The Meme Is Spreading -- "The LAPD Brought This On Themselves"

 

Last I remember hearing of the LAPD before this Dorner situation arose was after Anthony Villaraigosa  pranced around with nipples erect praising his shock troops for "masterfully" evicting the Occupy LA folks from the grounds of City Hall. That it was a violent and brutal raid in which dozens were injured and hundreds were arrested seemed to escape hizzoner's notice, but then, those were the days when kicking the shit out of the hippies was considered virile and manly and all. (Well, those days have never left us, have they.) The video above, for example, resulted from LAPD's violence against LA Art Walk participants in July of last year.

LAPD's reputation for excessive force, cruelty, murder, mayhem and violence -- toward selected segments of the public you understand -- has been known for generations; it's inbuilt. Every effort at "reform" -- that is to say, to curb the violence and cruelty and murder -- has had only limited and generally temporary success, if any success at all. What's true of LAPD is true of pretty much all law enforcement in Southern California: they are routinely violent, brutal and cruel -- toward selected segments of the public -- when they aren't outright murderous. There have been so many incidents just since the Rodney King Thing, that the public generally lives in greater fear of the police than they are of vaunted gangs and criminals.

The Doner Thing has opened floodgates of absolute outrage and contempt of the police, particularly LAPD since they are in the center of this mess, but affecting all the Southland law enforcement agencies. The ripple affect is traveling throughout the country.

The Dorner Thing has catalyzed the widespread recognition that enough is enough, and it was the panicked actions of the LA and Torrance PDs in shooting up two pickup trucks being driven near the home of one of LAPD's "high value protectees" -- ie: cops -- that wounded two women delivering papers and scared the shit out of a man while destroying two trucks while sending hundreds of bullets flying wildly into houses and cars and landscaping in a sleeping neighborhood that did the trick.

This action, they say, was the perfect demonstration of what Dorner was writing about in his lengthy "manifesto."

It is a culture of corruption, violence, impunity and... incompetence that afflicts the practice of policing in Los Angeles and throughout the land. Someone has to put a stop to it, because police agencies cannot do it themselves. 

While people are not happy about the way Dorner has chosen to try to put a stop to it, they "understand." What else works with these people, ie; the Po-Po, but a dose of their own medicine?

The wan and pathetic defenses of LAPD actions -- whether firing Dorner or shooting up pickup trucks in Torrance -- rub people the wrong way, to put it mildly.

And so a sort of conventional wisdom is congealing that says that the LAPD "brought this on themselves" by their actions specific to this case, by their historic incompetence, their long and disturbing record of violence and brutality (some of which was on nauseating display during their suppression of Occupy LA and other mass police actions in the Los Angeles area -- remember the LA Art Walk, or the Anaheim shootings?)

And look!

As Dorner seems to have disappeared -- whether into the mountain snow at Big Bear or somewhere else -- the police are modifying and mitigating their most outrageous behavior and even promising now to "review" Dorner's specific complaints.

Who'dathunk.