(MintPress) – “I saw some of the most vile things humans can inflict on others as a police officer in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the streets of LA. It was in the confounds of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) police stations and shops (cruisers). The enemy combatants in LA are not the citizens and suspects, it’s the police officers,” wrote former officer Christopher Dorner in his departing manifesto.

Dorner’s searing critiques of his former employer have largely been lost amid sensational headlines about manhunts, shootouts and murder during the nearly two-week saga.

The Memory of Rodney King

Many of the late Dorner’s criticisms harks back to the Watts riots of 1992 and the preceding Rodney King trial. King, an African American construction worker was beaten by 4 LAPD officers after a high speed car chase. The excessive use of force was observed by eyewitnesses who observed the assault from nearby apartment buildings.

After the four officers were acquitted of all charges, riots broke out in the impoverished Los Angeles community of Watts, resulting in the deaths of 53 citizens and more than 2,000 reported injuries.

The Watts riots, among the worst in U.S. history, resulted in a full-scale deployment of national guardsmen to subdue the unrest. Dorner noted that virtually nothing has changed since the blatant abuse of police power, writing, “The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse.”

Dorner elaborated saying that August 2007 he had reported an officer for physically assaulting a suspect, a clear use of excessive force Dorner observed while he was assigned as a patrol officer to the LAPD’s Harbor Division.

Dorner adds, “While cuffing, the officer kicked the suspect twice in the chest and once in the face. The kick to the face left a visible injury on the left cheek below the eye. Unfortunately after reporting it to supervisors and investigated by PSB (internal affairs) nothing was done.”

Dorner also called out the culture of racism while observing fellow officers regularly using racial slurs against African Americans. In one particular incident, Dorner reported another officer for “singing a nazi youth song about burning Jewish ghettos.” Again, nothing was done to discipline the guilty party.

After being demoted and discipled, Dorner continued to call out injustice where he saw it. Speaking about a female colleague also guilty of assaulting suspects Dorner writes,

“She found it very funny and entertaining to draw blood from suspects and arrestees. At one point she even intentionally ripped the flesh off the arm of a woman we had arrested for battery (sprayed her neighbor with a garden water hose). Knowing the woman had thin elastic skin, she performed an Indian burn to the woman’s arm after cuffing her.”

Dorner was eventually dismissed January 2009 from the LAPD. When officers conspired against him in an attempt to bring him down. He concludes that he, “lost complete faith in the system, when the system betrayed, slandered, and libeled me.”

By breaking the barrier of silence and calling out misconduct, Dorner drew the ire of his colleagues. More recent riots show that his complaints are part of a much larger problem.

Riots in Anaheim, CA erupted after the suspicious police killings of 2 Latino youths. An unarmed man, Manuel Diaz, who police say was a gang member, was shot and killed on July 21.

The following day Anaheim resident Joel Acevedo was killed by police after he allegedly fired a handgun at officers. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in the days that followed to protest the deaths of Diaz and Acevedo, individuals that local residents believe were unjustly targeted by authorities.

Protests escalated considerably after officers began to employ violent force to subdue the protests. Police fired bean-bag rounds and pepper spray into crowds filled with women and children during the 10 days of outrage that followed the police killings.

Scholars and community members note that police brutality is one factor driving these uprisings. Economic and social inequalities are also contributory factors in these types of actions.

“What we have here is concentrated power in the hands of a wealthy minority, a working-class and working-poor Latino majority that feels it has no voice coupled with completely uneven distribution of the city’s resources. And then, the deaths of two young Latino men in the span of one weekend,” said Jose Moreno, a California State University-Long Beach professor shortly after the Anaheim riots

The problem is not one specific only to police in Southern California. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington D.C. tracks cases of police brutality nationally.

From January 2010 through December 2010 the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project recorded 4,861 unique reports of police misconduct that involved 6,613 sworn law enforcement officers and 6,826 alleged victims.

Previously a 2007 study examining 10,000 citizen allegations of abuse against the Chicago Police Department found that internal police review boards exercised disciplinary action in only 19 of the 10,000 cases.

The study was conducted by University of Chicago law professor Craig B. Futterman and the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based organization that works on social justice projects.

Rather than using public resources to investigate cases of police abuse, authorities sought to silence a whistleblower who blew the lid on LAPD misconduct.

In the process of hunting down Dorner, LAPD officers shot two innocent civilians Thursday after officers spotted a truck matching the description of the one Dorner was last seen driving. Officers spotted the truck and fired at the vehicle hitting both the driver and the passenger.



Both innocents turned out to be newspaper carriers. The victims were transported to a nearby hospital. One suffered a minor gunshot wound and is being released. The other had two gunshot wounds and is reportedly in stable condition.

The reckless abuse of police power Dorner sought to expose was evident even in the search that ended in his demise.