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Former police officer Christopher Dorner is suspected in the deaths of a police officer and in two other Los Angeles Police Department related homicides. He has issued a manifesto stating he is out for revenge and to clear his name, saying he was hounded out of the LAPD for reporting incidents of racism and abuse of criminal suspects. The U.S. military has trained him well in killing and the LAPD is right to be fearful of him.
But how does that justify the crazed, homicidal behavior of the LAPD over the past few days?
Incident 1:
5 a.m. on Thursday, Police received a radio call saying a truck matching Dorner’s gray Nissan Titan was spotted near the home of a high-ranking LAPD officer. A few minutes later, a truck rolled down the officer’s street in Torrance. As the vehicle slowly approached, officers at the house opened fire, unloading a barrage of bullets into the back of the truck.
But …
The truck was a Toyota Tacoma not a Nissan Titan.
The color was aqua blue, not gray.
And inside the truck wasn’t Dorner, a large black man, but two not-large Hispanic women — Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71 — delivering newspapers.
But hey, not to worry, folks, the LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has already excused this criminal stupidity: the officers were understandably edgy:
The L.A. Times further reports:
Law enforcement sources told The Times that at least seven officers opened fire. On Friday, the street was pockmarked with bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs. Residents said they wanted to know what happened.
“How do you mistake two Hispanic women, one who is 71, for a large black male?” said Richard Goo, 62, who counted five bullet holes in the entryway to his house.
Glen T. Jonas, the attorney representing the women, said 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.
A reader commented (under an LA Times op-ed criticizing Beck for prejudging the officers innocent):
There seems to be two forms of justice being presented here – one for civilians, and one for cops, and based on Beck’s public statements, no charges should be filed, take his word on that. The DA and State Attorney General’s Office need to jump on this case, and start demonstrating some accountability for a myriad of laws that were broken here – assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder by police officers, multiple counts of assault, and criminal negligence.
Incident 2:
Police seeking Dorner opened fire in a second case of mistaken identity
Damn (!) these people are out of control:
David Perdue was on his way to sneak in some surfing before work Thursday morning when police flagged him down. They asked who he was and where he was headed, then sent him on his way.
Seconds later, Perdue’s attorney said, a Torrance police cruiser slammed into his pickup and officers opened fire; none of the bullets struck Perdue.
His pickup, police later explained, matched the description of the one belonging to Christopher Jordan Dorner — the ex-cop who has evaded authorities after allegedly killing three and wounding two more. But the pickups were different makes and colors. And Perdue looks nothing like Dorner: He’s several inches shorter and about a hundred pounds lighter. And Perdue is white; Dorner is black.
“I don’t want to use the word buffoonery but it really is unbridled police lawlessness,” said Robert Sheahen, Perdue’s attorney. “These people need training and they need restraint.”
So many great comments under that article, but choosing just one (emphasis added):
LL Cool J will be hosting the Grammys this evening, I hope he is not shot due to mistaken Identity. LAPD is one stupid police dept. Our community have been a victim of their mistakes and brutality for decades. The Rodney King incident was one of thousands only that time it was caught on tape. People still didn’t believe it. Oh Well. Dorner had the audacity to cross the thin blue line in other words he snitched. You see what LAPD do to snitches …
Advice: If you live in LA LA land, don’t matter what brand or color, keep the pick-up truck in the driveway.
Photo by JBrazito under Creative Commons license
67 Comments
A new and good article on Dorner, the LAPD, and the militarization of inner city policing, is ‘American Blowback‘ at Counterpunch.
Thanks for pointing us to the ‘American Blowback’ piece, fairleft. I’d blown right by it, reckoning that it was about our heinous foreign misadventures. It’s a great piece, imo. These two concepts stood out like beacons our nation is ignoring at our peril:
“Christopher Dorner is the dialectical gravedigger of a dying system: armed, trained, and prepared by a system which prizes cop culture, which massively arms the police and unleashes them on the poor and racialized, and which in its late stages demands that black people do the work of white supremacy.”…and:
“Frantz Fanon argued pointedly that exploitation, occupation, and colonization simply cannot exist without racism and torture of one form or another. As a result, it is useless to oppose the violence of occupation, or the torture made so palpable in Zero Dark Thirty, without opposing the occupation itself, of Iraq, of Afghanistan, of South Central L.A. Yes, something similar could be said of the LAPD, and here we begin to grasp why this most violent of institutions has so rigidly resisted change: because its historically brutal and terroristic tactics, the daily oppression and humiliation exerted most directly at poor black and brown Angelinos, are merely symptoms of the LAPD’s structural function” twined with ‘the application of a counterinsurgency model in LA and other urban policing.
It was sick to hear that Miguel Mazzo hasn’t ever been charged with murder…or anything else.
Rec’d.
Thanks for the link to the American Blowback piece. Very well written and argued.
I was struck by the similarities with Sly Stallone as Rambo as far as the motivation of this former officer.
Happy to recommend.
Welcome to the militarization of amerika’s police forces and the new-old policy of “shoot first,” and sanitize it later. It will take some getting used to but eventually the normal(?) lily-white (?) law-abiding (?) amerikan citizenry will come to realize/accept what minorities and poor folks have known for decades…the man will/can do whatever the hell he wants and there is nothing you can do about it.
Think about that while dredging over in your mind all of those cliches you use to justify police brutality; you known what I mean, stuff like this “well, if you are not doing anything wrong you have nothing to…” well, guess what Mr & Mrs comfortable amerika? It is fast coming to a neighborhood close to you – get used to it.
Jesus Christ. Just, Jesus Christ.
This is an excellent followup on hotflashcarol’s excellent earlier piece. To my mind this is not just a story about a renegade cop. It is a story about an illtrained police force run amok. And it is also a story about the mainstream press, which has focussed on a sanitized version of events omitting any mention of the two incidents fairleft documents here.
I consider hotflashcarol’s diary to be of the same importance as the identification of people targeted to become among the missing in countries we don’t think this one is. Relatives in those countries know that the first necessary thing to do is to put their loved ones on record so that they cannot be disappeared as if they never were. We out here in la-la land would not have known of these victims and these crimes had not folk like hotflashcarol spoken out right away, even before all the facts were known.
And thank you, fdl, for swimming against the stream.
Pretty clearly, only the police can be trusted with firearms. All that extensive training and a selection process that weeds out the unstable is just what the doctor ordered.
It not coming to a community close to you, Mr. Pitz, it’s been here and it’s not leaving. We’ve got more than enough money to murder our own citizens, lawfully, with police marauders it appears. But not nearly enough to feed them, employ them and protect them from sinister forces: other police marauders.
I can’t figure out what the LAPD officers thought they were doing, much less how the Department might try to justify it. I have carried a gun, and I have been the victim of people who were trying to kill me. Even then, I was keenly aware of the need to not shoot them if there was any alternative (and it turned out there was). I therefore bring some practical experience to the question of what was going through the minds of those policemen when they drew their weapons and opened fire. Why did they see the level of threat they actually faced so differently than it was? The act of drawing and firing is a BFD, why was is not so for those officers firing at those women? What did the LAPD do to those officers that made 6 of the 7 draw and fire – it’s just not the natural response?
The latest in profiling: Driving While…In a Pickup.
Uh oh, what about a pickup with a rifle decal on the back window? Safe or less safe? Hmmm
In baseball lore, ” The Natural ” was called precisely that because he’d been conditioned to hit the hell out of the baseball, right? So, why don’t you think this wasn’t a natural response? The police officer’s conditioned response was as natural as Roy Hobb’s swing. Just sayin’.
The fundamental issue is police force impunity. It’s been with us for a very long time. Most of the riots in inner cities since the 1960s, including Watts in 1965 and the one following the beating of Rodney King have had to do with police force impunity. And the underlying reason for the fury of the riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King had to do with the impunity of the police forces in those cities, an issue that had been simmering since 1865.
Already folks are psychologizing this event trying to make is a unique random event so as to avoid the main political issue.
Women have the power to demand & create a just world.
Occupy Our Ova!!!
http://stealthismeme.wordpress.com/
Deeply, Seriously disturbing, I have done my best to follow this from the beginning. The Chief needs to be fired NOW.
Please read some of the Chief’s comments regarding this.
He is a big part of the problem right up to now..
Fire him now.
US Attorney General offer safe arrest to Dorner.
Prosecute the undercover cops who opened fire without warning on citizens.
This is seriously disturbing for LAPD to openly conduct themselves as a DRUG GANG ARRESTING AUTHORITY, JUDGING AUTHORITY, EXECUTION AUTHORITY.
TY
In fairness to Charlie Beck and his employees, they are under a great deal of stress.
Still, when the dust settles, Chief Beck needs to publicly acknowledge that the Torrance event was totally out of control. And he needs to publicly state that there is no excuse for what happened. And that he is taking steps to prevent a recurrence.
They don’t know that people deliver newspapers early in the morning?
There were also a lot of bullets that went into houses in the neighborhood. Lots of property damage, fortunately none of the residents were injured.
Looking at photos of the Toyota, it’s amazing that neither woman was killed.
A TV news segment last night reported that LAPD is going to buy them a new car.
Reminiscent of the Woody Allen segment in “New York Stories”, in which the magician who made Woody’s mom disappear tells him, “If anything happened to your Mom, we’ll get you two tickets to any show we do.”
Thanks for the diary, fairleft, and for the excellent comments. I thought about linking to the latest on this from the LA Times but I have worn out my welcome there and keep getting a paywall. Better a fresh take on it, anyway. I’m really glad that this story continues to hold readers’ interests because it is such a perfect window into the root problems of unequal justice and police brutality and militarization.
I do believe that this is opening the eyes of people who have previously been under the misapprehension that police almost always behave in a rational and legal manner.
From the American Blowback article at Counterpunch that you linked to:
Heh! I just copied that exact quote from the article planning to paste it here.
Exactly! And thank you so much for coming in with your article when you did. I was sorry to see it removed from the MyFDL Recommended Diaries list. Still am.
In fairness to the LAPD officers opening up on these innocent people, I bet all of them were carrying wallets, so they were kind of asking for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Diallo_shooting
Even though Dorner hasnt been put down yet the PR campaign is in full swing. The law suits and new investigations will drag on into the future and little if anything will change. The cops are buying a new truck for their victim so they must be the good guys.
The only good thing that will come from this is that every time a LA cop hears a truck backfire he will shit his pants a little bit.
I cannot in any way abide your excuse that they are under “stress” ty
As I asked in another thread, we don’t seem to be hearing anything about the mayor and city council. Why aren’t they dealing appropriately with the police brutality? No, that’s not a rhetorical question. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.
Thanks, greenwarrior. It was there for a long time and the mods front-paged it so I think it got plenty of exposure. A lot of it is old news by now, not to mention inaccurate, as the first reports often are. So I hope everyone who feels compelled to put up a diary about this will do so; it’s a great big story and the more we learn about it and discuss it, the better.
I don’t know much about the LA City Council, but I would venture a guess that it is just as corrupt, incompetent and Chamber-of-Commerce owned as the Oakland City Council. Oakland can’t seem to do anything about police brutality but pay all the lawsuits – and hire William Bratton. We can see how well he worked out for LA.
Me too, I want the chief relieved of duty. Instead of repeatedly offering childish statements of support for his officers, he should be assuring citizens that he will not tolerate any further drug gang tactics from his force, and if any more unlawful shootings occur he will personally arrest the officers involved.
They are judge jury and executioner, how much more dangerous and unamerican can they be?
I’ve been wondering if Dorner–who seems like he might be a decent guy, considering–set his pick-up on fire to prevent any more civilians from being shot up.
Does anyone doubt that if it had been Dorner in the truck, the cops would have had their cover story all ready. “Yes, he shot first, and we had to open fire.” Yeah. Right.
I used to drive a late night/early morning paper route, and got pulled over several times. Usually because they were bored and needed to harass someone.
The only decent one was a women state cop, who pulled in behind me as I was throwing to offices in a mini-strip mall. She pulled up along side me, rolled down her window and apologized. “I didn’t see the baskets of papers in the back,” she told me, “I thought you might be casing the offices.” She waved and drove away. Any city cop would have made me get out, checked my license, registration, insurance, anything to justify the stop, and delayed me 30-45 min, and then written a ticket because I was driving on the wrong side of the street at 4am, in a mall, with no traffic. Just to cover their asses.
One of my co-workers, a black woman, was followed for half her route for three nights running by a cop. He never stopped her, never talked to her. Just followed. She’s the wife of a local minister, she eventually called the chief of police, and warned him about being sued for harassment. It stopped. Dicks.
Probably not likely. Charlie Beck is a 30-year veteran of LAPD. His father was LAPD. He was around during the illustrious Daryl Gates era (see T.R.A.S.H/C.R.A.S.H, among other highlights). Charlie supposedly cleaned up Rampart after that.
I am grateful the LAPD hasn’t killed anyone while it is randomly slinging lead at uninvolved civilians. But doesn’t something seem amiss in the training of officers who just start firing without being certain of the identity of their targets and then miss with so many rounds? It seems to me that LAPD and the citizens of Los Angeles would benefit greatly from a police department which knew what they were shooting at and then hit them.
I keep coming back around to the thought that the cops were supposed to be protecting everyone in that Torrance neighborhood from Dorner, not just the “target.” Perhaps the cops might have considered moving the “targets” to a safe houses in order to keep civilians safe from harm. But no, they went in with guns blazing and zero regard for collateral damage. I think they are incredibly lucky that nobody was killed.
Given the behavior of the LAPD, we can only be grateful when they miss. God forbid, they should be trained to shoot better.
Agree it is not likely, that is why he should be placed on admin leave right now….read some of the things he has said…..scary indeed…..
Including that he “got” someone to replace their shot up truck…damns this makes me want to cry thinking what it was like for those working women when the cops tried to murder them.
Please citizens of LA force his removal.
He fully supports this kind of gang behaviour from his force.
They may have reason to execute dorner on sight…..
Relieve the Chief of duty NOW
Attorney General of US offer safe arrest of Dorner
investigate whole deal…ty
Once the first cop shoots, the rest are trained to believe that first cop has determined shooting is appropriate.
I shoot a fair number of pistol matches and often squad with guys on the big city police pistol team. They are all quite good. I am a C+ at best. Those cops tell me that I am much better with a pistol than most cops that only shoot once a quarter for qualification.
Something seems wrong with this picture… was the pickup approaching in reverse?
Interesting idea, but has problems in crowds.
That does bring up a bunch of new questions, doesn’t it? I have seen a wider angle photo of the scene and if I remember correctly, there are multiple police cars but they’re all behind the truck. Why didn’t they have somebody positioned on both sides of the street who could have seen the front of the truck? That would have allowed them, at the very least, to see that there were two relatively small people inside. I’m assuming that they are all trying to get their stories straight; must be a bitch since there’s a photo of the aftermath that has to square with whatever the official account is going to be.
LAPD is offering at least $1 million – maybe as much as $1.5 million – for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Dorner. Wonder if you still get the reward money if they kill him on sight? An arrest and conviction seems like a pretty unlikely scenario.
Those are good questions. We’d be better off now if the issue had been pressed years ago, against other Americans in uniform.
And on the same theme, let’s not forget this golden oldie.
apples and oranges. there, they were targeting the press. /s
I suppose I should have added a snark tag.
Sorry if my comment came off like I wasn’t getting you: I know just what you meant, and just wanted to illustrate more of the same madness.
Good point, but that’s how it was described in the Times. Maybe several cops were down the street from the high level officer’s house?
Agree! Great comment … lots of great comments here.
When you mess with the American people’s right to drive their pickups you’ve stepped on a rattlesnake!
Like I said over at your diary, I hadn’t noticed it when I posted mine … Glad to keep the conversation and outrage going.
What we probably should try to understand is that this is not an aberration, it’s how police behave now and from now on except it will get worse. The tipping point is this whole era of post-9/11 paranoia and hate, so that no one can oppose the cops or the troops no matter how homicidal and criminal they are.
The economic elite won’t help us. I don’t know why, but this seems to be what the elite wants, or at least accepts. Militarized police forces, racist and rightist and stupid, independent of democratic control.
The ‘democracy’ won’t help us. I mean, where is our elected government, where are our politicians to stop this stuff, live rounds sprayed all over a middle-class neighborhood, dozens of aim-to-kill rounds into the back of a pickup truck? Scared and shriveled up inside the pockets of big money and corporate-media-generated conventional wisdom … post-democracy-ville.
I didn’t notice that until after I commented here. I think all diaries have a shelf life of a few days at most and then new ones are in order . . . especially in this case when the lies and misinformation keep changing. :)
That’s what I sort of guessed too… maybe LAT being intentionally imprecise, covering up a bit for the cops, make it plausibly sound like they were defending themselves from an approaching (attacking wink/wink) vehicle instead of shooting at the backside.
Just watched the latest press conference with the various SoCal mayors and Chief Beck, who specifically talked about how “easy” it was to come up with the $1 million reward. Sounds like the money came from police organizations/unions as well as elitist businesses who depend on the cops to protect them from the rest of us. I don’t know if there was ever really an era where the police officer was truly mandated to protect and serve everyone in the community or whether that was a Norman Rockwell fantasy, but our current police force has become a combination of the Pinkertons and the military.
I heard a reporter on CNN or somewhere talking about how the truck had exited the freeway toward the neighborhood where the “target” was and then started driving slowly with its lights turned off. That behavior was supposedly what spooked the cops so badly. One report said there were undercover LA cops that fired but the photos show multiple black and white police cars as well.
You would think that they would assign Torrance cops who were familiar with that neighborhood to be part of the protection force – in which case, they should have been familiar with these newspaper delivery ladies. Wouldn’t that make the most sense – cops who theoretically patrolled that neighborhood would be the ones likely to see something unusual. The trouble is, we don’t have community or neighborhood policing any more. Cops live in the safe suburbs and come to patrol people who are not their neighbors, for whom they obviously feel little responsibility.
Well we are all safe now because LAPD is going to start using drones in the manhunt!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-10/us-use-drones-chris-dorner-manhunt
Thanks for some possibly true fuller explanation… though I don’t know why we should necessarily believe the part about “started driving slowly with its lights turned off.” I’d need to hear it from the victims (and believe they weren’t bought off for saying so).
And OT, but re: “we don’t have community or neighborhood policing any more”, I’m afraid the scaling back of USPS home delivery will just make the meltdown of the friendly neighborhood watch/policing problem worse.
I don’t think Al-Awaki assassination and the LAPD attempted assassinations are entirely unrelated. Not only do we have leadership from the top with Obama becoming totally lawless but we’ve got the federal government and state/local police forces becoming more integrated with “fusion centers.” It wouldn’t surprise me if the LAPD is doing things like the NYPD muslim spying, just the LAPD hasn’t been caught yet…which the NYPD has been acting as an agent of the federal government, but oustide of federal oversight or federal FOIA.
No words! It’s too horrifying!
What the reporter was saying sounded as if it came straight from police, not from any actual journalism on his part. The women have an attorney so hopefully they are no longer in any direct contact with the cops. I don’t think the offer (from LAPD?) to provide them with a replacement truck is going to be sufficient. Perhaps LAPD would like to offer that deal to every drive-by shooter/attempted murderer.
Yes. I was shocked to discover that the NYPD has a Tel Aviv branch.
I don’t want to distract from the main issue but something we should consider sometime in the future is WHY THE FUCK CAN’T THE DAMNED POLICE SHOOT ANY BETTER THAN BOY SCOUTS GETTING THEIR FIRST TASTE OF A 22 BOLT ACTION?
Some fictional character once said to a cop “if you’d had one dead body to show for each round fired it would have proven your people knew what they were doing. Regardless of whether it was the RIGHT thing to do it would have shown they were picking and choosing their targets not just blindly banging away not caring who got hit.”
Who could have anticipated?/s
It’s my understanding that they drove with the lights off so they didn’t disturb sleeping residents, as they delivered the papers.
Me too; other newspaper carriers have confirmed that they do it as well. Cops who regularly patrolled neighborhoods at that hour might be expected to know such a thing. I understand that they were anticipating Dorner might jump out and begin firing. But aren’t “our heroes” called heroes because they put themselves in the line of fire in order to save innocent people? The mythology is beginning to wear a little thin.
First, these police officers failed to shoot out even one tire of that truck. Indicates to me that they had no idea what they were doing.
Second, this article is cross posted to DailyKos in a diary that hit their RECOMMENDED list.
Third, LAPD Gang of Seven and Disappearing the Evidence. The URL goes here:
– http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/10/1185964/-LAPD-Gang-of-Seven-and-Disappearing-the-Evidence
LAPD is trying to get ownership of that Toyota Tacoma. Cute ploy. Seems there’s a chance that the condition of the truck was altered by additional gunfire after the crime scene was secured. After Margie Carranza and Emma Hernandez had been removed on stretchers.
Altering crime scenes with additional gunfire is not a common practice. But it happens. Here, the Gang of Seven were looking as a possible homicide charge. They had fired with not a hint of probable cause or of likely hazard to themselves.
Madness ??? That’s not automatically limited to Christopher Dorner. These guys panicked.
Should one assume they were trying to protect someone who has moved anyway, arrest dorner
or simply execute him?
Why the hell LAPD shooting at these look alike, though different color and make, pick up trucks? LAPD has already said that they found Donner’s burnt pick up in Big Bear mountain area.
A few words of safety ADVICE if you are from Los Angeles area:
Just keep you fat, lazy ass in bed until sometime in the afternoons until this Donner fella is on the loose and you won’t get shot for mistaken identity by LAPD early in the mornings.
I posted this earlier today on NBC’s ‘discuss this post. But it was removed. I thought it was better than my last post on FDL and not too controversial. Maybe it’s because I had the n-word spelled out? But then I checked another post talking about winter snowfall when I was a kid on a different site and that was removed as well. Think of this as an addendum to my ‘LAPD and Dorner. You can decide if it’s written poorly. I won’t answer any replys to my comment on this posting. I previewed it and can’t figure out why I get /// lines instead of punctuation.
For the LAPD. And those officers on the force only a few years and their superiors.
“He can turn himself in and he can be able to get his side of the story out,” Smith said. When this first started happening, the mass media propagandists said he was a madman. Madman implying like a rabid animal, a total lunatic, etc. How does a madman get his side of the story out? What I’d like Mr. Smith to tell everyone, is ‘madman’ a step up from n****r or not. The LAPD still doesn’t get it. This was never about Christopher Dorner. Arrest him, kill him, drape him in purple vevet and make him king, it won’t matter. He’s a symptom of the problem. The problem came about starting from a long time ago. This thing started as a seed that was planted decades ago. And now Dorner is just a symptom of the spiritual repurcussion that is now finally bearing fruit. Calling him a madman or promising him that he’ll be able to tell his side is just being in denial about what gives birth to this juggernaut. What was needed was having a policy where bad cops would be brought up before a grand jury instead of being given adminstrative leave with pay for bad acts and crime. That’s one way the bad cops can get weeded out of the force. If they were weeded out, you’d have a better society, a lot more respect for the department, no Christopher Dorner, and qualified candidates coming into your police academys. Instead you have this problem that stems from administrative policy over a 30-40 year period. Dorner’s just a reaction to that. It would’ve gone amuck with or without him eventually because bad policy has spiritual consequences. We’re spiritual beings living inside shells of flesh, remember? And every action has a reaction even if that reaction takes an entire lifetime to show up. But go ahead, maybe your reward will net a result. I can’t say one way or another. I can tell you why Dorner wrote his 11,400 word document. It’s his last will and testament before he gives up his life, without the will just the testament part. That’s why he shared his likes and dislikes for all those people he wrote about. It’s his way of saying what he was about before he dies. And it’s a long, wordy testament so that alone probably indicates that your problem with him might turn out to be long as well, maybe not, but I’d count on it being long and bloody. How you choose to go forward from here on out is a different story. You’ll either change and I mean really change or bounce along from one spiritual repurcussion to another. You need to man up. It’s known as being mature adults that face up to consequences and responsibilities.
I try to explain what it’s all about in what I’ve written previously. I first lived in Torrance before moving to Fullerton. One day something happened involving an indiscriminate police shooting. I asked a guy I was with just how the police could do that? He said I have a better understanding if I accepted the fact that California is a police state. That was 30 years ago. It’s gotten a lot worse. I live in a small town in Wisconsin now. The police are nice here as they tend to be most places.
Right!
LAPD didn’t shoot Jay-Z after the Grammys.
That’s something.
In any case, consider that LAPD is up against the Mexican drug gangs as well as the 80,000 Crips/Bloods gang members. That environment changes everything. Think “Fallujah” and you get closer to the reality of daily life for these guys.
Criminal gangs change everything. It’s unavoidable.