A Tale of Two Cities
Corona
February 7, 2013, two officers are seated in their black and white. They are pulled off patrol and after a briefing are assigned to protect an LAPD officer at his house in Corona, who the Department believed may be a target of double murderer Christopher Dorner, at his house in Corona. They have been flagged down by a civilian. He tells them that he has just seen the suspect’s vehicle at the very gas station at which they are now parked. The citizen recognized the vehicle from news broadcasts. The previous briefing at their division told the officers that ex- LAPD officer Dorner had military training, LAPD training, and was believed to have high powered weapons and explosives and knew how to use them. He wrote and posted a manifest online that made it clear that he was going to kill police officers because of his belief that he was unfairly terminated at a Board of Rights. He had killed two innocent people in cold blood a few days before, and he said more murders were coming. The officers believed him.
As the officers gather information from the citizen, a pickup truck drives by and the citizen identifies it as the one he had seen. Both officers run to their police vehicle. They are out of radio range with LAPD, but they follow the pickup anyway. They had been told that Dorner’s vehicle was blue and this one is gray. They pull closer to get the plate. The pickup suddenly exits the freeway. They follow and make a wide turn to tactically keep their line of sight and create distance between the vehicles. The pickup pulls to the curb and stops.
As the driver officer places his transmission in park, a male steps out of the pickup, aims an AR-15 rifle at the officers and begins firing. Glass fragments hit both officers in the face as bullets whiz by their heads. The officers dive for the floorboards as more rifle bullets slam into the vehicle. The driver officer raises his pistol over the dashboard and fires shots in the direction of the suspect as his partner opens the passenger door and slides out. The driver officer peers over the dashboard and continues firing until his pistol goes into slide lock. The passenger officer comes up and fires at the suspect as he is getting into the pickup. The pickup roars off.
The passenger officer looks at his partner. He is bleeding from the head. They reload and take cover, expecting the suspect to come back and finish them off. Instead, the suspect drives two miles down the street, pulls up next to a Riverside black and white, and, without warning, fires another clip from his rifle into the two unsuspecting officers inside.
Torrance
February 7, 2013, two officers are seated in their black and white. They are pulled off patrol and after a briefing are assigned to protect an LAPD officer at his house in Torrance—an officer who the Department believed may be a target of double murderer Christopher Dorner because he was the captain who was on Dorner’s Board of Rights. The officers were positioned in a driveway eight houses down from the captain’s residence. Other officers had been placed in other locations in various cover positions. They knew that Dorner had military training, LAPD training, and was believed to have high-powered weapons and explosives.
The officers also knew that there wasn’t a single rifle among them, only pistols and shotguns. They were outgunned. Furthermore, they knew that this captain was a highly likely target because he was a member of the board that recommended his termination and a day or two prior, an individual matching Dorner’s description had been observed at the captain’s residence. Tensions were high. A flyer described Dorner’s vehicle as a blue Nissan Titan pickup.
At 0326 hours, the radio informs the officers that LAPD officers had engaged Dorner in a gun battle in Corona and that two Riverside officers were later shot, one of them dying and one severely wounded. The officers know that Dorner is out and on the hunt. Tensions climb even higher.
At 0429 hours, the radio informs the officers that the suspect’s vehicle is a charcoal gray Nissan pickup and that the suspect has a license plate starting with 8D.
At 0437 hours, the radio informs the officers that a citizen reported a gray Nissan pickup believed to be Dorner with a partial plate of 808 had exited the freeway few miles away from the officers.
At 0515 hours, the officers hear a unit posted eight blocks on the other side of the captain’s residence broadcast “We got a truck headed our direction.” The officers are instantly alert. This might be it. One officer hurriedly pulls out his phone and brings up his home number. “Tell the kids I love them,” he texts.
The next broadcast crackles over the radio. “I think this is the vehicle. It’s dark. It’s a dark colored vehicle. The license plate starts 8D and so far everything’s matching.” Then “Hey it’s driving real slow toward us. It’s coming our way.”
The officers exit their vehicle and each gets behind the engine block of a parked vehicle and peer up the street towards the captain’s house. “Be ready! Be ready!” They hear from the radio. They see a truck slow down and come to a stop in the vicinity of the captain’s house. Then it started.
The officer hears a pistol shot, then what sounds like rifle shots. He hears bullets fly by and sees leaves falling from the trees near him as bullets cut them down. The pickup truck has its bright lights on and is moving slightly forward from the captain’s residence. Muzzle flashes come from the cab of the truck on the driver’s side. The alarm goes off in the car the officer is hiding behind caused, he believes, by the impact of bullets. The officer rises and returns fire. He redeploys behind a portion of a house and the gunfire coming from down the the driveway and it is drawing fire. He leans out and fires again.
Aftermath
Let’s pause for a second and think about what it takes to return fire with a pistol when highpowered rifle fire is directed at you. The AR-15 (Assault Rifle-15) is the civilian version of the U.S. Armed Forces M-16, the standard military rifle. It was chosen by the military for its accurate, rapid and effective fire. Thirty-round magazines are typical for the AR-15, and each bullet will hit you at a speed of around 3,000 feet per second with a force of 1,100-foot-pounds and will probably tumble inside your body to damage as much tissue as possible. Never bring a pistol to a rifle fight; especially a rifle fight where the other guy is experienced and has military training. Nevertheless, these officers faced this fire with their pistols and engaged. We should be impressed and they should be honored.
Let’s also pause for a second and think about two soldiers who throw their bodies on top of hand grenades to save their fellow soldiers. One grenade goes off and one does not. Both are still heroes, are they not? One is just a lucky hero. We judge them for what they knew at the time they acted, not by the ultimate result as known after the act. The law recognizes this, and it is in LAPD’s shooting policy: “The reasonableness of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” (Special Order No. 36, IIA)
After the Corona officer-involved shooting, it was determined that the officers had indeed engaged with Dorner in a heroic firefight. These two officers faced deadly rifle fire, kept their heads, and fought valiantly. Probably because of this, they survived.
After the Torrance officer-involved shooting, it was determined that it was not Dorner, but rather two Los Angeles Times ladies delivering early morning papers. It turned out that they drove into a scene at the tail end of a string of incredible coincidences. The officers stationed at various places surrounding the captain’s house were in a high state of alert because of the likelihood of the captain being a target and the information that a person resembling Dorner had been seen in the neighborhood a couple days before. That state of alert was heightened by the information concerning the Corona engagement and the murder of the Riverside officer. Then, the information of a Dorner-type vehicle exiting the freeway only a few miles from their location was broadcast. Then the thousand-to-one shot that the pickup matched the color of the pickup on the bulletin and the license plate started with 8D. On top of all this, the pickup acted strangely (if you had no idea what it was doing) by alternately slowing down and speeding up as if checking for addresses and then paused in front of the captain’s house.
Expecting high-powered automatic weapons and explosives, the initial officers heard what they thought was a gunshot (actually a thrown paper smacking into a sidewalk) and they returned fire. That was the beginning. The officers highlighted at the beginning of this article quite reasonably believed they were being fired upon. What they did not know was that a unit returning from a break was behind the pickup and hearing shots believed they were under fire. When they fired rounds, their bullets hit around our officers and their muzzle flashes, from the perspective of our officers, appeared to be coming from inside the cab of the pickup, rather than from behind it.
If the reasonableness of an officer’s action is to be judged on the knowledge the officer had at the time the decision to use force was made, it is hard to see how their decision was unreasonable. What was unreasonable was the dispatch of officers with no protection detail training, no rifles, and limited communications to relieve other officers in the middle of the night. Why was this done? The Police Commission found that “the decision to swap out the officers (was) due to the concern over overtime.” Sound familiar?
As of this writing, only the boots on the ground officers have received an Administrative Disapproval in the Torrance officer-involved shooting. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Use of Force Board recommended that the shootings were “in policy” to the Chief. The Chief did not follow their recommendation.
Alex Bustamante, the Inspector General (IG), again according to the Times, “clashed” with the Chief over looking further up the chain of command for responsibility for this tragic shooting. Mr. Bustamante had the support of the Police Commission on this issue, and they instructed the Department to further investigate the role of higher-ranking officers in the OIS. I wish the IG luck, but pushing what rolls downhill back up the mountain is a difficult job.
The political wind is blowing strong on this and debate will rage with the involved officers being whipped back and forth until the next media event occurs. The Use of Force Board is to be commended for understanding the pressure that the Torrance OIS officers were under and taking it into consideration in their recommendation.
The officers were convinced they were facing a vicious, well-armed, well-trained killer. Their only thought was to protect their captain. They are in the same class as the soldier whose grenade did not explode. Their decisions on that night came from their sense of duty and honor. They all ran towards the fire. Isn’t that asking enough?
Be legally careful out there.
