews, some black residents offered at least a partial endorsement of the sentiments expressed by the suspect, Christopher J. Dorner, in a manifesto posted on his Facebook page, even as they made it clear that they did not condone the violence he is accused of. Dorner, the subject of a manhunt, claimed that racism was a factor in his dismissal from the department in 2008, and that it was as endemic in the force as ever.
“We look at the police differently from the way you look at the police,” said Hodari Sababu, 56, a tour guide who has lived in the South Central section of Los Angeles for forty years. “In your community, the police are there to protect and serve; in my community, the police are there to harass and to insult and to kill if they get a chance.”
Charles Hutchinson, 72, a tennis coach who lives in Los Angeles, said he believed Dorner’s story that he had witnessed a fellow officer kick a suspect. Dorner was dismissed on charges that he had falsified that report. “These things happen all the time,” he said. “I truthfully think that he was wronged by the Police Department. I think that senior officer kicked that homeless guy, they do that all the time.”
Yet even as he said that, Hutchinson was quick to add that the situation had improved markedly from the days when William H. Parker III ran a force notorious for profiling and beatings. And no matter the lingering perceptions, the evidence reflects that change.
As Bratton noted, polls have increasingly shown the department’s image has improved across the board, including among blacks and Latinos. Whites now make up less than one-third of the force, a sharp turnaround from thirty years ago.
“There has been a huge change,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, who wrote a report on departmental abuses, in an email. But, he added: “It would be naïve and misguided to say that racism in any institution is entirely a thing of the past.”
Charlie Beck, the police chief, said he did not give any credence to the claims Dorner made about racism in the department. “You’re talking about a homicide suspect who has committed atrocious crimes,” he said. “If you want to give any attribution to his ramblings on the Internet, go right ahead. But I do not.”
Dorner was dismissed on the recommendations of a police board that found he had filed a false report claiming to have witnessed a partner kick a homeless man in the process of an arrest. Dorner sought without success to have the court overturn his dismissal.
Three witnesses to the arrest said that they had not seen the alleged assault; the father of the homeless person said that his son told him that he had been kicked.
Chief Beck— and Bratton, who said he had also reviewed the file— said he had no doubt that Dorner’s dismissal was appropriate. “That case was thoroughly adjudicated; it was reviewed at multiple levels,” the chief said at a news conference. “In the final analysis, you’ll find Dorner's statements to be self-serving, and the statements of someone who is thoroughly unhappy with his lot in life.”
Still, in some black neighborhoods, where the case has been followed extremely closely, there was evidence of skepticism about how Dorner was treated by the department.
“Black people feel like we’ve been targets for so long, we’ve always felt that the LAPD was corrupt,” said Kim Pace, 45, a bus driver from Carson. “So for us, it’s like, okay, they pushed him over the edge.”
Sababu, the tour guide, said the sight of a police officer kicking a suspect was not uncommon in the history of South Central Los Angeles. “Here you have an officer that’s actually standing up for a citizen and saying: ‘That’s wrong, why are you kicking that guy in the face?’ and for his efforts, he’s fired,” he said.
Bratton expressed concern at the fallout of Dorner’s statements, suggesting that they might become a rallying cry for the disaffected. “Just look at the Facebook postings around this issue, and some of the crazies that come out of the woodwork who are rallying to this guy’s cause,” he said.
Smart said there had been significant improvements in the Police Department’s standing with minorities over the past decade, even if some problems remained. He expressed concern that the nuances of that situation could be lost. “While there’s been a lot of improvement, there’s still a need to make better relations,” he said. “Whether or not all these things happened to him or not, this is causing some people— you can see this on Facebook, on the articles online— to say, ‘I told you so.’”
Ian Lovett has a related article in The New York Times about the same guy:
The search for the former Los Angeles police officer wanted in three killings continued in Big Bear Lake, California, even as a blizzard covered the mountains with a foot of snow. But as no new traces of the suspect were found, the authorities wondered if he had somehow slipped through their fingers.
Law enforcement agencies from across Southern California had been on a regionwide manhunt for Christopher J. Dorner, 33, a former Navy reservist sought in connection with the shooting deaths of three people and the attempted shootings of several police officials.
Over the course of the week since the first killing, Dorner had been spotted all over Southern California, from Riverside to San Diego. His trail seemed to lead here when a burned-out pickup truck found at the base of the mountain was identified as belonging to Dorner. Law enforcement followed tracks from the car into the nearby woods. With only a few routes in and out of town, they were confident they had Dorner cornered.
More than a hundred law enforcement officers spent the last two days combing the area, going door to door overnight, taking special care to investigate remote cabins and other vacation homes whose owners were away, and scanning the area by helicopter.
But they have been unable to turn up any new clues, Sheriff John McMahon, sheriff of San Bernardino County, said at a news conference. “We searched all night; we did not discover any additional evidence,” Sheriff McMahon said. “We will continue searching until either we discover that he left the mountain, or we find him. We don’t have any evidence to suggest that he is or is not here,” he added.
For the second day in a row, local schools were closed, keeping schoolchildren and their yellow buses off the mountain roads in the midst of the search.
Still, as the search continued without new evidence, and the ski resort reopened, life in the town began to return to normal. Skiers and snowboarders flocked to the mountain to take advantage of the fresh powder. And both local residents and visitors expressed growing skepticism that Dorner was— or ever had been— in town. Instead, many thought the pickup truck was a diversion.
Cindy Johnston was in the Big Bear Lake area, about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, to ski with her family. “We’re being a little bit more careful, but that’s about it,” Johnston said. “We’re keeping the kids closer together, and not going out so much at night. I think he’d be stupid if he was here, and he doesn’t seem stupid. There are too many people looking for him.”
Yvette Blunt, a Big Bear Lake resident, did not think Dorner was in town anymore, either. “He left the car here to attract everyone here,” Blunt, 66, said. “That way, he can go somewhere else.”
Rico says let's hope they find this idiot before he kills anyone else...
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