I'm Conflicted about Christopher Dorner

Basically, I'm inclined to believe his accusations about his firing, you are rarely going to go wrong by overestimating the venality and corruption of the Los Angeles police force^*, but his victims were innocent, and at best only vaguely rated related to the specifics of his complaint, and he was f%$#ing murdering people.

I will leave you with the conclusion of Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don't really know how anyone, with any sort of coherence, adopts Christopher Dorner as a symbol in the fight against police brutality, given how he brutalized those two human beings. I cannot understand, except to say that sometimes our own anger, our pain, becomes so blinding that we fail to see the pain of others. This is the seed of inhumanity, and inhumanity is the seed of the very police brutality which we all deplore.

In my time here I have blogged relentlessly about police brutality. It's an important and legit issue. When cops brutalize innocent black people, they erode the contract between citizen and country. But the case against police brutality enjoys more eloquent, and more moral, voices than a coward who ambushes innocent people in a parking garage. We don't need a Jesse James. No one needs a Jesse James.

I'm still hoping that there will be an independent investigation of the circumstances of his firing though.

If there is any truth to his accusations, it is an indication of deep and systematic problems with the LAPD.

^*The LAPD of Jack Webb never really existed.