LAPD went nuts, justifiably. You have no idea how unsettling it is to have one of your own target you. It is so rare that it is mind blowing. (Outside Fort Hood Texas can we think of another?) PJM has a LAPD officer write for them. This is his article.
So you show up at work one day, and your supervisor tells you that instead of your normal duties you’re going to be working a protection detail at a fellow officer’s home. Okay, you say, but why?
And your supervisor tells you that they’ve identified a suspect in a double murder, the one down in Irvine that everyone’s been talking about, the one where the daughter of a retired LAPD captain and her fiancé were shot to death while sitting in a car. And he goes on to tell you that the suspect is a former LAPD cop who was fired a few years ago, and that he had put some kind of twisted manifesto on his Facebook page saying he had declared war on the LAPD and would hunt down and kill everyone he held responsible for his getting canned from the job. And their families.
And you say, “What?”
Then you get a copy of this guy’s manifesto, and the first thing you do is skim through it looking for your name. And though you’re relieved not to find yourself listed among the killer’s targets, there are people you know on the list and you wonder if all of these protection details the LAPD is scrambling to put together will be in place before the guy strikes again. And you think, the guy blames the retired captain (among many others) for his getting fired, so he goes out and kills his daughter? And her fiancé? What the hell is wrong with this guy?
Plenty, as you come to learn, for as you read more deeply into his manifesto you realize he’s put a lot of thought into it — a lot of pretty tangled thought, but a lot of thought nonetheless — and he says he’s got all kinds of guns and military gear and knows how to use them and not get caught.
Then your cell phone starts ringing. It’s people you work with or used to work with, and they have questions. Have you seen the manifesto? Can you believe so-and-so is on the list? Can you believe the guy is willing to kill family members over this? And then you talk to a coworker who tells you that a friend of his is on the list, and your coworker says it was he who informed his friend to arm up and hunker down more than an hour before anyone from the department got around to officially warning him.
Then they tell you the cop you’ll be protecting is someone you used to work with, and you and the rest of your detail drive 30 or 40 miles to his house out in the suburbs and get set up. A few guys in tight on the house, a few others farther out, a few others even farther out. Every car that comes through the neighborhood has to be checked out. You want to knock on the door of the house you’re guarding and ask how your former coworker is doing but you don’t want to bother him and his family, because God knows how they must be feeling. But then he needs to go out for some groceries, so you arrange to put him in an unmarked car with some cops in plain clothes, so at least he can go and get what he needs without making a big scene at the supermarket.
Read the rest.
What people didn’t get is that Dorner declared war on the LAPD AND THEIR FAMILIES! That isn’t some stuff you walk away from. He signed his death warrant the minute he killed that girl. He knew it, but he was living a fantasy where killing a girl and kidnapping and terrorizing an innocent couple is somehow going to make him a hero. (And did over at CNN)
Over what? That he was “wronged?”
Bullshit.
Dorner started a war over a job he lost. Then he lost the war. That is how things go when you kill a cop’s daughter because you feel you are a victim of racism.
It’s a good lesson to learn and remember, especially for those on that side of the argument you keep thinking someday they’ll “strike” out against the “Man.” You want to play, you had better be willing to pay. The police are very restrained in their day to day interactions with the public, even when under physical attack. Sometimes that is mistaken for weakness. Imagine what would happen if they didn’t care about whether you made it to court or not.
It’s that simple.