True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 216: Moderate Rebel: The Christopher Dorner Story (Part 1)
Aired: 2022-03-26
Duration: 01:30:49


=== Crime Obsessed Vibe (04:36) ===

[00:00:02]  The question is, what would you do to clear your name?
[00:00:07]  Name.
[00:00:08]  A word or set of words by which a person, animal, place, or thing is known, addressed, or referred to.
[00:00:17]  Name synonyms.
[00:00:18]  Reputation, title, appellation, denomination, repute.
[00:00:25]  A name is more than just a noun, verb, or adjective.
[00:00:29]  It's your life, your legacy, your journey, sacrifices, and everything you've worked hard for every day of your life as an adolescent, young adult, and adult.
[00:00:42]  Don't let anybody tarnish it when you know you've lived up to your own set of ethics and personal ethos.
[00:00:49]  Christopher Dorner, Facebook post, 2013.
[00:00:55]  On February 1st, 2013, Anderson Cooper, the gray-maned queer son of incest tycoon Gloria Vanderbilt and anchor of the underground comedy cartoon Anderson Cooper360, received a package in the mail.
[00:01:09]  No, it's not the package that many of you dream he will someday receive.
[00:01:14]  Instead, this package contained three items.
[00:01:17]  A sticky note that read, I never lied.
[00:01:20]  Here is my vindication.
[00:01:21]  Evans kicked the suspect.
[00:01:23]  Respectfully, Chris Dorner.
[00:01:25]  Attached to a DVDR with Chris Dorner exoneration written across its face and an LAPD challenge coin with what appears to be four bullet holes punched through it.
[00:01:37]  The DVD contained an excerpt of a deposition given by Christopher Gettler, a deposition that Christopher Dorner believed would show the world that his hand was forced.
[00:01:49]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:50]  And I'm Brace.
[00:01:51]  We're joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:54]  And this is Truanon, colon, Moderate Rebel, The Christopher Dorner Story.
[00:02:27]  Liz, I know you can't say it, so I'm going to basically say it.
[00:02:30]  What are you going to say?
[00:02:31]  I'm going to say it.
[00:02:32]  This man was a libtard.
[00:02:34]  Okay.
[00:02:35]  I know.
[00:02:36]  We were joking.
[00:02:37]  We were joking about that.
[00:02:38]  And I was like, I can't say that.
[00:02:40]  For some reason, it makes me cringe.
[00:02:41]  But it is true.
[00:02:43]  Yeah.
[00:02:43]  This is the first, like, this is like the extreme blue pill.
[00:02:49]  This isn't a blue pill, baby.
[00:02:51]  This is a blue bullet.
[00:02:52]  Shot at the blue line across the golden state of California.
[00:02:58]  Dude, being a true crime podcast.
[00:03:00]  I don't know how they do rule.
[00:03:02]  Here's the thing.
[00:03:02]  I don't, I have never listened to a true crime podcast.
[00:03:05]  I don't think.
[00:03:06]  Well, maybe I have for like research for episodes.
[00:03:09]  There'll be one made about you someday, baby.
[00:03:11]  Oh, hey, what?
[00:03:13]  No, just so what were you about you listen to them?
[00:03:17]  So, so I don't know.
[00:03:19]  Like, I'm like, there's, okay, there's the old school true crime genre, which is, in my opinion, classico style, which is like e-true Hollywood story, uh, you know, dateline, frontline.
[00:03:33]  Those always have like a, in it, like a brief, like, snippet of a cop during like the previews.
[00:03:38]  It's being like, it was the most gruesome.
[00:03:39]  I've never seen anything like it in my career.
[00:03:41]  And there's like a ripped like newspaper headline.
[00:03:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:45]  And like some kind of crazy, like, like crazy, you know, sounds going.
[00:03:49]  It's always on at like three to four to 5 p.m. on like some network you've never heard of that's like an offshoot of TBS or whatever.
[00:03:58]  So there's that genre.
[00:03:59]  And then there's like the new true crime genre, which is like, we're wacky wackos.
[00:04:04]  Yeah.
[00:04:05]  And look at all these people in Portland getting murdered or like whatever.
[00:04:09]  Like, I don't understand like how it evolved into that.
[00:04:12]  Listeners.
[00:04:13]  If you want to commit a true crime yourself or at least have the urge to do it, I urge you to look up the most subscribed to podcast on Patreon.
[00:04:25]  What's it called called?
[00:04:27]  True crime.
[00:04:28]  True crime obsessed.
[00:04:29]  True crime obsessed.
[00:04:30]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  They remind, they look like fuck, what is that like Nickelodeon cartoon?
[00:04:36]  Is it Nickelodeon?

=== Nickelodeon's True Crime Sensation (04:47) ===

[00:04:39]  I'm just, I don't know, Dan Schneider?
[00:04:41]  No.
[00:04:41]  What is it?
[00:04:42]  It's like a recent one with the like, it's like an atom.
[00:04:44]  It's not, it's not Nickelodeon, but I know it's a cartoon and it's like atomic characters.
[00:04:48]  They're like mad scientists who are like Rick and Morty.
[00:04:52]  There we go.
[00:04:52]  Yeah.
[00:04:53]  I don't know what I think you're wrong about.
[00:04:55]  They look like Rick and Morty people.
[00:04:57]  Yeah.
[00:04:58]  They're like extremely epic.
[00:05:00]  They're like, I thought you meant they look like the characters from Rick and Morty.
[00:05:03]  No, no, no, no.
[00:05:04]  They look like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:06]  No, no, no.
[00:05:07]  They look like they look like Rick and Morty vibe.
[00:05:12]  They're like, if Rick and Morty were set in Portland, they're basically the like Le Epic bacon dark version of Liz and Brace.
[00:05:18]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:05:19]  Yeah.
[00:05:20]  You see a photo of them, you're like, holy God, this is, you know, the Seinfeld episode where it's Bizarro World.
[00:05:26]  I reference it constantly on this podcast.
[00:05:28]  Well, that's also just sort of a reference to Bizarro World.
[00:05:31]  Yeah, from Seinfeld.
[00:05:32]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:33]  But I always think of the Seinfeld because it's so funny.
[00:05:35]  These are our Bizarro characters.
[00:05:37]  This could be us and another.
[00:05:39]  I mean, I think a lot more.
[00:05:40]  They are more successful.
[00:05:41]  Listen, like by many degrees.
[00:05:43]  Anyways, what would you do to clear your name?
[00:05:47]  Liz, what would you do to clear your name?
[00:05:49]  Probably not a lot.
[00:05:50]  Yeah.
[00:05:51]  Yeah.
[00:05:51]  I know.
[00:05:52]  I mean, I'd probably, you know, here's my thing.
[00:05:53]  You know what's easier?
[00:05:55]  Changing your name.
[00:05:56]  You know what's even easier?
[00:05:58]  Making like a few Facebook posts that are vague about like, there's two sides to every story.
[00:06:05]  You know, she's really mentally ill.
[00:06:07]  Sure.
[00:06:08]  And then disappearing for a few years and then reinventing yourself as like a anti-woke guy.
[00:06:12]  Yeah, totally.
[00:06:13]  That's what I would probably do.
[00:06:15]  I think that's safe.
[00:06:16]  That's a safe route.
[00:06:17]  It's well trod.
[00:06:18]  So today we're talking about a man who did.
[00:06:23]  I don't know if he really did much to clear his name, but he killed a lot of people.
[00:06:28]  Yeah, he did kill a lot of people.
[00:06:29]  Christopher Dorner, this is like, this, it's funny because when we were looking this up, I mean, I fully remember this very well when it was happening.
[00:06:36]  It's crazy to me that this was not that long ago.
[00:06:40]  No, but it was also almost 10 years ago.
[00:06:43]  In my head, this was like, no, it was like literally nine years ago, or it was nine years and a month ago.
[00:06:50]  It was, but to me, in me, this happened in like 2009.
[00:06:53]  Yeah.
[00:06:54]  I was shocked to remember that it happened in 2013.
[00:06:57]  Yeah.
[00:06:57]  Obama years.
[00:06:58]  Yeah.
[00:06:58]  I was, that's probably my least recollected year of my life.
[00:07:03]  2013?
[00:07:04]  Yeah.
[00:07:06]  And so I, but I still remember this happening.
[00:07:08]  It was big news.
[00:07:09]  And more than that, I sort of remember the celebrations of Christopher Dorner across essentially everybody I knew.
[00:07:16]  And Christopher Dorner is one of the sort of few spree killers because I don't know what to call him exactly.
[00:07:21]  I mean, he did go on a spree killing.
[00:07:23]  And I'm not saying that to denigrate the man.
[00:07:25]  Spree killing of all of the named ways that you can kill a bunch of people is kind of like the most jaunty sounding of them.
[00:07:33]  But he's he's really celebrated and has sort of become a folk hero, a little bit more a folk hero.
[00:07:38]  You know, he has a place in kind of semi-popular culture.
[00:07:42]  And really, I mean, I thought about us doing this episode because I saw multiple people, including Dan Ringcon, wearing Chris Dorner shirts in the past few weeks.
[00:07:51]  That is such a Dan Brecon thing to do.
[00:07:53]  Exactly.
[00:07:53]  I like it when he doesn't wear a shirt.
[00:07:56]  I also think that this, we were talking about this because a couple things came to my mind.
[00:08:02]  One, this was one of the first instances of kind of like a collective live internet like sleuth thing happening as this was going on.
[00:08:12]  Because as we'll detail like later on in, you know, I think the next episode, you know, the manhunt lasted for quite some time.
[00:08:20]  And so there was a lot of people click clocking on the old tippy tappers.
[00:08:24]  Yeah, they did.
[00:08:25]  They did do that.
[00:08:27]  No, on Reddit and stuff, like kind of like live investigating as this was going on.
[00:08:32]  That was kind of like a first.
[00:08:34]  And it also really presaged another, let's say, mass casualty event that happened just a short while later where Reddit definitely covered itself in glory by doing some ill-advised investigations.
[00:08:48]  I'm talking, of course, about the Boston bombing.
[00:08:51]  Oh, yes.
[00:08:53]  Yeah, this was a wild year.
[00:08:54]  And I think for us, like we don't usually cover, or we don't, I mean, I don't think that like mass shooting sprees are really our bag.
[00:09:03]  And true crime, certainly, not really, but this, this, you know, as we walk through this, there's a lot to talk about here from Chris Dorner himself to Los Angeles and the good old shiny blue LAPD to the kind of media spectacle that surrounded this.
[00:09:21]  And I don't know what else to say.
[00:09:23]  What you said, the lib-tarded nature.

=== Boston Bombing Revelations (04:30) ===

[00:09:26]  Yes.
[00:09:26]  There, you got me to say it.
[00:09:27]  Good.
[00:09:28]  It feels good to say it.
[00:09:29]  I know.
[00:09:29]  It feels a little.
[00:09:30]  You get a pass on it.
[00:09:32]  Yeah.
[00:09:34]  No, but just like how extreme, I mean, we'll go through his manifesto, if we even want to call it that later on.
[00:09:39]  And all the people he shouts out.
[00:09:41]  Very bizarre case.
[00:09:43]  Yeah, I think we should just get straight into it too.
[00:09:45]  Yeah.
[00:09:46]  Okay.
[00:09:46]  So Chris Dorner, who is he?
[00:09:48]  Chris Dorner, well, all right.
[00:09:50]  First of all, I really wanted, I fucked up by not structuring the notes in the same way that he structured that part of his manifesto that you read, which is that everything is written like a fifth grade paper.
[00:10:01]  Like definitely.
[00:10:03]  Exactly.
[00:10:04]  Yeah.
[00:10:04]  Yeah.
[00:10:06]  But no, Christopher Dorner was born on June 4th, 1979 in New York City, but raised right here in Southern California.
[00:10:14]  I think mostly by his mother.
[00:10:15]  Now, the early thing, or excuse me, one of the things about Chris Dorner's early life is that there's actually not a ton of reporting on it, or at least not a ton of detailed reporting on it.
[00:10:25]  In fact, for a lot of sort of the gaps in Chris Dorner's life, you see essentially people fact checking his manifesto.
[00:10:32]  And like, if there's any sort of like talk about his college years or before that, it's mostly from people who are in his manifesto that reporters called rather than actually doing like a detailed kind of going through his early life.
[00:10:45]  What we do know is that he moved around through a lot of Southern California towns, mostly in the LA and Orange County area.
[00:10:52]  And one of the first Dorner instances or one of the first events of his life that we have actually any actual sort of reporting on, it's done by Chris Dorner himself, is that he claims he was called the N-word by a kid in the first grade at Norwalk Christian School.
[00:11:08]  And this is, I mean, I'm not going to read all this out here, but well, I guess I will.
[00:11:15]  I'm just not going to read every word out.
[00:11:17]  But he says a fellow student, Blank, if I can recall, called me the N-word on a playground.
[00:11:21]  My response was swift and non-lethal, which is really funny way to describe beating up another kid in the first grade.
[00:11:30]  I struck him fast and hard with a punch and a kick.
[00:11:32]  He cried and reported it to a teacher.
[00:11:34]  Exactly.
[00:11:35]  Their teacher reported it to the principal.
[00:11:37]  The principal swatted blank for using a derogatory word towards me.
[00:11:40]  He then, for some unknown reason, swatted me for striking blank in response to him calling me the N-word.
[00:11:47]  He stated, as good Christians, we are to turn the other cheek as Jesus did.
[00:11:51]  Problem is, I'm not a fucking Christian and turned the other cheek.
[00:11:55]  And that old book made of fiction and limited non-fiction called the Bible, never once stated Jesus was called the N-word.
[00:12:03]  That is true.
[00:12:04]  How dare you swap me for standing up for my rights and for demanding that I be treated as an equal human being?
[00:12:09]  Now, I think this is important because it's kind of, you know, it's sort of like a very silly and kind of melodramatic way to talk about something that happened in the first grade, but it's also something that Dorner says happened, and I believe him that happened throughout his life, where he suffered some racial abuse by somebody and spoke up about it and then was either punished himself or just saw the other person not only not get punished, but occasionally get rewarded.
[00:12:36]  Yeah.
[00:12:36]  I mean, we'd say it's a silly way to write it, but he's obviously, I mean, the whole manifesto, he's writing as a report, right?
[00:12:42]  It's in the language and kind of structured a little bit as a police report, hence the, you know, non-lethal, the way he's kind of reporting, like, by the books, ma'am, this is what the, you know, this is A, B, and C and D that went down.
[00:12:55]  Got to say, though, the Bible, that's a proper noun that should be capitalized.
[00:12:58]  Yes, it should.
[00:12:59]  So the manifesto also goes on to describe similar incidents that happened to him throughout high school.
[00:13:05]  But none of this dissuaded Chris from what he believed from a very early age was his calling, which was to become a police officer.
[00:13:12]  Yeah, he ends up enrolling in one of those kind of like LAPD outreach programs.
[00:13:20]  The one at this time for the LAPD was called the Explorer program.
[00:13:24]  And this is with the La Palma PD.
[00:13:26]  I think he started doing it in high school.
[00:13:29]  And this is kind of like their sort of recruiting arm for young kids, like ROTC or whatever.
[00:13:35]  I want to say about these programs is like, especially in Los Angeles, they are not without their own scandals.
[00:13:41]  In 1998, there were eight LAPD officers assigned to the Explorer programs at both Rampart and the Northeast divisions.
[00:13:48]  And they were accused of 95 counts of misconduct related to sexual assaults of at least three kids in the program.

=== Explorer Programs Recruiting (08:11) ===

[00:13:56]  In 2005, an officer who ran the youth program in Devonshire, which is also in California, was arrested and pled guilty to sexually assaulting seven kids in the Explorer camp.
[00:14:08]  And those weren't even like the first or only allegations.
[00:14:10]  There were some from the 70s.
[00:14:13]  There were five officers from the Hollywood division who were charged with unlawful sexual intercourse, which, by the way, I'm not sure what that's rape.
[00:14:20]  Yes.
[00:14:21]  For with underage girls in the scouting program, there was one that was like, it was the guy who was actually running all, it was the head cop who was running all of these programs.
[00:14:31]  A bunch of these charges were eventually dropped just because none of the witnesses would testify, which I just want to like put a pin in because that kind of culture of being afraid to talk about abuses permeates this entire Dorner case.
[00:14:47]  Yeah, absolutely does.
[00:14:49]  It's what's really interesting about this, and not to be like a true crime guy.
[00:14:52]  No, we are true crime guys.
[00:14:54]  Oh, excuse me, to be a true crime guy is there's so many incidences from both his early life and sort of, well, yeah, the early life prior to joining the LAPD, but also just from the LAPD's culture in general that are like really magnified in his time at the LAPD.
[00:15:10]  Absolutely.
[00:15:11]  So he goes to Southern Utah University from 97 to 2001.
[00:15:16]  Not a college I've heard.
[00:15:17]  I mean, frankly, to be totally real with listeners, I haven't heard of most colleges.
[00:15:23]  Yeah, but I've really never heard of that college.
[00:15:25]  Yeah.
[00:15:25]  I mean, so I'm like, maybe that's a real college.
[00:15:27]  But if Liz hasn't heard it, because I feel like you've at least come into contact with college football, which I feel like is how people hear about colleges.
[00:15:34]  I don't know anything about college football.
[00:15:36]  I bet like you've like been at a bar where they played it.
[00:15:38]  Okay.
[00:15:39]  I assume.
[00:15:40]  Yeah.
[00:15:41]  Well, speaking of college football, Christopher Dorner, who by the way is a pretty big fucking guy.
[00:15:47]  Huge.
[00:15:47]  He's huge.
[00:15:49]  He's at least 5'7.
[00:15:51]  No, he's like 6'7.
[00:15:53]  He's 6'7 and like 400 pounds.
[00:15:55]  He's not at all.
[00:15:56]  That's not true, but he is massive.
[00:15:58]  You know, he's, I think he's six feet tall.
[00:16:02]  I used to think he was taller because most photographs is by himself and he just looks big.
[00:16:06]  Yeah.
[00:16:07]  But I saw some video of him around other people at a shooting range and he's shorter than some of them.
[00:16:12]  And then I saw something that said he's six foot.
[00:16:14]  So I think he's six foot, but he's like 240 pounds.
[00:16:16]  The guy is built like a linebacker, which is.
[00:16:21]  I have no idea what position he played.
[00:16:22]  Yeah, me neither.
[00:16:23]  But he was in footsteps.
[00:16:24]  Yeah.
[00:16:24]  Let's say, you know what?
[00:16:25]  Let's say he's a linebacker.
[00:16:26]  Why not?
[00:16:27]  And then, so Liz, you know how people will be like, I joined the army so I could go to college, right?
[00:16:32]  Yeah.
[00:16:32]  Yeah.
[00:16:33]  Imagine, imagine you go to college and then you're like, oh, I should join the armed forces.
[00:16:40]  Oh, like you get into the armed forces at college?
[00:16:42]  Yeah, like afterwards.
[00:16:44]  It seems like a stupid.
[00:16:46]  So he joins the Navy Reserve, which is, well, you guys all know what I'm thinking.
[00:16:54]  He wants to become a helicopter pilot and he heads for training at an Air Force base in Oklahoma.
[00:17:00]  He does not become a helicopter pilot.
[00:17:02]  I can't figure out why.
[00:17:04]  I ended up spending a little too long looking into it before I was like, you know what?
[00:17:08]  There's more important things to do.
[00:17:10]  But the one notable thing about his time in Oklahoma is he and a fellow trainee make the newspaper after finding and turning in $8,000 that they found in an envelope.
[00:17:20]  I got to say, like everything about this guy, he really is like, and you see this come through in the manifesto in various ways, but he's really like Mr. Buy the Books, likes the rules.
[00:17:33]  Like everyone should be following the code of honor.
[00:17:36]  And like the problem is when people don't follow the rules and things go wrong.
[00:17:40]  Yeah.
[00:17:40]  Like he like really is like, you know, like, yeah, finding $8,000, not taking it, turning it in, like reporting it, doing everything by the books, almost autistically, I'm just going to say.
[00:17:50]  Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair enough because he does seem to have a big, like most of his major complications in life come from his struggles with other people not following like the written procedure for something or just the general sort of like moral course to take.
[00:18:05]  Right.
[00:18:05]  The spirit of the law.
[00:18:07]  So he didn't end up becoming a pilot, but he did eventually run gate guards as an officer.
[00:18:12]  Now, I want to be clear here.
[00:18:14]  I support gate guards.
[00:18:17]  If you are a member of the armed services, armed forces of the United States of America and your job is to ticket other soldiers, make their lives harder, arrest them, and prevent their friends from seeing them at bases, then, sir, I support you.
[00:18:35]  This is a pro-gate guard podcast.
[00:18:38]  Oh, you're signing up right now.
[00:18:39]  I will become a reserve.
[00:18:41]  If I could be a reserve gate guard and just give guys in their fucking, what's the, their Dodge Chargers, just fucking ticket after ticket.
[00:18:49]  Oh, one mile over the speed limit.
[00:18:50]  I'm sorry.
[00:18:51]  That's against the U.S. CMJ or whatever code of conduct.
[00:18:55]  I don't care.
[00:18:55]  You're going to prison.
[00:18:56]  You're losing your pension.
[00:18:58]  You're going to.
[00:18:59]  I'm fucking your wife.
[00:19:00]  Yes.
[00:19:01]  This is also a pro-Jodi podcast, but that's neither here nor there.
[00:19:05]  So he becomes a sort of officer in charge of gate guards.
[00:19:10]  Remember, this guy is in the reserve.
[00:19:11]  And so he's, I assume, working other jobs while doing all of this.
[00:19:15]  It's a little unclear.
[00:19:18]  He wasn't exactly an elite trooper and he didn't see any combat, but his training was at times fairly extensive for a naval reserve guy.
[00:19:26]  He achieved expert pistol and rifle marksmanship.
[00:19:29]  And, you know, if you take a look at his medals, he doesn't really have anything extraordinary.
[00:19:33]  You know, he seems to be like a thoroughly average, I don't know what they call him in the Navy, sailor?
[00:19:40]  Oh, you have no idea.
[00:19:41]  Officer.
[00:19:42]  Officer?
[00:19:43]  Yeah.
[00:19:43]  Well, he's an officer, but I don't know what they call him in general.
[00:19:46]  And, you know, Franklin, it's none of my problem.
[00:19:48]  And as we can see, as you will see in our second episode, the guy was anything but a competent sailor.
[00:20:08]  So then Chris Turner joins the LAPD.
[00:20:12]  This is 2005.
[00:20:14]  He was supposed to graduate in 2006.
[00:20:18]  The total training is what, like six months, which by the way, very short.
[00:20:23]  Yeah.
[00:20:23]  Yeah.
[00:20:24]  Well, I think there's like the academy training and then they have like street training.
[00:20:28]  Right, right, right.
[00:20:29]  So, but it took Dorner, oh, it took Dorner 13 months to complete.
[00:20:33]  He's very diligent.
[00:20:35]  He suffered some injuries around his first go.
[00:20:40]  And the second time, he shot through his own hand.
[00:20:44]  Can you explain this, Brie?
[00:20:46]  I actually can't.
[00:20:49]  I don't know what kind of pistol the LAPD uses.
[00:20:54]  But in order to shoot through your hand, you'd have to have one hand on the gun and then your other hand somewhere in front of the place where the bullet comes out of the gun.
[00:21:04]  Yeah.
[00:21:05]  Now, to me, that, listen, you know, I'm, you know, I think gun safety is fake, right?
[00:21:12]  Like, the one and only rule of guns is have a blast.
[00:21:16]  Yeah, I don't think that's not a.
[00:21:19]  Well, here, look at this.
[00:21:21]  Me, a guy who thinks that versus a guy who shot his own hand.
[00:21:26]  But don't you think that he did have a blast?
[00:21:29]  No, but he wasn't having fun, which isn't what guns are about.
[00:21:33]  Yes, I know he did.
[00:21:34]  I have no idea how to do it.
[00:21:35]  I'm trying to do my little true crime puns.
[00:21:38]  I have no idea how he shot his own hand.
[00:21:41]  It seems that that is something like, by all accounts, he was not the greatest cop in the world.
[00:21:47]  Right.
[00:21:48]  That to me, if I was going through training with this guy, I'd be like, damn, that is very stupid thing to do.
[00:21:56]  I have never seen anyone do that.
[00:21:58]  I've seen people do, you know, I actually am very safe with guns, but I've seen people do some very unsafe things with guns and never come anything anywhere close to that.

=== Teresa's Stupid Gun Mishap (15:29) ===

[00:22:08]  He also around this time gets reviewed by an ex of a six-week relationship, which I'm like, can you really call that an ex on a website called don'tdate him.com.
[00:22:18]  Classic, classic early 2000s website.
[00:22:21]  Yes, I know.
[00:22:22]  That's like when I read that, I was like, wow, that's such a like an artifact from that.
[00:22:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
[00:22:27]  Didn't we talk about that?
[00:22:29]  What was that fucking that episode?
[00:22:32]  That fucking like app that you could rate guys.
[00:22:34]  Lola.
[00:22:35]  No.
[00:22:35]  Lol, no.
[00:22:37]  But anyways, you guys know what I'm talking about.
[00:22:39]  People are really into raiding people in the early 2000s.
[00:22:42]  That was like half of websites.
[00:22:44]  I think he moved away from that.
[00:22:46]  Yeah.
[00:22:46]  Well, sort of.
[00:22:47]  No, now they just, now the ladies just do it in brace-centric girls' chats.
[00:22:52]  Oh, my God.
[00:22:53]  But she posted his badge number, which is Doxing, and says he was super paranoid and twisted.
[00:23:01]  I'm going to do True Crime Voice for this.
[00:23:03]  She also says he hates himself for, oh, this is the wrong place to do True Crime Voice.
[00:23:07]  She also says he hates himself for being black and thinks he can get away with anything because he's a cop.
[00:23:15]  He claims didn't do True Crime Voice for that one.
[00:23:18]  I'm going to do it for this one, though.
[00:23:19]  Okay.
[00:23:19]  He claims to have witnessed several racist incidents during his time at the Academy.
[00:23:24]  One, which involves several officers taunting a Jewish trainee, a rabbi, with Hitler youth songs.
[00:23:31]  All right.
[00:23:32]  I got to be real here.
[00:23:34]  You don't believe that?
[00:23:35]  Like, how are you?
[00:23:36]  How do you can?
[00:23:37]  I feel like, so I actually read that it was, it wasn't just songs, but it was like Sig Heil's.
[00:23:42]  Okay, that makes more sense.
[00:23:43]  Which makes more sense, I think.
[00:23:45]  Because, all right.
[00:23:46]  And I can definitely, I kind of, it's Sally Pedia.
[00:23:49]  Like, I can kind of see that.
[00:23:50]  I just can't see, like, I mean, listen, I've known some racist guys, and none of them are like, I'm meaning, like, cop kind of racist, not guys who are like really like, you know, like researching it and all this stuff.
[00:24:05]  And just knowing a Hitler youth song seems like.
[00:24:08]  Yeah, it does seem like very, yeah.
[00:24:12]  Yeah, but I fully believe him about the rest of this.
[00:24:17]  And I'm sure that, I mean, you know, that this was, they were Zee Heiling and all that kind of stuff.
[00:24:22]  He was, he made a complaint about this.
[00:24:26]  I believe it went nowhere.
[00:24:27]  In fact, I think he got in trouble for something involving this.
[00:24:30]  Sounds about it.
[00:24:31]  Which the cadet was like, no, he didn't.
[00:24:33]  He it was totally fine.
[00:24:35]  He didn't do anything.
[00:24:37]  He was also, this is a pretty major incident for Chris.
[00:24:40]  He was apparently the cause of an internal affairs investigation at the academy.
[00:24:45]  And now this is a pretty major, major incident.
[00:24:47]  Like I said, for Chris, he was on foot patrol with some officers when the two of them just straight up started referring to people like by the N-word and by people, I mean, black people.
[00:24:56]  Dorner, who, by the way, I don't know if we've mentioned this, Chris Dorner is black.
[00:25:01]  For those of you maybe Europeans listening to this, he's like, can you stop doing this?
[00:25:05]  One cop says no.
[00:25:07]  And then he's like, I'll say it whenever I want.
[00:25:09]  And then Dorner starts to beat his ass.
[00:25:12]  Now, Liz, can you read?
[00:25:14]  Can you read this part of the manifesto for me?
[00:25:17]  Yeah, okay.
[00:25:19]  What I should have done was put a Winchester Ranger SXT 9mm 147 grain bullet in his skull and Officer Blank's skull.
[00:25:29]  The situation would have been resolved effective immediately.
[00:25:34]  That's immediately.
[00:25:35]  Is that right?
[00:25:37]  What do you mean?
[00:25:38]  Effect?
[00:25:38]  No.
[00:25:38]  Oh, no.
[00:25:39]  The comma.
[00:25:39]  He wrote that weird.
[00:25:40]  Yeah.
[00:25:41]  But that's a Dorner misspelling.
[00:25:42]  That's not.
[00:25:42]  Okay.
[00:25:42]  You know what?
[00:25:43]  I'm going to just, I'm going to do him a solid and read that with the correct comma placement.
[00:25:48]  The situation would have been resolved effective immediately.
[00:25:52]  The sad thing about the incident was that when Detective Blank from Internal Affairs investigated this incident, only one parentheses, one officer, parentheses, unknown, in the van other than myself, had statements consistent with what actually happened.
[00:26:07]  The other six officers all stated they had heard nothing and saw nothing.
[00:26:13]  So Dorner is clearly telling the truth here.
[00:26:16]  Yeah.
[00:26:17]  This is one of the most realistic depictions of anything like this happening that I think you could have even imagined, right?
[00:26:24]  I mean, you can picture a cop saying every single one of those things.
[00:26:27]  Absolutely.
[00:26:28]  I want to also point out the situation would have been resolved effective immediately.
[00:26:32]  I mean, that's cop, that's cop terminology for like cop terminology for like, okay, this guy would be killed, but also that's like that's like how cops approach situations like this.
[00:26:44]  To say we need to resolve it effective immediately means shut it down, kill the guy, put it to bed, put it to rest, like end it.
[00:26:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:51]  Right.
[00:26:52]  Um, well, these two cops were put to rest, and by rest, I mean desk duty, which I gotta say, cops are always complaining about.
[00:26:59]  If you guys hate desk duty so much, how come you always sit in your fucking cars?
[00:27:04]  Cops hate walking around in the street, which I'm kind of fine with because I don't like walking near cops.
[00:27:09]  But like in SF, when they try to get them to do more foot patrols, they're like, no, like we want to like sit.
[00:27:14]  You guys love sitting.
[00:27:15]  It is your number one passion is sitting down.
[00:27:19]  And so I'm sorry.
[00:27:20]  I'm not hearing your little complaints about desk duty.
[00:27:23]  Anyways, they are placed on desk duty, the two N-word cops, which obviously means that something, I mean, the two cops had said the N-word.
[00:27:31]  Yeah, they definitely said the N-word.
[00:27:34]  And they had their salaries paid by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which is the name for the police union there.
[00:27:40]  Dorner at this point gets, you know, he spends the next few months training out on the streets, but basically gets called up for active duty with the Naval Reserves.
[00:27:50]  Goes to Bahrain.
[00:27:51]  Which what are you doing over there?
[00:27:53]  Give me some Bahrain.
[00:27:54]  Yeah.
[00:27:56]  Please?
[00:27:57]  No?
[00:27:58]  God say please.
[00:28:00]  Okay, well, I mean, well, then I get.
[00:28:03]  Okay, he gets back from Bahrain after about a year and marries a woman named April Carter.
[00:28:10]  Not related to Jay-Z.
[00:28:12]  She's an undercover cop in LA.
[00:28:14]  But the marriage only lasted a month.
[00:28:17]  The brother says the marriage was basically over in eight days, in eight hours, excuse me, eight hours.
[00:28:21]  Doesn't seem like, I don't know what happened there, but I don't know, quickie sham marriage.
[00:28:27]  In my experience, women are mostly really ashamed after they sleep with you and like don't want to talk to you afterwards, because they like don't want to be associated with you or seen with you or like you're they're, you're like, they think you're weird or you're like yeah, whatever you say, please.
[00:28:41]  And so uh, I I get it, but they did remain friends afterwards and uh, I guess Dorner was seen doing yard work at at her mom's house, basically almost up until he went on his um, sort of Avenging Angel rampage, yeah.
[00:28:56]  But unfortunately he meets a woman with a far worse reputation than the reputation of a wife.
[00:29:02]  I am talking, of course, about I'm doing true crime again.
[00:29:06]  The chupacabra.
[00:29:10]  The chupacabra.
[00:29:11]  It should be the chupacabra.
[00:29:13]  Yeah, it should be.
[00:29:15]  I think she's just known as Chupacabraca Okay, so Dorner, he gets back from the reserves and he's put in with the LAPD as a rookie officer.
[00:29:28]  He's, by the way, gone for a year.
[00:29:30]  Yeah.
[00:29:31]  Which is important to note.
[00:29:33]  Yes.
[00:29:35]  He gets paired with a woman while, you know, like out on duty named Teresa Evans, a white woman in San Pedro, which I've spent a lot of time in.
[00:29:47]  Another white woman in San Pedro.
[00:29:50]  She, Teresa Evans, very interesting character.
[00:29:53]  She says that he basically at this time was doing poorly as a cop.
[00:29:57]  It's probably true.
[00:29:58]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:29:59]  He doesn't seem, like you said, he doesn't seem like the best cop.
[00:30:01]  Well, he'd also been away in Bahrain for a year.
[00:30:04]  Like his training on the street was aborted after, what, three or four months for a year long, 13 months long like break.
[00:30:12]  You know, he had his academy training, which, to be fair, went on for a really long time.
[00:30:16]  Yeah.
[00:30:16]  He did extra.
[00:30:17]  Yeah.
[00:30:18]  He did extra.
[00:30:18]  Yeah.
[00:30:20]  He, and then he had, he had, you know, three or four months of street work and then he's gone for a year and then he's just put back on the streets.
[00:30:26]  Yeah.
[00:30:27]  He kind of like messes up a couple times.
[00:30:30]  There's one time where he kind of breaks down crying, basically asking for more training, which I feel, I don't know.
[00:30:36]  I'm a woman.
[00:30:36]  So I'm like, no, I feel bad.
[00:30:39]  Give him, yeah, give him more.
[00:30:40]  He's asking for it.
[00:30:41]  He's saying, please.
[00:30:42]  It's hard.
[00:30:43]  It's hard.
[00:30:44]  It's like hard for guys to cry sometimes when they're not on podcasts and faking it for either attention or sympathy.
[00:30:50]  All right, let's talk about Evans.
[00:30:51]  So like we said, she's known as the Chupacabra.
[00:30:54]  Will you do it again?
[00:30:55]  La Chupacabra.
[00:31:02]  Every time it's different.
[00:31:04]  I'm trying to.
[00:31:05]  I'm trying to get more.
[00:31:08]  Now, Dorner claims in the manifesto that, and this is a quote from the manifesto, she intentionally, quote, ripped the flesh off the arm of a woman arrested for battery, parentheses, sprayed her neighbor with a garden hose.
[00:31:24]  Knowing the woman had thin elastic skin, she performed an Indian burn to the woman's arm after cuffing her.
[00:31:31]  That woman was in her mid-70s, a mother and a grandmother.
[00:31:35]  As a fun note, I just found this like to be a fun little cute thing.
[00:31:39]  Indian burn is actually known in Bulgaria as the policeman's glove.
[00:31:44]  Really?
[00:31:45]  Yeah, which I Believe I call it a Belden Spanish.
[00:31:49]  Have you ever given me one of those?
[00:31:51]  Stop.
[00:31:51]  They call it, dude.
[00:31:52]  I am the, I'm the, oh my God.
[00:31:54]  Next time I see you, Liz, it's on site for Indian Burns.
[00:31:57]  Oh, please don't.
[00:31:57]  Those that's that's awful.
[00:32:00]  Yeah.
[00:32:01]  Uh, he claims that Evans is basically demoted for performance issues, implying that she was taken out of the patrol for like these kind of concerns, that she was getting you know, complaints, or other officers were noticing that she was the chubacabra, which apparently she like Dorner says that she welcomed that name and would like laugh about it and was kind of like, yeah, I mean, it is pretty badass sony.
[00:32:23]  Yeah.
[00:32:24]  Um, so unlike many of our listeners of this show, she was in a relationship, and her boyfriend is a guy.
[00:32:32]  I think that is just another one of those little LAPD things that's very indicative of what Dorner's talking about his manifesto and the reasons he did what he did.
[00:32:40]  She's dating a guy named Dominic Fuentes, who's also a cop, who was accused, but not actually tried for jury tampering after he'd approached jurors on a robbery trial and told them about the defendant's robbery convictions, even though those weren't evidence or prior convictions, even though those weren't evidence at the actual trial.
[00:32:59]  Yeah, he like straight up like approached them.
[00:33:02]  And at one point, I think he did it a couple of times.
[00:33:04]  One of them, he just went, How's it going? and then flashed a thumbs up or thumbs down.
[00:33:14]  That's a I'm sorry.
[00:33:16]  It's like the other, the other juror that he that he like tampered with too, he also did a finger thing too.
[00:33:23]  He's like, he's been convicted this many times and then showed out his finger.
[00:33:27]  And somebody clearly told this guy that if you just do finger stuff to jurors, like it doesn't count, which does now that I guess if we did a transcript of that, I'm glad we don't do transcripts of the show because that would be if you do finger stuff to jurors, by the way, listeners, it does count.
[00:33:43]  To be clear, though, Fuentes was not just like a random guy, he was the arresting officer of the robber.
[00:33:48]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:50]  And so he was, he was a desk jockey at this point himself.
[00:33:55]  On July 27th, an incident happened that would forever change Christopher Dorner's life in the landscape of Southern California.
[00:34:05]  Okay, we're talking about the arrest of a guy named Christopher Gettler.
[00:34:09]  This was at the Double Tree in San Pedro.
[00:34:13]  That's a hotel.
[00:34:14]  Dorner is having trouble cuffing Gettler.
[00:34:18]  Getler is schizophrenic, so he's kind of like lashing out a little bit, right?
[00:34:23]  And Teresa Evans, Evans, is there.
[00:34:25]  And according to Dorner, Evans swings her foot back and kicks Getler in the face.
[00:34:33]  Yeah.
[00:34:34]  So Dorner witnesses this.
[00:34:36]  And this is, by the way, literally the most crucial incident of all the incidents that Dorner talks about in his Facebook post slash manifesto.
[00:34:47]  This is the crucial incident.
[00:34:49]  And this kick is really the most crucial incident.
[00:34:51]  For the record, I fully believe Dorner that Teresa Evans kicked a schizophrenic guy in the face.
[00:34:58]  Cops love beating the shit out of crazy schizophrenic whatever people because, you know, as we can see here, they don't often don't have much recourse to actually do anything about it.
[00:35:11]  And as we'll talk about, the LAPD has a storied history and culture that not just like, you know, promotes and advocates this stuff, but covers it up.
[00:35:19]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:35:21]  So Dorner does not report this at first.
[00:35:25]  So first of all, he is Teresa.
[00:35:27]  He's training alongside Therese Evans.
[00:35:29]  I mean, she is like a full cop.
[00:35:31]  He is, he's a cop, but he's a rookie.
[00:35:33]  He's a rookie, yeah.
[00:35:33]  Exactly.
[00:35:34]  And she's like basically turning in these reports about his performance.
[00:35:37]  I think it's weekly or maybe monthly.
[00:35:39]  No, it's weekly.
[00:35:40]  Yeah, she's in charge of his career, basically.
[00:35:42]  Exactly.
[00:35:42]  And, you know, one sort of fail from her could really like, I mean, either set his career back or destroy it entirely.
[00:35:49]  And so he is obviously has incentives not to fully report this, but I think he also just doesn't really know if this falls within use of force, but it sort of gnaws at him.
[00:35:59]  And he agonizes about what happened for weeks and about whether to report it.
[00:36:03]  He eventually called a friend who's also a cop and tells him about it.
[00:36:06]  His friend tells him to report it.
[00:36:08]  Now, this is like, this isn't, you know, from Dorner's mouth or anything.
[00:36:11]  I mean, he does talk about this, but this is also from what we know from the appeal and the testimony of his friend.
[00:36:18]  So Evans had told Dorner the day before he reports the incident.
[00:36:23]  So the day before he actually goes and reports it, a couple of weeks after it actually happened, that he was in danger of getting an unsatisfactory evaluation, which would have sunk his career before it even started.
[00:36:33]  I think that she knew that he felt uncomfortable with what happened.
[00:36:37]  And I mean, this is not a guy who was very adept at hiding his emotions.
[00:36:41]  And so I have a feeling she might have known what was coming and was like, listen, like, you know, I might funk you.
[00:36:48]  And then sort of the ellipses after that stands for, or if you do something for me, I might not.
[00:36:54]  Right, right, right.
[00:36:56]  So Dorner was terrified, but he reports it to his captain.
[00:36:59]  And according to this captain, whose name is Demings, Dorner begged him not to say anything for fear of retaliation, right?
[00:37:06]  I mean, I think it kind of doesn't go without saying we should say it, but like, if you're in an organization like this, and it's not just cops, it's really any sort of like tightly knit and very insular organization.
[00:37:19]  There is quite a lot of incentive not to rock the boat, especially if you're new and somebody else has been there for a long time.
[00:37:26]  They had an unequal power dynamic relationship.
[00:37:31]  But he's begging the captain, like not, he's like, I have to tell you about this, but please don't do anything about this.

=== Chris Dorner's Appeal (14:42) ===

[00:37:37]  I'm concerned because, you know, Teresa Evans has a kid.
[00:37:40]  I don't want her to get fired or anything.
[00:37:41]  I just thought this was concerning and that you should know about it.
[00:37:44]  Demians is like, not happening, brother.
[00:37:46]  I got to report it.
[00:37:47]  Yeah, like you, yeah, you already, you already said got to report it, got to put it in.
[00:37:51]  Also, I do wonder a little bit, like, you know, they're trying to vary the kid a little bit.
[00:37:55]  Yeah.
[00:37:56]  Absolutely.
[00:37:57]  No.
[00:37:58]  Once it came out that he had filed a report with his superior, basically Dorner says that he felt backlash from like either if it was like soft backlash or like more like, you know, more obvious.
[00:38:12]  He like talks about one incident where he says that someone pissed on his gym bag and jacket.
[00:38:19]  Like he got, he got back to his locker and opens it up and he says it stinks and it's wet and he says it's like urine.
[00:38:25]  The LAPD says they they investigate it and they're like, it's not urine.
[00:38:30]  There's even a thing where they said we tested it, which is just like total bullshit.
[00:38:34]  I'm sorry.
[00:38:35]  I'm sorry.
[00:38:36]  They're not sending Chris Dorner's jacket to the lab to be like, yep, the scientist says this is not P, but that's the taste say in the official report, which is so wild.
[00:38:47]  I mean, yeah.
[00:38:48]  So he's getting, I mean, this is like, again, the intimidation culture that Dorner is talking about that we know about in police departments, particularly in the LAPD.
[00:38:57]  And he's really feeling the heat.
[00:38:59]  So Internal Affairs opens up a case investigating Evans' use of force as reported by Christopher Dorner.
[00:39:06]  During the IA investigation, Dorner's testimony is, of course, contradicted by Evans.
[00:39:10]  I mean, she's like, this, this didn't happen.
[00:39:12]  Classic, he said, she said kind of thing.
[00:39:15]  Now, there are different witnesses that basically back up different sides here.
[00:39:19]  There are a few Doubletree employees that back up Evans.
[00:39:23]  We do have their testimony, but we don't exactly have, well, we have summaries of their testimony, but we don't exactly know where they were standing during any of this, if they were able to see what happened.
[00:39:35]  I mean, there's just basically three employees saying that, no, this didn't happen.
[00:39:39]  However, Christopher Gettler, the person who was actually kicked, did say it happened.
[00:39:45]  Now, the problem with Gettler's testimony is that he kind of contradicts himself and he just doesn't give the best testimony that you want to give.
[00:39:53]  Now, he's pretty severely nuts.
[00:39:56]  So that makes sense, but he does identify a woman as kicking him.
[00:39:59]  And he identifies the race as somebody who's almost black.
[00:40:02]  Like that's what he says, which obviously he's sort of confusing Dorner because Dorner is very light-skinned.
[00:40:10]  And I think he's just kind of, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like he might just be mixing it up in his mind.
[00:40:15]  His father backs him up too.
[00:40:17]  But for some reason, that testimony, we don't understand why, but they basically threw it out.
[00:40:21]  They said it wasn't.
[00:40:22]  Yeah.
[00:40:23]  They didn't believe it, basically.
[00:40:25]  Yeah.
[00:40:26]  There was a claim that Gettler's face was like fucked up from basically falling into a bush.
[00:40:32]  So that was what the cops said.
[00:40:33]  Yeah, they said, oh, he fell backwards into a bush.
[00:40:36]  And that's how his face got all fucked up.
[00:40:39]  Which his face was fucked up, right?
[00:40:41]  Yeah.
[00:40:43]  So we should talk a little bit about this procedure because it's pretty, it's pretty key to the entire Dorner case, like you said.
[00:40:50]  So he's rep Dorner himself is represented by a retired LA police captain named Randall Kwan.
[00:40:57]  Now, put a little pin in that name because we're definitely going to come back to him later on in the episode.
[00:41:03]  Actually, probably next episode.
[00:41:04]  Yeah, probably next one.
[00:41:05]  Evans is represented by a guy named Robert Rico.
[00:41:09]  Now, I just want to say Rico is, I don't love bagging on defense attorneys, but this is not a defense attorney, really, because this isn't actually a legal hearing.
[00:41:19]  This is an internal hearing.
[00:41:21]  So I'm going to bag on him anyway.
[00:41:22]  Rico is the attorney for Sergeant Philip Jackson, the Harbor Division officer who looked into the first use of force investigation the night of the incident.
[00:41:31]  Rico's also represented a ton of, let's just say, unsavory LAPD types, which is, you know, that's casting a wide net, including convicted rapists, drug traffickers, also the cop who sold TMZ the photos of Rihanna the night she was beaten by Chris Brown.
[00:41:48]  I gotta say, selling, so I mean, I know it's so, that's so fucking for an episode that we're gonna talk about, but we're gonna talk a little bit about police sidelines or at least side gigs, the gig economy of the LAPD a little later in the episode.
[00:42:03]  But I do, I mean, Christ, can you imagine how many of them basically just make like a ton of extra money a year?
[00:42:10]  Oh my gosh.
[00:42:12]  So much.
[00:42:13]  Yeah.
[00:42:13]  I mean, it's probably unique to them.
[00:42:15]  And I mean, New York, probably less so, but it's Christ.
[00:42:19]  I mean, there has to be a huge sideline in it.
[00:42:21]  Yeah.
[00:42:22]  Back in 2002, this guy, Rico, he offered, this is like just, this takes the cake.
[00:42:27]  He offered, like straight up offered his name to serve as co-counsel for one of the like most infamous rampart cases that we're going to talk about, where a crash unit of the LAPD, the arrest report stated that a suspect was injured after falling down a fire escape after he had beaten up a bunch of LAPD officers.
[00:42:47]  What they found out when they investigated was that actually the officers had beat up the suspect while he was asleep, including kicking him about 20 times.
[00:42:58]  So the Board of Rights, which is where all of this is sort of judged, because this isn't a court case yet.
[00:43:06]  It's essentially like, this is like the LAPD's internal hearings, and they're called the Board of Rights.
[00:43:12]  They're made up of two cops.
[00:43:13]  At the time, they're made up of two cops and a defense attorney.
[00:43:16]  Although cases are decided via majority review, not unanimously.
[00:43:21]  They're known as tribunals, which is, I mean, I gotta say, I do like a tribunal.
[00:43:25]  You know, I hope to be in charge of some someday myself.
[00:43:29]  Um, the accused, which in this case is Evans, gets to choose two of the three judges from a randomly selected group of four commanding officers.
[00:43:37]  And the third judge is chosen by the board of police commissioners, which is basically the corporate board of directors for the LAPD.
[00:43:44]  And then from there, they choose from basically self-selected community representatives, which is like politicians, ex-judges, former cops, shit like that.
[00:43:54]  This is this, this, this procedure basically came to be after the Rodney King beatings and the fallout from that.
[00:44:01]  Now, actually, LA voted to change the way this was structured in I think 2018 with the charter amendment.
[00:44:09]  Now, that cops can actually choose to have an all-civilian board of rights.
[00:44:13]  The thing with that is you might be like, oh, wow, that's great.
[00:44:16]  Actually, they have like a much higher rate of exoneration with all civilian panels because civilians often don't really have like a lot of ideas about how you know they'll just defer to cops on this.
[00:44:28]  Interesting.
[00:44:29]  And so there's like a way higher rate of exoneration with them.
[00:44:32]  And so cops are more likely to choose an all-civilian panel now.
[00:44:35]  Yeah.
[00:44:36]  They need a Belgian amendment for it where you just judge.
[00:44:38]  They should just have me judge it.
[00:44:40]  Yeah.
[00:44:40]  I'll be like, yeah, I don't know.
[00:44:41]  I mean, maybe put his ass on desk duty.
[00:44:46]  Give me his gun and his badge.
[00:44:49]  And his wife.
[00:44:50]  And his wife.
[00:44:51]  Yeah.
[00:44:52]  Because you know what?
[00:44:53]  If there's Jodies for the army, a Jody is a guy who fucks your wife while you're in Iraq.
[00:44:57]  There should be Jodi's for cops.
[00:44:59]  You're doing overtime.
[00:45:01]  I'm at your house with your wife and all my friends.
[00:45:06]  Watching.
[00:45:07]  Okay, back to the Board of Rights.
[00:45:08]  So they rule that Dorner had lied about Evans' use of force, basically because he was afraid of a negative review.
[00:45:16]  What that means is they rule that he filed a false report.
[00:45:21]  Yes.
[00:45:22]  He gets fired.
[00:45:23]  Yeah.
[00:45:24]  I want to say that Evans was exonerated in part because of a lack of quote visible dirt transfer.
[00:45:31]  They say, oh, there's no dirt marks on the shirt of Gettler.
[00:45:35]  So we don't think it happened.
[00:45:36]  And they also say that Gettler is a bad witness because he's schizophrenic.
[00:45:40]  Just crazy.
[00:45:41]  Sergeant Sherilyn Anderson, who's someone who Dorner calls out by name in the manifesto, argued to the board that Dorner lacked the integrity necessary to be a cop and should receive the quote harshest penalty for violating the trust of his peers, his department, and the public he was sworn to serve.
[00:46:03]  So it's like, I just want to say too, you can see here, it's like the crime here is violating the trust of the department, aka you crossed the thin blue line, baby.
[00:46:12]  Shouldn't have done it, Dorner.
[00:46:13]  I mean, that's it.
[00:46:14]  He fucked up.
[00:46:15]  He fucked up.
[00:46:17]  Even his own attorney, the retired police captain, Kwan, he said this officer wasn't given a fair shake.
[00:46:25]  In fact, what's happening here is this officer is being made a scapegoat.
[00:46:30]  Yeah.
[00:46:31]  We should say that there was a 2006 Supreme Court, California Supreme Court ruling that closed these proceedings to the public and basically sealed all disciplinary records for cops, including the use of forced complaints and inquiries.
[00:46:44]  And they cited privacy, which I think is really funny.
[00:46:48]  But really, it was due to excessive lobbying from police unions.
[00:46:51]  Basically across the state, they all kind of like, you know, banded together, Band of Brothers.
[00:46:56]  And part of that was due to a bunch of the increased scrutiny of their act of like the LAPD's actions after the Rampart scandal in the late 90s, early 2000s.
[00:47:05]  So the only way the public ever sees any of these transcripts is if someone in the LAPD basically leaks them to a friendly media outlet or to an outlet that's interested in publishing them, which is actually what happened in the case of Dorner.
[00:47:17]  You mentioned the Anderson Cooper DVD at the beginning.
[00:47:21]  He actually sent it to at least three people that we know of.
[00:47:25]  Yeah.
[00:47:26]  Anderson Cooper, there was a reporter at KTTV in LA and his former youth police program mentor.
[00:47:34]  It seems pretty clear, and a lot of people have alleged, so I'm just reporting that, that way more people received copies of these DVDs, including the LA Times, although they didn't run them.
[00:47:46]  But KTTV, KTT, I feel like there should be another T in there.
[00:47:49]  KTTV.
[00:47:51]  No.
[00:47:51]  Doesn't really rule up.
[00:47:52]  No, you just have to put the emphasis on the second T. KTTV.
[00:47:56]  Yeah, that's better.
[00:47:57]  KT TV.
[00:47:58]  Yeah.
[00:47:58]  Yeah.
[00:47:59]  KTTV actually published the full deposition on YouTube in 2013, which is they, first of all, they're the only outlet to do so.
[00:48:05]  And that's the only way anyone has ever actually seen all this stuff.
[00:48:09]  Yeah.
[00:48:10]  I'm going to say we're going to link that.
[00:48:11]  And you know what?
[00:48:13]  If I remember, we will.
[00:48:14]  That's nice.
[00:48:15]  And if we don't, just search Chris Gettler deposition, which is going to take you the exact same amount of time as it would to look in the show notes.
[00:48:23]  So I don't want to hear any complaints.
[00:48:25]  In fact, it takes even more time depending on what podcast app you're using.
[00:48:28]  Just putting that out there.
[00:48:30]  Don't yell at me.
[00:48:32]  So Chris Dorner appealed this decision, right?
[00:48:35]  Because one thing about court is that you can appeal and appeal and appeal and appeal.
[00:48:40]  Well, but it's not, that wasn't a court.
[00:48:42]  So when he does appeal it, it actually goes to real court.
[00:48:45]  Yes.
[00:48:46]  But the appellate court rules against order.
[00:48:48]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:51]  In fact, now rather than the LAPD having to prove that he lied, he has to prove that the Board of Rights was incorrect when they called him a liar who filed a false report.
[00:49:01]  Yeah.
[00:49:01]  In the ruling against his appeal, the judge basically relies on the testimony of Evans.
[00:49:05]  And this is a quote, Sergeant Evans herself testified that she did not kick Gettler.
[00:49:09]  Her testimony alone would have been sufficient to support the board's findings.
[00:49:14]  But this is interesting.
[00:49:15]  The judge goes on to say the board simply found Dorner not credible and thus implicitly found Evans credible.
[00:49:23]  Now, I'm going to put a little lawyer hat on, a little like legal thing.
[00:49:27]  Well, no, because that's the thing.
[00:49:28]  Remember, the Board of Rights, the person on it wasn't a trial or whatever, but Evan, they were investigating Evans.
[00:49:34]  Yeah.
[00:49:34]  Right.
[00:49:35]  Dorner was never a defendant.
[00:49:37]  And so he wasn't in a position to call character witnesses or show evidence to his integrity to support that he was a credible witness.
[00:49:44]  He couldn't, for example, show the newspaper article showing that he like turned in that $8,000 or anything or call anybody to testify on his behalf.
[00:49:53]  So it's really not the responsibility of an appeals court judge to judge whether he was credible or not.
[00:50:00]  Like there's nothing there for them to rule on.
[00:50:02]  And so the only way for him to actually win this appeal was to demonstrate that the Board of Rights was basically like derelict in their duty and that the findings that they submitted were just improbable.
[00:50:17]  And this is like a totally impossible task.
[00:50:19]  That's just a hurdle way too high, especially even for a six-foot man.
[00:50:23]  Yeah.
[00:50:24]  According to Dorner's Facebook post, terminating me for telling the truth of a Caucasian officer kicking a mentally ill man is disgusting.
[00:50:32]  Don't ever call me a fucking bully.
[00:50:34]  I want all journalists to utilize every source you have that specializes in collections for your reports.
[00:50:39]  With discovery and evidence available, you will see the truth.
[00:50:43]  Unfortunately, I will not be alive to see my name cleared.
[00:50:47]  So Dorner eventually basically exhausts all avenues he has of getting himself back in the LAPD or even just clearing his name.
[00:50:55]  And it's very clear that he ended up on the wrong side of the thin blue line.
[00:50:59]  Now, something we've discussed about Dorner, I mean, and it's pretty apparent from Redia's Manifesto and just having even a cursory knowledge of the LAPD or police departments in general, is that Dorner was somebody who was really straight and narrow, who believed, you know, in this rules-based international order.
[00:51:15]  And well, kind of, I guess he, I guess he did.
[00:51:19]  We don't know his foreign policy view.
[00:51:20]  Well, yeah, I mean, he did join the Navy, so, and go, I guess he got there around.
[00:51:24]  He was a real extreme radical centrist, we'll say exactly.
[00:51:28]  Yes, but he believed in the rules and he believed that the rules prevented him.
[00:51:33]  The real rules should have kept him in the LAPD, but the unwritten rules, the thin blue line, he was on the wrong side of it and he got left out in the cold.
[00:51:41]  Yeah, he gets officially terminated for filing a false report.
[00:51:44]  And it's interesting because they could actually have charged him because it's a crime, but they didn't.
[00:51:51]  And I think they didn't because that would have meant going to a trial before a judge and jury and a real investigation.
[00:52:00]  So he tries to appeal the case for years and it just goes nowhere.

=== Rampart Scandal Revelations (14:21) ===

[00:52:20]  I think before we move into this next part of the episode, we should first mention that we are pulling a lot from this really excellent pamphlet put out by the radical collective Research and Destroy.
[00:52:32]  We won't be citing it at every turn, but we'll link to it in the notes and you should really all check it out.
[00:52:37]  They published a highly annotated version of Dorner's text and they really throw it into motion.
[00:52:45]  By that, I mean, you know, provide some really necessary historical context for everything he is saying, which I guess I think, you know, we're trying to do here as well.
[00:52:56]  And just with their project, our intention isn't to exonerate or defend his actions, like absolutely not, but to, you know, to show that Dorner really was an LAPD man through and through, that he's really a consequence and, you know, an institutionally produced blowback to the historical structures that promote and reproduce the LAPD's most heinous crimes.
[00:53:24]  So Dorner came to a, I guess, a lot of acclaim after his shootings or after the Facebook post became public for his incisive criticism of the LAPD, the culture and the history of the organization.
[00:53:36]  In fact, the way you mentioned his report starts off is basically it's structured almost like a police report.
[00:53:43]  You know, it's from Christopher Jordan Dorner/slash/7648, his social security number, or the last four digits.
[00:53:50]  Although, a guy like me, I only have one digit in mind.
[00:53:53]  It's one because I'm so old.
[00:53:56]  Two, America, subject, last resort.
[00:53:59]  Which I wanted, by the way, can we just drop a real quick?
[00:54:02]  Because we're in California.
[00:54:02]  Can we just drop a real quick little papa roach clip right there?
[00:54:06]  Suffocation, no breathing.
[00:54:09]  I knew a guy who was in that music video.
[00:54:11]  I was supposed to be in that music video.
[00:54:13]  Really?
[00:54:13]  Yeah.
[00:54:14]  Dude, this would have been fuck.
[00:54:16]  We've talked about a lot on the World Park.
[00:54:18]  Yes, I know.
[00:54:18]  I just remember that.
[00:54:19]  But I'm thinking a timeline where you are in it would have changed the whole thing.
[00:54:25]  Think of the schizothreads we could have gotten from that.
[00:54:27]  That would be incredible.
[00:54:30]  Regarding CF hashtag 07-00-4281.
[00:54:39]  I know most of you who personally know me are in disbelief to hear from media reports that I am suspected of committing such horrendous murders and have taken drastic and shocking actions in the last couple of days.
[00:54:50]  You are saying to yourself that this is completely out of character of the man you knew who always wore a smile whenever he was seen.
[00:54:58]  I know I will be vilified by the LAPD and the media.
[00:55:01]  Unfortunately, this is a necessary evil that I do not enjoy but must partake and complete for substantial change to occur within the LAPD and reclaim my name.
[00:55:11]  The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days.
[00:55:15]  It has gotten worse.
[00:55:17]  The consent decree should have never been lifted.
[00:55:20]  The only thing that has evolved from the consent decree is those officers involved in the Rampart scandal and Rodney King incidents have since been promoted to supervisor, commanders, and command staff in executive positions.
[00:55:34]  So there's a couple of buzzwords to kind of talk through there.
[00:55:37]  Specifically, two things: the consent decree and the rampart scandal, which we both mentioned a little bit as we were talking about the rampart scandal.
[00:55:46]  So let's start there.
[00:55:47]  The rampart scandal refers to the rampart division of the LAPD and a series, bake like a billion revelations around the specific unit called the crash unit that was located within that division.
[00:56:00]  Crash stands for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
[00:56:05]  I want to add here, it had formerly been known as Trash, which was total resources against street hoodlums.
[00:56:11]  And I got to say, all right, these were not good guys.
[00:56:14]  In fact, they're famous for being bad guys, but you gotta, you gotta like those.
[00:56:19]  I know.
[00:56:20]  That's why they had Bratton come in, is just to clean up like how they named things.
[00:56:26]  And well, this doesn't really have to do with this, but I did convince my friend the other day that I hang out at a crane and that I hang out with these two guys.
[00:56:35]  Yeah, just like I hang out at a crane sometimes and met these two guys named Barfbag and Dump Truck.
[00:56:39]  And then like one or both of them really wanted to go on a date with her.
[00:56:43]  And she was like, well, who?
[00:56:43]  I mean, who are they?
[00:56:45]  And I had to keep the lie up for as long as possible.
[00:56:47]  Was she seriously being like, whoa, Barfbag sounds cool.
[00:56:50]  Well, no, she's just like, who are you showing my picture to these guys?
[00:56:53]  I was like, yeah, I showed you a picture of these guys at the thinking to herself, I guess, Miss Drump Truck, I could do it.
[00:56:59]  I'm like, these are cool.
[00:57:01]  Like, yeah, I mean, Barfag, I mean, they call it, it's ironic.
[00:57:03]  He never barves.
[00:57:04]  Oh, my God.
[00:57:05]  Okay, Rampart.
[00:57:07]  So I just want to say, set the stage here a little bit.
[00:57:10]  The Rampart area, it's basically just west of downtown LA.
[00:57:13]  It's basically downtown LA, but it covers about close to eight square miles.
[00:57:17]  It's one of the busiest, largest operational commands within the LAPD.
[00:57:22]  So this is not like a small, discrete little unit.
[00:57:25]  At the end of the 90s, there were basically more than 400 sworn and civilian personnel assigned to it alone.
[00:57:32]  So it's pretty big.
[00:57:33]  Historically, and especially during the late 80s and 90s, this area had one of the highest crime rates in the city.
[00:57:40]  And specifically since the mid-80s, there's just like, I mean, everyone knows there was a huge ramp up.
[00:57:45]  No pun intended.
[00:57:47]  Maybe pun intended.
[00:57:49]  In of gang activity in the area.
[00:57:50]  You know, you got narcotics trafficking, weapons trafficking, all the usual gang shit that I think everyone knows about.
[00:57:57]  Yeah, I mean, there's like all these estimates that there were like 8,000 active gang members in that area during this time period.
[00:58:04]  I have no idea if that's true, but I mean, certainly like, you know, it could be.
[00:58:09]  I mean, I just have no idea how the fuck they get those numbers.
[00:58:13]  But certainly it was like, it was, I mean, you know, not to exaggerate, but there was quite a lot of gang activity in the area.
[00:58:20]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:58:22]  Later on in the manifesto, Dorner specifically calls out some cops.
[00:58:26]  He writes, the department has not changed from the Daryl Gates and Mark Furman days.
[00:58:31]  Now, I'm sorry, I'm laughing because Mark Furman, I mean, everyone knows Mark Fuhrman, right?
[00:58:35]  He's the detective in the OJ case who was put on the stand basically only to reveal not just his own disturbing history of racism, neo-Nazism, sexism, violence, corruption, all that, but also like the extent to which the LAPD would tolerate and cover up for him and like his ilk, which was pretty shocking revelation at the time.
[00:58:57]  Darrell Gates was the infamous former chief of police of the LAPD from the late 70s to 1992, I think.
[00:59:07]  This is the guy who invented the SWAT team.
[00:59:10]  To lie, I invented the SWAT team.
[00:59:12]  And he also invented like an intelligence division within the department.
[00:59:17]  He used it to spy on people he called subversives.
[00:59:20]  He's defended the use of chokeholds, saying, and this is a direct quote from him, blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people.
[00:59:33]  Yeah, he created and defended the crash units that are basically at the heart of the Rampart scandal.
[00:59:38]  I want to say too, just real quick, this isn't in our notes, but we should mention the LAPD, I mean, it's kind of unique in the kind of grand landscape of United States police departments that it's basically used as training ground for new police policing techniques, like rollout of new weaponry and new kind of crowd control techniques, all of it.
[01:00:04]  It has a shit, like shit ton, massive amount of federal contracts.
[01:00:08]  And it's one of the first places that the feds were really like dumping military-grade weapons into neighborhoods.
[01:00:15]  Of course, a long history.
[01:00:17]  I mean, much like, you know, the Chicago Police Department, the New York Police Department, long history of working very closely, sometimes interchangeably with the CIA and the FBI against subversives, whether they were committing criminal activities or not.
[01:00:33]  Yeah.
[01:00:34]  Okay, back to Rampart.
[01:00:35]  So these crash officers were, and I mean, extreme latitude was given to aggressively fight what they call gang-related crimes.
[01:00:44]  There's a point where the LAPD says that gang-related crimes in the Rampart area fell from 1,171 in 1992 to 464 in 1999, which is an insane reduction that exceeds basically the crime rate drop citywide.
[01:01:03]  And the reason for that is because basically all of the cops were just in the gangs.
[01:01:08]  Yeah.
[01:01:09]  And like not.
[01:01:12]  To be clear, it's not just like they were acting, the cops were acting like a gang.
[01:01:16]  No, it's like the cops were literally just actual members of the literal gangs.
[01:01:20]  Yeah.
[01:01:22]  The whole unit was out of control.
[01:01:24]  And there's like usually this kind of, you know, we always talk about it, this blurry line between the police or the mob.
[01:01:29]  In this case, people call it gangs.
[01:01:31]  It's all the same, organized crime.
[01:01:33]  And, you know, in this instance, it was non-existent, right?
[01:01:38]  This is also what that movie Training Day was based on.
[01:01:41]  Yeah.
[01:01:42]  Apparently the Shield's also based on this, but I'll be real, never seen the Shield.
[01:01:46]  I've never seen that.
[01:01:47]  I just remember that bald guy.
[01:01:48]  Yeah, the bald guy.
[01:01:49]  He did good stuff for bald guys, I think.
[01:01:52]  I can't remember what his fate.
[01:01:54]  I know he was like a bigger bald guy.
[01:01:56]  Yeah, he was a big guy.
[01:01:57]  He was a big guy.
[01:01:58]  Well, was he big or was his bald head just big?
[01:02:01]  Well, I mean, it's hard to have.
[01:02:03]  I mean, there's little people with wheat superfaces, but, you know, I think the man himself was probably quite large.
[01:02:11]  It would be too distracting for a television show to have a really small man with a really large bald head.
[01:02:17]  I feel like that would distract.
[01:02:18]  Sometimes you can't help it.
[01:02:19]  Sometimes you get cast what you're giving.
[01:02:21]  You know what I mean?
[01:02:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:23]  We intimidate those who intimidate others.
[01:02:26]  That's the crash division motto.
[01:02:28]  Yeah, there's no way to describe this other than a mobbed up, highly, highly protected squadron within the LAPD that was just enforcing outright violence and chaos for drugs and weapons traffickers for basically like two decades.
[01:02:41]  There's three guys who are kind of at the heart of the scandal.
[01:02:45]  This guy, Rafael Perez, David Mack, and Kevin Gaines.
[01:02:50]  There's basically an episode or let's say two or three here where we go into depth about these guys and what was, you know, what they were running and how the activity and the widespread decades-long cover-up of all of it is tied into the murder of one individual,
[01:03:07]  which if we were to cover, would be a story about the continued cover-up of the LAPD's direct involvement in said assassination, all in order to stop not just a media backlash no municipal force has ever seen or battled, but one powered up by a city bankrupting billion-dollar civil wrongful death judgment.
[01:03:30]  Yes, we are talking about the assassination of Christopher Wallace, aka Frank White, aka Big Papa, aka notorious VIG.
[01:03:39]  That's right.
[01:03:40]  The murder of Viggie Smalls.
[01:03:43]  That episode is not today.
[01:03:45]  You mean the Ebony Gourmand?
[01:03:49]  That's so bad, dude.
[01:03:51]  Dude, the LAPD straight up killed Biggie and Tupac.
[01:03:54]  It's so crazy.
[01:03:55]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:03:56]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:57]  So we're keeping the Ebony Gourmand in.
[01:03:59]  Okay, glad to know.
[01:04:00]  Just keep going.
[01:04:02]  I just want to say we should mention some of the details about the Rampart scandal just to kind of like run through them to convey how insane this was.
[01:04:10]  Because this is, mind you, this is just like six years after Rodney King was beaten live on TV and South LA was up in flames, right?
[01:04:17]  So this highly specialized gang task force, what are they doing?
[01:04:22]  Well, so, all right, to be clear, these are we're presenting these as bad things, yes, right?
[01:04:29]  Okay, so they were robbing banks, running drugs, stealing drugs from LAPD evidence rooms, and working with the bloods to get it out on the streets, running guns, terrorizing Echo Park.
[01:04:43]  All right, I'm sorry, some of these are fine.
[01:04:46]  Terrorizing Echo Park is okay to have you been there, it's okay to terrorize Echo Park.
[01:04:52]  Uh, planting evidence on innocent people, shooting suspects, and then planting guns on them to say that they were the ones who shot or you know, shot at them or shot themselves.
[01:05:02]  Uh, just uh, straight up murdering people, framing innocent people, and then lying on the stand to get them convicted, and then hazing rituals that bordered on or basically were just gang initiation ceremonies.
[01:05:13]  And they were also for private hire, excuse me, for hire private security for a man named Sugar Knight, the Sugar Knight, who is a he was in Lord Sugar's army.
[01:05:27]  Now, this is just a fun note on this.
[01:05:29]  So, the LAPD cops at this time were basically banned outright from working with death row records.
[01:05:34]  That's Suge Knight's record label, of course, because it was so clearly and obviously an overtly tied up with the bloods.
[01:05:42]  This didn't stop a ton of guys from working for them off the books.
[01:05:45]  Uh, most of them, I think a lot of them in the crash unit in Rampart.
[01:05:49]  But in general, they would get paid so much.
[01:05:52]  You know, this is their side gig, they get paid so much that it would like render their day job as cops secondary, right?
[01:06:00]  It's kind of like I've said, I think I've said this before, but like when you kind of look at the checks on balance, like LeBron is actually just a shoe salesman who happens to play basketball.
[01:06:08]  Yeah, well, I think too, it's like one thing about I remember being really like in my teenager and walking down, I think, Polk Street and just seeing a cop, like a straight-up cop, but he was wearing like some different thing on his sleeve.
[01:06:21]  And it's like, oh, he's working, he was like working private security for someone.
[01:06:25]  And a lot of cops moonlight as private security guards.
[01:06:29]  Uh, and it's a little different than being like a security guard, like a Vons or something.
[01:06:32]  Like, they're like, They're working as private security with the added implication that, like, I'm a cop and I can do cop shit to whoever fucks with whoever I'm hired to protect.

=== Dorner's Critique of LAPD Practices (14:56) ===

[01:06:41]  Absolutely.
[01:06:42]  And, you know, Shug would purposely hire off-duty cops for that reason.
[01:06:49]  One, it's funny because there's only one guy that fucked up in LA.
[01:06:53]  Well, all of them fucked up, but I mean, one guy in the LAPD fucked up and accidentally filed an official permit request to work for Death Row when everyone else is like, yeah, you just do it on the side.
[01:07:01]  You don't even ask for it.
[01:07:02]  Exactly.
[01:07:03]  You don't ask for permission.
[01:07:04]  You ask for forgiveness.
[01:07:05]  Yes.
[01:07:06]  This is a guy named Richard Macaulay.
[01:07:10]  His permit was revoked in early 1996.
[01:07:13]  And basically he was told, like, never associate with Death Row.
[01:07:15]  Don't put this on the books.
[01:07:16]  What the fuck are you doing?
[01:07:17]  Stuffing dummy.
[01:07:19]  You should go work for Nirvana.
[01:07:20]  Macaulay didn't follow orders.
[01:07:23]  And he showed up as a security detail on the payroll of Death Row later on in 1996, but not in L.A.
[01:07:31]  He was in Las Vegas working for Shug the night of the murder of Tupac Shakur.
[01:07:38]  I had the same English teacher as Tupac Shakur in high school.
[01:07:41]  Did you really?
[01:07:42]  Yeah.
[01:07:42]  That's why you're such a very talented poet.
[01:07:45]  I was only there for two months.
[01:07:47]  Well, you dreamed a lot.
[01:07:49]  Three months.
[01:07:49]  Yeah.
[01:07:50]  No, I faked having read the Odyssey.
[01:07:52]  I just didn't.
[01:07:53]  I didn't even watch the movie or like look up a night.
[01:07:56]  You should read it.
[01:07:57]  I mean, it's really the Iliad that you should read.
[01:07:58]  Well, either one.
[01:08:00]  I just, I didn't read it at all.
[01:08:01]  And I didn't even do the regular fake dumb guy thing of being like, like reading the cliff notes or whatever.
[01:08:06]  I'm like, you know, I'm just going to wing it.
[01:08:07]  Cyclops.
[01:08:09]  Guess what?
[01:08:10]  I failed.
[01:08:13]  Just totally failed.
[01:08:14]  And they knew I didn't read the book and I just insisted that I had the entire time.
[01:08:20]  So there's a line from the manifesto or for the Facebook post.
[01:08:24]  So there's an interesting little language game with that too, right?
[01:08:27]  Because Dorner did not put out a manifesto.
[01:08:30]  These are just sort of a collected series of Facebook posts.
[01:08:34]  Yeah.
[01:08:34]  Which for any other human being in history would be the most humiliating sentence ever strung together about something that they did.
[01:08:42]  But for Dorner, I think it is, it's more applicable because he didn't like put out like a man.
[01:08:48]  He didn't like send a manifesto.
[01:08:49]  No, he didn't.
[01:08:50]  And I think we're going to talk about in the next episode why the media frames it in that way, actually specifically, and why that kind of caught on.
[01:08:57]  But he says citizens slash non-combatants, which is the hardest word in the English language for me to do.
[01:09:02]  Combatatants.
[01:09:04]  Combatants.
[01:09:05]  Yeah.
[01:09:05]  That's the word.
[01:09:06]  Do not render medical aid to downed officers slash enemy combatants.
[01:09:12]  They would not do the same for you.
[01:09:14]  They will let you bleed out just so they can brag to other officers that they had a 187 caper the other day and can't wait to accrue the overtime and future court subpoenas.
[01:09:23]  As they always say, that's the paramedic's job, not mine.
[01:09:27]  Yeah.
[01:09:28]  Dorner here is talking about the well-documented history that LAPD has with just letting suspects bleed out and die.
[01:09:34]  That guy, Rafael Perez, the one from the that I mentioned that's at the heart of the rampart case, he testified in one incident that there was like fellow officers and him, they were chasing a suspect, I guess, down the hall of an apartment building.
[01:09:50]  And one of the officers he was with just open fired on the kid and hit, he says, hit it in the 10 ring, which is what is at the center.
[01:09:58]  That's like right in the center.
[01:09:59]  That's the, yeah, that's the source board.
[01:10:01]  That's from the target, right?
[01:10:03]  Okay.
[01:10:04]  Just want to make sure I knew what that was.
[01:10:05]  Yeah.
[01:10:06]  Oh, I'll show you what that is.
[01:10:07]  Oh my God.
[01:10:08]  Anyway, Perez approaches the guy and he looks down and the guy has no gun.
[01:10:12]  Of course, the officer who shot him placed a gun stairway next to him.
[01:10:15]  And then he, but he looks down.
[01:10:17]  The guy has just been shot in the stairway looks up at Perez.
[01:10:22]  And Perez says the guy was like confused and was like, oh, he was perfectly fine.
[01:10:26]  He's like talking.
[01:10:27]  He's like, man, what the hell is going on?
[01:10:29]  And when all of this is happening, the officers are kind of just standing around trying to get their story straight.
[01:10:33]  And the guy is just totally conscious, bleeding out.
[01:10:37]  He just fucking dies.
[01:10:38]  There's a number of things you can do when someone gets, if someone gets, I mean, all right, to be clear, someone gets shot in several areas of their body.
[01:10:46]  I'm like, I don't know exactly what I would do.
[01:10:48]  Center mass, probably, I mean, I'm guessing, I don't know what he would think of 10 ring center, but just like in the middle of the chest.
[01:10:56]  I don't really know what I would do if someone got shot like that.
[01:11:01]  You know, I guess just try to like stop the bleeding as much as he can.
[01:11:05]  But, but yeah, it doesn't seem like they did any of that.
[01:11:08]  They just like, well, it's just, I guess he's just going to keep bleeding.
[01:11:12]  Yeah.
[01:11:13]  Yeah.
[01:11:13]  I mean, the cops, like the LAPD, it's like, there's been so many investigations into this practice.
[01:11:17]  They do it all the time.
[01:11:19]  He also, Dorner in that quote, he also mentions that LAPD officers were basically accruing overtime for court subpoenas.
[01:11:27]  That's also true.
[01:11:29]  Well, one thing is, if you are working in a job like cop, it is like one of the most overtime heavy jobs you can do.
[01:11:39]  And these fucking, like, it's cops and some other municipal employees who I do support doing this basically like make a career out of just accruing overtime.
[01:11:49]  And I want to be clear.
[01:11:51]  I am blanket don't care about any other like city or government employee doing this.
[01:11:57]  When cops do it, I'm like, you should be at home beating your wife.
[01:12:03]  This is also from Dorner.
[01:12:05]  Don't honor these fallen officers/slash dirtbags.
[01:12:08]  And he means cops, by the way, not podcasters.
[01:12:10]  When your family members die, they just see you as extra overtime at a crime scene and at a perimeter.
[01:12:17]  Why would you value their lives when they clearly don't value yours?
[01:12:23]  Also, to be clear, I don't think they should actually beat their wives.
[01:12:26]  That was in reference to cops way more likely to beat their wives than anybody who has any other job in America.
[01:12:33]  But yeah, there's this culture of the thin blue line that Dorner's talking about here, where like you're seen as a snitch if you report any of these.
[01:12:42]  Like cops do cut so many corners and break so many rules constantly, every day in their jobs, right?
[01:12:48]  And just view all of the like all of the procedures and stuff they're going to follow as like bureaucratic stuff put in place by either like officers who don't actually have to do any of this stuff in the field or civilians who hate cops.
[01:13:00]  And so there is this enormous pressure not to report any of this stuff because you're seen as like, you know, you're kind of not playing on the team.
[01:13:07]  Like you're not, you're not going along to get along.
[01:13:09]  And that means you can't be trusted.
[01:13:11]  I mean, look what happened to Frank Serpico.
[01:13:13]  Yeah, the code of silence, the culture of the code of silence.
[01:13:18]  I mean, that's, yeah, that's what we saw.
[01:13:20]  It's like, you know, if you fail to report misconduct, that gets kind of like implicitly reinforced by the code of silence within the department.
[01:13:31]  And it deters officers from coming forward.
[01:13:34]  He, yeah, Dorner, he calls it breaking the so-called blue line, like you said.
[01:13:40]  This was something that when they were looking into the Rampart case, you know, there's like all these independent review boards and that were set up and there was official investigations that went into this stuff.
[01:13:50]  They wrote a lot about this culture that was permeating the LAPD.
[01:13:56]  This is from the report.
[01:13:57]  For a variety of reasons, including friendship, loyalty, fear of retaliation, and uncertainty regarding acceptable practices, officers who witness misconduct often fail to report it immediately.
[01:14:08]  Punishing officers for failing to come forward immediately discourages them from reporting the conduct later, adding to the informal pressure to keep quiet.
[01:14:17]  This is all stuff everyone knows, but this is just like in like report or I'm putting an official report together language.
[01:14:23]  But I think it's interesting to point out that like this is all that that could be just taken directly from Dorner's Facebook post, right?
[01:14:30]  Yeah.
[01:14:31]  He's just like saying the same thing, but was, you know, it certainly wasn't taken the same way.
[01:14:37]  No, no, not at all.
[01:14:39]  He calls out later on in the manifesto, he calls out a ton of officers by name.
[01:14:44]  This is a quote, Bratton, Beck, Hayes, Tengaridis, Eisenberg, Martella, Kwan, Evans, Hernandez, Villanueva, Galagos, and Anderson.
[01:14:53]  Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over.
[01:14:58]  So most of those names we've actually already mentioned.
[01:15:00]  They were part of the BOR hearing, but the others are like heads of the LAPD.
[01:15:07]  Yeah, so Bill Bratton is a name that will probably be familiar to anybody who's paid attention to national politics in the last decade.
[01:15:14]  He's probably the most famous cop in the country.
[01:15:17]  At the time, he was, I think he was, I think he was chief of police of the LAPD, but he had been in charge of the NYPD under Giuliani, where he basically pioneered broken windows policing.
[01:15:31]  I mean, this was like his main thing, where essentially that means that like broken windows is kind of a stand-in there for misdemeanors leading to felonies, right?
[01:15:40]  So like if there are enough misdemeanors around a place, then like eventually like worse crime is going to happen there.
[01:15:46]  Or if there's a bunch of misdeernas around a place, that's like one of the underlying causes.
[01:15:50]  Like we can get a bunch of thugs off the street without actually like arresting them in the act of selling drugs.
[01:15:55]  So what this actually meant is that arrests in New York City sort of skyrocketed.
[01:16:00]  People got really caught up in the legal system, which is very difficult to get out of.
[01:16:05]  The, you know, that's basically his, what he was most famous for.
[01:16:08]  So he comes to LA, he brings that practice to LA and arrests of pedestrians skyrocketing LA.
[01:16:16]  So he's there from 02 to 09.
[01:16:17]  He gets back to New York in 2014 and then eventually gets forced out of the era or basically over the Eric Garland murder.
[01:16:25]  Oh, yeah.
[01:16:26]  Now he owns a company called Blue Line, which is LinkedIn for cops.
[01:16:30]  It's actually how I met Liz and Young Chompson.
[01:16:35]  Another name that Dorner called out was Charlie Beck, who was the chief of police after Bratton at the LAPD.
[01:16:41]  He was the chief when Dorner sent out these posts.
[01:16:44]  That guy was, he's kind of in the Bratton mold in the sense that he was really good at working the media.
[01:16:52]  Like Bratton is like a politician, basically.
[01:16:56]  Like, I mean, he's a cop, but he's like a kind of a politico.
[01:17:00]  And that's why so many people really know his name nationally, at least.
[01:17:05]  But Beck was really good at kind of like giving like media and particularly the LA Times, who we will talk a lot about, the kind of like what they needed, like little sound bites to kind of like, I don't know, juice the LAPD and, you know, get the stories out there that what you got to juice.
[01:17:24]  No, you got to do some.
[01:17:25]  Yeah, just get the stories out there that they wanted.
[01:17:27]  Like he would say, oh, it was a job of action.
[01:17:29]  You made a difference in people's lives.
[01:17:32]  Or, you know, he was very famous for saying, like, we're changing the culture and we've got a majority, minority police force, you know, just like basically ways of kind of politicking around all of this stuff and, you know, like shutting down, you know, accusations of racism, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:17:47]  All of that.
[01:17:49]  And then Eisenberg was another, he was a commanding officer of the North Hollywood division.
[01:17:54]  He actually got famous for basically heading up the LAPD's 2000 task force for the DNC, where the LAP, he basically recommended that they like outfit the LAPD that was like, you know, gonna handle these, the protesters and the security for the DNC that year with like insane riot gear.
[01:18:14]  Just like basically, and as everyone knows, when you, you know, pump up the volume with that shit with cops, it always translates to more use of force on like protesters and civilians, which is exactly what happened during that.
[01:18:30]  It was insane.
[01:18:31]  His task force is like raining rubber bullets on crowds and beating protesters and journalists with sticks.
[01:18:37]  So, a sort of consistent theme in Dorner's manifesto is that all of these wrongs that happened, these sort of like famous cases in the LAPD, you know, Rodney King, Ramparts, not only did what they basically covered up, but the problems from them got worse.
[01:18:53]  The officers who were involved in these and involved in covering up these activities not only didn't have their careers ended, I mean, some of them famously did, but were actually promoted and put into further into positions of power, solidifying sort of this code of silence, this blue line that cops are on one side of, and like really kind of tightening up the organization in a way that, like, you know, maybe during crash, things were getting a little too loose.
[01:19:17]  But the actual, it has the effect of the cover-up of those activities, or the, you know, obviously with the, I mean, they're both very famous cases, they weren't fully covered up, but the reaction by the LAPD to the public outcry over this and to all these investigations by the FBI and whatever, you know, DOJ, had actually this sort of like solidifying aspect to it.
[01:19:40]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:19:41]  I mean, there were still, you know, it's like the LAPD commission into this stuff didn't even answer like basic questions.
[01:19:47]  There was this USC independent review that came out right at the same time as the official review of the Rampart case.
[01:19:55]  And there was just like, how many officers were involved?
[01:19:57]  How many officers knew about it?
[01:19:59]  Was this happening in other units?
[01:20:01]  How did this go?
[01:20:02]  None of that was even investigated because it's not the point, right?
[01:20:06]  Like you're saying, the cover-up is to kind of, you know, solidify and reconcretize the institution itself at a point of crisis.
[01:20:16]  Like, here's a good quote from that USC review: The culture within the LAPD gave rise to the Rampart scandal and allowed it to remain undetected for so long.
[01:20:26]  Every police department has a culture: the unwritten rules, mores, customs, codes, values, and outlooks that creates the policing environment and style.
[01:20:34]  The LAPD's organizational culture drives everything, including these scandals.
[01:20:38]  And this is like effectively what Dorner would say 13 years later.
[01:20:43]  The thing is, though, I mean, Rodney King may have been a bad look for the LAPD and, of course, the cause of some pretty famous riots.
[01:20:51]  But Ramparts and the Rampart scandal coming out, which is, by the way, it's such an insane story how it even came out and all yeah, it's a great, I mean, maybe we will someday do a series on that or episodes on that.
[01:21:03]  Yeah, it involves an incredible shooting on a highway between two off-duty cops.
[01:21:08]  Versace shirts.
[01:21:10]  Yes, a Tupac shrine.
[01:21:13]  Living with another man's wife.
[01:21:15]  I mean, it's got basically, it's like my family.
[01:21:17]  Well, it's really got a, it's got true non-Ramparts.
[01:21:19]  It's a story.
[01:21:20]  Yeah.
[01:21:21]  There were a lot of lawsuits coming down on the LAPD after Ramparts came out because, bam, turns out that this sort of gang interdiction unit had actually just been members of a gang and doing a shit ton of SHIELD style police work.

=== Reforms Under Threat (06:59) ===

[01:21:38]  Yeah.
[01:21:38]  And so they were facing, I mean, the city of LA was facing just an astronomical amount of money that they were being sued for.
[01:21:45]  Yeah, DOJ had basically been investigating the LAPD since 1990, around 1996 for excessive force violations, in addition to a fucking bevy of other things.
[01:21:55]  And in 2000, in like the waning days of the Clinton admin, DOJ basically threatened to sue LA for, I mean, like, like you said, a litany of civil rights violations, including like excessive force, false arrests, you know, violating the Fourth and the 15th Amendment, like serious things.
[01:22:15]  And we mentioned that the LAPD, you know, they have a very, I mean, you know, as much as municipal forces can, but they had a very cozy relationship with the feds in the sense that they get a lot of federal fucking money, a lot.
[01:22:27]  Yeah.
[01:22:28]  And those lawsuits threatened those contracts, one, but like you said, also just bankrupting the force.
[01:22:37]  So the LAPD goes into secret negotiation, four-month secret closed-door negotiation with GOJ, with the feds.
[01:22:45]  And what comes out of it is this thing called the consent decree, which is what Dorner references at the beginning of his manifesto.
[01:22:54]  Dorner thinks the consent decree should not have been lifted is sort of one of the main themes of his manifesto.
[01:23:01]  Basically, it was federal oversight over the LAPD where they had to abide by certain practices.
[01:23:09]  I mean, you saw Eric Holder kind of like float doing this for different police departments.
[01:23:13]  I think he might have done it for the Ferguson Police Department or something.
[01:23:16]  They threatened to do it with the NYPD, but.
[01:23:18]  None of this shit, like, it should be said, none of this shit ever comes to anything, right?
[01:23:22]  Like, you know, cops, the FBI is just as bad as the regular cops.
[01:23:29]  And, you know, these, these, these, these things have the effect of like keeping up appearances and kind of giving an end date for like, okay, here's where the reforms have ended and we are a new police department now.
[01:23:41]  So in effect, it can have actually the it can basically like reinforce these practices and re-entrench them, but keeping them more under the rug.
[01:23:51]  Yeah, while opening, you know, lots of like opening the door to lots of new, you know, HR style contracts.
[01:23:58]  I mean, I think that the best, I mean, regardless of what Dorner said, I mean, you know, Dorner says one thing, whatever, but it's best described between as like somewhere between a bailout and a cleanup job.
[01:24:10]  Yeah.
[01:24:11]  And I'd say all in all, the official like investigative panel recommendations, it's like it's all of it is basically scandalous enough to be an embarrassment, toothless enough to not actually do anything substantial, and massaged enough to necessitate the kind of procedural reforms that demand lucrative private contracts, which seems like all in all, a day's work, you know, for the cops.
[01:24:35]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:24:53]  So a lot of the attention, I mean, as you can probably imagine, the LAPD has not cleaned itself up.
[01:25:00]  I mean, the cops still just function the same way as they've always functioned.
[01:25:03]  They do, this is like, this is how organizations like this work, right?
[01:25:07]  So, even if there's no like major rampart style, like huge public blow up on the LAPD, you can rest assured that all the shit, the same shit is still happening.
[01:25:17]  I remember I was trying to buy dope in Skid Row, which it still blows my mind that there's a neighborhood called Skid Row, which is not as to be clear, like the Tenderloin, which I guess is San Francisco Skid Row, a much better Skid Row style Skid Row than the actual Skid Row itself.
[01:25:37]  And a guy tries to steal my jacket while I was buying dope from him, which was just like a really shitty cloth jacket that was like worth less than if he had not taken it.
[01:25:49]  He didn't get it from me, but this like police car just pulls up on the curb, cops pull out with guns drawn and are just like, get the fuck out of here to me and just like start going to town on this.
[01:25:59]  They don't shoot him, but just like beat this dude's ass and arrest him and shit.
[01:26:02]  I mean, it's just like, it was, I had never seen anything like that.
[01:26:08]  The sort of focus now is on the LA Sheriff's Department.
[01:26:12]  I mean, there is a sort of huge public push for investigation to the LA Sheriff's Department.
[01:26:19]  The LA Sheriff's Department is pushing back because of sheriff gangs, which essentially sound exactly like the crash unit, you know, sort of rampart style stuff with, you know, basically these gangs within different stations.
[01:26:32]  You know, they have names like the executioners and the banditos, which by the way, is already taken as the name for a gang.
[01:26:39]  So it's like, you really got to come up with a new one, but function in precisely, you know, basically the same way.
[01:26:44]  They also have initiation rituals, which apparently can involve killing people or, you know, arresting a certain amount of innocent people.
[01:26:53]  You know, it's pretty, it's pretty nasty stuff.
[01:26:55]  The sheriff has been really fucking defiant in talking about it.
[01:26:59]  It's starting to get more attention.
[01:27:00]  I think there was just recently a review where there was like they identified 71 officers who are in these gangs.
[01:27:05]  They get the tattoos and stuff.
[01:27:08]  You know, LA Sheriff's Department covers a bigger area because it's a county.
[01:27:12]  LA City itself is only a small part of the county, or not a small part, but it's not the whole thing.
[01:27:17]  So they actually cover a much larger area than the LAPD does.
[01:27:22]  So in 2009, a federal judge finally lifts the consent decree.
[01:27:27]  They note there's been significant reforms under Chief William Bratton.
[01:27:33]  This is Vila Ragosa in 2009.
[01:27:36]  Now residents in our most crime-plagued neighborhoods view our brave men and women in blue as partners, not adversaries.
[01:27:43]  Our officers used it as a guide to change their culture.
[01:27:48]  They basically, they put in this, basically the feds were like, okay, we're going to lift the decree, but also we don't trust you.
[01:27:54]  So they put in a transition agreement to make sure that all these reforms or whatever got put into permanent place.
[01:28:01]  That didn't end formally until May 2013, just three months after Christopher Dorner posted his manifesto on Facebook targeting some of the reformers at the department and going out on a revenge killing spree, Culminating in a fatal shootout in Burning Cabin at the hands of his former employer.

=== Thus Ends Part One (02:12) ===

[01:28:37]  On Super Bowl Sunday, February 3rd, 2013, when my pats were playing the Chicago Bears with Tim Tebow doing really good, a resident of a condominium complex in Irvine County.
[01:28:51]  California saw two people slumped over the dash of their car on the top floor of a parking garage next to the complex.
[01:28:59]  Police arrive at the scene, identifying the bodies as belonging to Keith Lawrence, a campus security officer, which is a policeman who is at school, and Monica Kwan, a basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton.
[01:29:13]  They'd been engaged just a few days before.
[01:29:17]  They'd been shot at least 14 times, and their valuables were still on them.
[01:29:23]  Detectives responding to the scene knew this was a murder, not a robbery gone wrong.
[01:29:30]  Across town, a retired LAPD police captain named Randall Kwan is wondering, why hasn't my daughter called me today?
[01:29:42]  Thus ends part one of Christopher Dorner of Moderate Rebel, a Christopher Dorner story.
[01:29:48]  Did I do that true crime enough?
[01:29:49]  I think that was true crime enough, but I think we got to say, thus ends part one of Truanon, Colin, Moderate Rebel, the Chris Dorner story.
[01:30:01]  Was it Christopher Dorner story?
[01:30:03]  Christopher Dorner, the Christopher Dorner story.
[01:30:06]  Okay.
[01:30:06]  Thus ends.
[01:30:07]  Truanon colon.
[01:30:09]  Wait, I still can't say it right.
[01:30:10]  Thus ends.
[01:30:11]  Thus ends.
[01:30:12]  Let's do it in tandem.
[01:30:13]  No, no.
[01:30:14]  Thus ends.
[01:30:15]  Part one.
[01:30:16]  Part one of Truanon.
[01:30:18]  Truanon.
[01:30:19]  Colon.
[01:30:19]  Colon.
[01:30:20]  Moderate.
[01:30:21]  Moderate rebel.
[01:30:22]  Wait, what was it?
[01:30:23]  The moderate?
[01:30:25]  Yeah, let's do.
[01:30:25]  All right.
[01:30:27]  The mod.
[01:30:27]  The moderate rebel.
[01:30:28]  The moderate rebel.
[01:30:30]  The Christopher Dorner Dorner story.
[01:30:33]  I'm Liz.
[01:30:34]  My name is Brace, the murderer.
[01:30:37]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky, aka the victim.
[01:30:41]  The podcast is called True.
[01:30:45]  True Crime Anon.
[01:30:47]  And we'll see you next time.