LAPD hunting Dorner shot at innocent guy in second mistaken identity incident

Los Angeles police looking for ex-cop and multiple homicide suspect Christopher Jordan Dorner have opened fire in a second mistaken identity incident, this time shooting at an innocent guy who was just trying to sneak in some surfing before he went to work.

David Perdue is white, the two newspaper delivery ladies the LAPD mistakenly shot are Latina, Dorner is black.

Perdue, like the unfortunate newspaper delivery ladies, is also significantly shorter and a hundred pounds or more lighter.

"I don't want to use the word buffoonery but it really is unbridled police lawlessness," said Robert Sheahen, Perdue's attorney. "These people need training and they need restraint."

Hot tip: if you live in West Torrance, California and you drive a pickup truck, DON'T.

(HT: Matt Novak)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

class_enemy

And remember, dear citizens, the police can be trusted with guns. The rest of you can’t.
- grimc
  
  Hmm, lessee: It takes an entire police force to shoot at three innocent people, wounding one. On the other hand, a single Adam Lanza was able to kill more than two dozen.
  
  Lemme pull out the ‘ol calculator…Gosh, you’re right: If you want a bunch of innocent people shot, you can’t trust the police to do it. Clearly, this is the perfect situation to argue for more guns in the hands of more random people.
  - Dave Lloyd
    
    Surely the argument is that noone should be trusted with guns – police or civilians…
    - DataShade
      
      *Whose* argument? I’m sure the Nugent-style “preppers” would argue that any government agent is inherently less trustworthy with a gun than a private citizen.
- http://profile.yahoo.com/RIXYW7GMXTJ2M2OEEXIQADTB5I Cheef
  
  The main difference between Dorner, and the rest of his department is that Dorners targeting specific people, and is actually killing them, where the other cops have adopted a “spray and pray” engagement approach.
  If dorner was as piss poor a shot as the rest of his department, everyone would still be alive, but random folks would be wounded.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  So you trust guys like Dorner instead?
  - fuzzyfuzzyfungus
    
    In the sense that I think he’s a wonderful guy who I want running around with a stash of guns? Not so much.
    
    In the sense that he appears to do exactly what he says on the tin? Well… He does seem to be carrying out the ‘It’s totally fucked up that I’m able to go on this killing spree entirely with weapons I legally acquired’ thesis rather convincingly..
  - class_enemy
    
    So you trust guys like Dorner instead?
    
    Not a fair comparison. I do think that the gun owning population in its entirety – even considering the few Dorners among them – is proportionally less likely to shoot an innocent bystander than is the police force in its entirety.
  - http://profile.yahoo.com/RIXYW7GMXTJ2M2OEEXIQADTB5I Cheef
    
    It’s the rest of the police who seem to be shooting indiscriminatingly. Jesus, whether you might be hispanic, white, old, young, female, whatever, they will f- up your truck without any fear of being punished. Have a pickup, get sprayed! I’m not afraid of Dorner, I never screwed him over, but these yahoos are shooting trucks of any make and different colors. Tomorrow they’re going to double tap an asian grandma in a red El Camino.
    - goldenmansacks
      
      “Tomorrow they’re going to double tap an asian grandma in a red El Camino.”
      Thanks for the tip. I’ll call grandma.
  - Rindan
    
    You don’t have to trust one over the other. Dorner is perfectly capable of being someone with legitimate grievances who responds in an insane way, while at the same time the LAPD can be LAs biggest and most violent gang. They can both be assholes.
    
    I do find it morbidly hilarious that Dorner has tried to kill people as many times as the LAPD since this started. The only difference is that Dorner appears to be a better shot.
    
    The LAPD looks like shit in this entire thing. At least some of Dorners grievances are probably legit, if not murder worthy. The LAPD has responded with a massive manhunt the likes of which no private citizen can ever expect if they get shot. On this massive manhunt the police have shown without even a shadow of a doubt that they are not looking to arrest anyone, but are out to assassinate Dorner. I’m glad his suicide note says that he is okay with dying, because that poor bastard couldn’t surrender even if he wanted too. In the the polices attempt to assassinate Dorner, they have managed to shoot up a hilarious array of people that look nothing like the guy they are targeting. The 40+ bullets into two Asian women simply takes the cake. How the fuck do you confuse two Asian women whose combined weight doesn’t equal the single large black man who they are actually after? Fucking incompetent assholes. I bet the fuckups that fired all of those shots get a 3 weeks paid vacation.
    
    I suggest all large black men in the greater LA area refrain from going out until the police gets done assassinating Dorner. Hell, seeing as how they have confused a two small Asian women with a single large black man, maybe EVERYONE in the greater LA area should be weary when they see cops.
    - wysinwyg
      
      You’re looking for “wary”. Just letting you know for future reference because it’s a great word and under-used.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        How about “chary”?
Michael

It should be noted that while the two women were shot by LAPD, this guy was fired on by the Torrance Police Department, which is a separate agency.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1515015318 Missy Pants
  
  So there are two rogue police agencies now just randomly shooting people and vehicles? Excellent, I’m sure Californians feel so much safer!
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Louis-Koester/100000597130734 Louis Koester
    
    I’m just glad that these are “well trained” men.
    - RElgin
      
      Heavens to murgatroid, you forgot your sarcasm tags.
  - elix
    
    This begs the question: What the fuck is happening in Oakland right now if this is the operational procedure for finding Dorner?
    - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1515015318 Missy Pants
      
      I know the dude murdered innocent people, but I do kinda wonder if he actually knows things they don’t want anyone else to know? Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
      - fuzzyfuzzyfungus
        
        I’d be pretty surprised if he knows anything that novel (if you look at his bio, he wasn’t exactly walking the halls of power at police HQ, nor did his rather comprehensive manifesto have any real revelations).
        
        It seems to be less of a ‘he knows where the bodies are buried’ and more of a ‘he thinks that he and everybody else know where the bodies are buried, and he’s mad as hell that nobody is digging’ thing.
      - donovan acree
        
        You know he murdered innocent people based on what? An LAPD press release?
        
        The police clearly want him dead and not on a witness stand. It’s a shame that we have already tried this man. There will be no justice or due process in this case. If he is killed, we will never know the entire story.
- http://profile.yahoo.com/RIXYW7GMXTJ2M2OEEXIQADTB5I Cheef
  
  Does this mean no truck for David Perdue? “Cause they tore his shit up.
http://openid.aliz.es/QiLa QiLa

Request: Can boingboing moderators add a tag “police” that adds yakkity sax soundtrack to any boingboing post about police?

If that’s too much what about for the “lapd” tag?
- http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin
  
  added.
  - http://openid.aliz.es/QiLa QiLa
    
    ^_^
TomClayman

There goes another million dollars or more of tax payer money to settle another lawsuit. These cops are like Yosemite Sam with their guns.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1515015318 Missy Pants
  
  It’ll be fine, they just need to buy him a new surfboard to make it all better.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=558002551 Kevin Atchison
  
  Please.Don’t use Yosimite in comparison with them.That is my nick name,because I am short,with a shorter fuse.And I feel comfortable saying that I am much sharper than these Keystone cops in Cali! LMAO
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza
- spiessbraten
  
  Fornicate with the constabulary.
- http://twitter.com/datsneefa Jim Terwiliger
  
  http://www.titaniumteddybear.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/instruct-me-how-to-douglas.jpg
- niktemadur
  
  For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge the police.
  Fornicating Under Consent of King. The police.
- Drew_Gehringer
  
  Make inquiries toward and about the authorities
- toyg
  
  Kindly sodomize all guardsmen.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    Ravish the watch.
Benjamin King

HELP HIM.
fuzzyfuzzyfungus

I’m going to take it as a bad sign that only sheer failure of marksmanship has kept the cops from racking up the same body count (in people who don’t even resemble Dorner, no less) as Dorner so far has…
timquinn

The only way to stop a bad man with a gun is to just go ahead and kill everyone.
JonS

Clearly the problem here is a lack of guns. If the two delivery women, and Surfer Dude, had had guns, then this wouldn’t have happened.

Adding more guns to a tense situation is clearly the only way to ensure no one gets killed.
- chgoliz
  
  And eyes in the back of their heads, and double-jointedness so that they could shoot straight behind them….
  - http://twitter.com/HubrisSonic HubrisSonic
    
    uh, dude.. turret mounted M60. natch!
    - fuzzyfuzzyfungus
      
      At only 500rounds/minute, M60s are for people who can hit things.
      
      Luckily, Dillon Aero has the butterfingers among us covered:
      
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqDelOuvJaA
http://twitter.com/hoffasaurusx Michael Hassall

So a while ago Boing Boing posted something about documents with blacked-out sections just having black squares drawn over on the word document. In Dorner’s manifesto, they seem to have done the same thing, and I’m guessing someone with a little technical know how could remove the squares and find out which officers he refers to…
- Rindan
  
  The first link his it…
  http://lmgtfy.com/?q=dorner+manifesto+uncensored
- Alex Lion
  
  LMGTFY:
  
  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/09/1185809/-Christopher-Dorner-Manifesto-Uncensored
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  There were preserved Reddit posts of the first manifesto before it was withdrawn and censored.
  
  However, don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because those hunting him are bumbling and reckless sociopaths that he’s some kind of righteous Frank Serpico.
  - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1515015318 Missy Pants
    
    Or that he isn’t actually crazy.
Joel Phillips

“Nobody trains police officers to look for one of their own,” said Maria Haberfeld, a police training professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Why not? Why are police officers assumed to be better behaved than the rest of the world? In any case …

So what? The idea of the police officer as superhero has little basis in reality. Dorner’s military training is maybe a bit more relevant, which prompts the question …

Why is this so unusual? Dorner isn’t the first person with military training to go off the rails. It seems that what the police are finding difficult is not his training, but the fact that he wants to kill police officers. Which is the nub of the problem …

If an organisation that is supposed to protect the public is prepared to endanger the public in order to protect itself then it has failed.
- Gerald Mander
  
  If an organisation that is supposed to protect the public is prepared to endanger the public in order to protect itself then it has failed.
  
  Yes. Decades ago.
  - Gilbert Wham
    
    Well, quite. I read a history of the LAPD a few months back (the name escapes me). It made James Ellroy’s novels look like simpering, rose-tinted hagiographies. Fucking nuts.
    - DataShade
      
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMUTUO-xzxw
- BillStewart2012
  
  Why not? Because police are trained to stick up for their fellow tribe members.
  
  But this isn’t a case where they’re having to tell the truth about their fellow officer to Internal Affairs or the Feds. This is a manhunt, and the fact that they’re not trained to chase people who have the same skills they do doesn’t mean they should go shooting up lots of non-cops to do it.
  - Joel Phillips
    
    Yeah, the brotherhood shit is just a less immediately life-threatening version of failure, namely when an organisation that’s supposed to enforce the rules resists the application of those rules to itself.
    
    N.B. The first point I was making was that we ought not get sucked into the whole “highly skilled police officer” bollocks. The reason that they are panicking (and shooting up lots of non-cops) is not because they’re worried about his crazy skillz. It’s because, by explicitly targeting cops, Dorner has removed the one bit of real advantage that police do have, i.e. in normal circumstances most people, even really bad guys, will think twice before shooting at a cop if they have an easily available alternative option.
http://twitter.com/the_damned_fool the damned fool

Seems it’s less dangerous to live in a region that receives 5 feet of snow overnight than it is to go out in broad daylight in Los Angeles
- xzzy
  
  It’s also more fun, because snow is awesome.
  - dragonfrog
    
    Spoken like someone who sees snow maybe a few months a year…
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Hey, I see snow about six months per year. Fortunately, it’s 11,000 feet up.
    - http://twitter.com/racerabbit Fred Swetland, IV
      
      Or someone who lives in a place where they get 400+” a year. Some of us like snow, you know.
      - xzzy
        
        Yep, this. Raised in Alaska, can’t ever have too much snow.
Gerald Mander

LAPD are easily the most organized gang in the city.
Cameron Evans

Clearly if one is driving a pickup in Southern California and sees the Police, the safest course of action is just to start shooting first.
- dragonfrog
  
  Well, they’re apparently unlikely to hit you in the course of returning fire.
awjt

Dorner’s in Mexico. You think a guy that smart would just head off into the mountains right outside LA in the middle of an ice storm? LOL. He took off in the opposite direction after he torched his truck.
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  And since his truck was found torched, why are the police still shooting at trucks which look like it?
  - C W
    
    Teaching ‘em a lesson.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Spare the ammo and you’ll spoil those bystanders.
      - http://twitter.com/HubrisSonic HubrisSonic
        
        stealing that.
  - captain_pudding
    
    That’s the sad part, they’re not even shooting at trucks that look like it. I dunno about you, but to me a blue toyota tacoma doesn’t look all that much like a grey nissan titan. There’s evidently some kind of shoot on sight order for any japanese truck in California.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Other than both being big pick-ups, they look nothing alike.
      - captain_pudding
        
        Also, haven’t been able to confirm this but supposedly the other truck they gunned down (guy who was going surfing) was a black Honda Ridgeline
  - awjt
    
    I know, right. They weren’t that hard to outsmart, were they? Jeez.
  - RElgin
    
    EXACTLY!!!
    
    The police have panicked and it is now one gigantic truck hunt.
    - That_Anonymous_Coward
      
      So they are just operating how DHS runs?
DJBudSonic

All these Cali trucks are mint, too, so it’s terrible to see them shot up. You can’t buff out 40 holes.
- oasisob1
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk9Pcjgb1z8
http://twitter.com/datsneefa Jim Terwiliger

You can’t argue with the Douglas Instructor!!
Eark_the_Bunny

“There’s something happening here.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

There’s a man with a gun over there,

Telling me I got to beware.

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s going down.

There’s battle lines being drawn.

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong…”

What I see here is sheer insanity on everyone’s part!
- captain_pudding
  
  Crap, I just realized I’m a Cylon.
  - wysinwyg
    
    Did you mix up “For What It’s Worth” with “All Along the Watchtower” or am I missing a joke?
    - captain_pudding
      
      Right you are sir . . . no idea why I thought it was For What it’s Worth. Time to re-watch he series I suppose
brucearthurs

When did “Kill them all, let God sort them out” go from being a military tactic to a police tactic?
- fuzzyfuzzyfungus
  
  You could try asking these guys…
SomeGuyNamedMark

Remember who killed Monica Quan and Keith Lawrence.
- missmimipoppy
  
  Tragic yes but the police are proving it’s not a simple, senseless murder.
  - Drew_Gehringer
    
    Yes it is.
    
    It’s a simple, senseless murder that the police are reacting to with more senselessness, but that doesn’t ‘prove’ anything beyond ‘the LAPD are incompetent’, which is something plenty of people (particularly nonwhite people) already knew.
10xor01

Straight outta Roanoke!
http://www.facebook.com/bazimmerman Brad Zimmerman

I have no doubt that those communities are full of tense, scared people; there are obviously a lot of cops running around with itchy trigger fingers and that’s bound to put everyone on edge.

Cops always say they have tough jobs, but it seems they are mostly at fault for making their jobs tough. It’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for guys that shoot old ladies and surfers and don’t ever seem to be punished or even appear to feel responsible for their actions.
Atomicpanda

What I find most disturbing is that LA area police, by spraying a couple vehicles and their occupants with bullets, without warning, and then claiming the only mistake was one of identity, have basically admitted that they’re not out to find and apprehend Dorner, as they by law should be. They’re trying to execute him. I’m certainly no fan of Dorner but there’s a little something called due process. Or at least there used to be.
- fuzzyfuzzyfungus
  
  Quoth Attorney General Holder(in public, no less)
  
  “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.” ”The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”
  
  (that said, the general rule that killing one or more cops markedly increases the chances of you being gunned down like a black guy reaching for his ID rather than taken alive seems to be much older than Holder)
fredges

I got five says the innocent victim count reaches 10.
- http://twitter.com/HubrisSonic HubrisSonic
  
  suckers bet.
jansob1

Another sucker’s bet: no serious punishment for any officer who shoots innocent bystanders. I hope they get him, if only to stop the random and consequence-free killing of random citizens. But I really couldn’t care less how many uniformed gang members he gets first. Seems to truly be the only way to get rid of bad cops.
jansob1

And I love how they are building him up to be a supervillian to justify trying to execute without trial (that seems to be a theme lately in the US).
Also if he’s a genius they’re pretty dumb to be looking for him RIGHT WHERE HIS ABANDONED TRUCK INDICATES HE IS. He’s either already in Mexico or he’s back in LA getting ready to add to the notches in his gun barrel. If he’s actually been chased into the mountains he’s not much of a genius.
steve849

Disappointed to see Boing Boing put up a “Fuck the police” message.
- toyg
  
  You must be new here.
- That_Anonymous_Coward
  
  Maybe if the police stopped shooting everyone in a truck hoping they might magically hit the suspect they might get more respect.
- marilove
  
  I think the police are big boys and can defend themselves; they don’t need some random dude from the internet to do it.
toyg

People keep saying he’s not Frank Serpico, but of course he is not. Serpico did fuck all in late ’70s South Korea; Dorner was in 2006 Iraq, when shit was actually blowing up around him and the locals would have loved to stab him at every turn. This guy is an elite, decorated marksman with guerrilla-warfare training.

He’s not Serpico, no; he is John fucking Rambo.
Ryan Lenethen

I guess they are pretty much not trying to capture him or ask him to surrender at this point. They seem to just be spraying any truck that seems to be the same with bullets. I mean if they can’t tell that two women or a small white guy is not a big bald black dude, well it is obvious that they are not even looking, let alone asking before opening fire.

Besides, didn’t they find his truck already torched? Why the heck do they continue to shoot up other trucks, do they think he has another?
- captain_pudding
  
  They also can’t seem to tell that a black honda ridgeline or a blue toyota tacoma aren’t a grey Nissan titan.
HelixFelix

This thing just got very real for “Which Way L.A.”:
http://blogs.kcrw.com/whichwayla/2013/02/christopher-dorner-manhunt-hits-home
MT_Head

Did anybody bother to read the article? This shooting happened within minutes of the other one, and hours before the truck was found in Big Bear.
“Moments later, Torrance Police Department officers responding to the gunfire…”

Not trying to justify anything AT ALL – outrage is definitely the correct response here – but getting the facts right is also helpful.