Officer Safety Uber Alles: Christopher Dorner and the "Rickoverian Paradox"

The intrepid Captain Phillip Tingirides of the Los Angeles Police Department has come down with a sudden case of “Blue Flu.” This is an oddly selective malady, one that only afflicts police officers. “Sick-outs” are a common police union tactic in contract disputes with municipal governments. In this case, the epidemic appears to be contained in the Tigirides household, where the bold and valiant captain is cowering in fear of his former comrade, Christopher Dorner.

“This month, it will be 33 years on the Los Angeles Police Department,” Tingirides told the Orange County Register. “I have had a number of threats and very rarely do I take them seriously. In this case … I’m taking it very seriously…. I recognize I am susceptible to his violence.”

Little in Tingirides’s official bio would suggest that danger has been his constant companion. Early in his career he patrolled such grim and forbidding territories as Wilshire and Hollywood before being promoted to such assignments as Prostitution Enforcement Detail, Community Relations, and the Vice Unit. 

His career has been devoid of measurable peril, even by the standards of law enforcement – which is one of the least risk-laden occupations in contemporary life. This helps explain why Tingirides has been hiding out in his home, surrounded by a phalanx of timid and trigger-happy police bodyguards who are entirely willing to open fire on innocent people if they come within eyeshot. 

“I haven’t been able for the last few days to go outside my house,” whined Tingirides to the Register. “Am I afraid? Well, I hesitate to use that word – but I saw what he did to his attorney.” The attorney to whom he referred was Randy Quan, who represented Dorner during the 2008 disciplinary hearings that resulted in Dorner’s dismissal from the LAPD for supposedly lying about abusive conduct by another officer. Lying about a Mundane is part of a police officer’s job description; lying about a fellow officer is simply impermissible.

Dorner is believed to be the assailant who shot Quan’s 28-year-old daughter, Monica. That young woman was apparently killed for the same reason the Obama Regime murdered 16-year-old Abdel al-Awalki: Someone habituated to criminal violence decided that the child was guilty of having an irresponsible parent. 

Tingirides was chairman of the three-officer “board of rights” that upheld the decision to terminate Dorner’s employment, and the stalwart captain was mentioned by name in the vengeful ex-cop’s online “manifesto.” 

 Back in August 2011, Captain Tingirides was interviewed on the beach near Torrance to promote a youth “Surf Camp” program. Despite the fact that he had grown up within easy distance of the shore, that interview represented the first time he had ever attempted to surf. 

The time devoted by Captain Tingirides to producing that PR spot for the LAPD constituted the most danger-intensive hour of his career. Surfing is a far riskier activity than working as a law enforcement officer. The risks are particularly acute for surfers who have the misfortune of encountering police, as David Perdue can testify.

Last Thursday, as the LAPD’s institutional panic escalated, Perdue visited a beach near the site of Tingirides’s 2011 press stunt to enjoy some early morning surfing. He happened to be driving a pickup truck that resembled the vehicle being driven by Dorner. Two officers flagged Perdue down, determined that he wasn’t the suspect, and then let him go. Scant seconds later, two other officers rammed their vehicle into Perdue’s truck and opened fire.

It was Perdue’s immense good fortune that the assailants were police officers – which means that their marksmanship was poor enough to make the typical Imperial Stormtrooper from Star Wars look like William Tell. Although he wasn’t shot, Perdue suffered a concussion and a shoulder injury.

Robert Sheahen, Perdue’s attorney, described the episode as one of “unbridled police lawlessness.” The Department offered Perdue the same perfunctory apology it had issued to two women who were shot at by another security detail guarding the home of another LAPD luminary. The LAPD has thus established itself as a greater threat to public safety than the “rogue” cop they are pursuing: While Dorner’s alleged crime spree targeted a narrow cohort – police officials and their families -- the police have engaged in indiscriminate violence against innocent citizens.

The manhunt for Dorner has involved the deployment of thousands of police personnel and the use of unmanned aerial drones. It will cost tax victims in Los Angeles and elsewhere millions of dollars in overtime. This means that the police involved in the pursuit – who are already trained to be risk-aversive – will have a financial incentive to prolong the exercise as long as possible. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the police, who are preoccupied with the sacred imperative of “officer safety,” have turned to the public for help in solving the crime.

LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has offered a $1 million reward – provided by private interests; all the available public money will probably be devoured by police overtime -- for information leading to the arrest and capture of Dorner.

“We will not tolerate anyone undermining the security of this community,” mewled Villaraigosa. “We will not tolerate this reign of terror.” LAPD Chief Charlie Beck also characterized Dorner’s shooting rampage, as “domestic terrorism.”

Who, exactly, is being “terrorized”? The productive public at large has been going about its business without facing any discernible risks from Dorner, whose only identified would-be victims are either police officers or their families (who have done nothing to injure anybody, of course).

The only way that private citizens could collect the reward for Dorner’s capture would be for them to take risks that police aren’t willing to run. For example: A citizen or privately employed security guard wouldn’t be able to ram an unidentified truck and open fire on its driver, or spray gunfire in a residential neighborhood, without facing criminal charges.

In the official reaction to Dorner’s rampage, we see an unusually candid manifestation of the “Officer Safety Uber Alles” mentality that defines police work. From their perspective, the population exists to protect and serve the police, rather than the reverse. This brings to mind the concept of Rickover’s Paradox, which I encountered in a science fiction novel decades ago. According to author Vonda McIntyre, the scenario was used to test the moral attitudes of officer candidates at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The most famous version of this conundrum is the following:

Two individuals, the only survivors of a tragic shipwreck, are adrift in a small, damaged lifeboat. The water is pitilessly cold and infested with ravenous sharks. The boat itself is irreparably damaged in such a way that it will only be able to carry one of its occupants. If nothing is done, both occupants will perish. But whichever is cast into the sea will die very quickly.

One of those aboard the stricken lifeboat is a highly trained officer with valuable – perhaps irreplaceable – technical skills. A huge sum has been spent on his training, which makes him all but irreplaceable.

The other refugee is an innocent and law-abiding person of no particular achievements or aptitudes. Few if any would notice that person's absence, and the community at large would be impoverished in no discernible way if he were thrown overboard.

Since only one can be saved, which of the two should it be?

The only morally sound answer to this predicament –assuming that the military is actually the institution it pretends to be – would be for the officer to sacrifice himself on behalf of the civilian. This isn’t because there is a natural duty on the part of any individual to sacrifice himself for another, but rather because the officer had freely chosen that duty, and refusing to carry it out would invalidate the entire stated purpose of having a military establishment in the first place. Any other course of action would be based on the assumption that the civilian population exists to defend the military, rather than the reverse.

Although this parable is supposed to instill an attitude of chivalry on the part of military officers,  it actually underscores the uselessness of the state as a protective institution, because human beings are not wired to sacrifice themselves on behalf of strangers – and the state is structured in such a way that those who work on its behalf always place individual and institutional self-preservation above every other consideration.

This is why tax-subsidized cowards like Phillip Tingirides are cowering behind both their tax-funded bodyguards and the public the police supposedly serves, while someone who was once a part of the state’s punitive priesthood carries out a mission of revenge against his erstwhile comrades in officially sanctioned violence and plunder

If the police are reduced to puddles of panic at the thought of dealing with one of their own, why should the public trust them – or countenance their institutional existence at all? 

If you can, please help keep Pro Libertate on-line. My family and I are immensely grateful for any and all help you can provide. Thank you, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

"Gun Violence": The "National Conversation" We Won't Have

Victim of state-inflicted gun violence: Jose Guerena, Jr. after seeing the dead body of his father.

 
Gabrielle Giffords, the “surprise witness” at the January 30 Senate hearing on gun violence, was among thirteen people attacked by a deranged gunman in the parking lot of a Safeway in Tucson two years ago. Vanessa Guerena, another Tucson resident whose husband was murdered in an act of gun-related criminal violence in their living room about four months later, was not given an opportunity to address the Senate panel. That’s because her husband’s killers – who remain at large – committed that crime under the color of state “authority.”

Guerena, a former Marine and Iraq combat veteran, was gunned down by a Pima County SWAT team who committed an illegal home invasion on the basis of a spurious search warrant. When the invaders arrived, Jose was asleep after finishing a graveyard shift at a local copper mine. It’s difficult to believe that the 26-year-old father of two would be working the graveyard shift if he had been at the center of a large marijuana smuggling operation, as the Pima County Sheriff’s Office later claimed on the basis of unalloyed speculation. 

The Sheriff’s Office was aware of Jose’s work schedule, because they had kept his home under surveillance for several weeks before the raid. If an arrest had been justified, it could have been carried out, using conventional means, at practically any time. In fact, the Sheriff’s Office conducted a conventional, low-profile arrest of three of his relatives. The suspects – two small women and a man well into middle age – were taken into custody by plainclothes detectives without a SWAT team laying siege to their homes. But this occurred nearly a year after the fatal SWAT assault on Guerena’s home. 

The Sheriff’s Office never explained why a SWAT raid was supposedly necessary in order to carry out searches that didn’t result in arrests until nearly a year later. The unspoken but obvious answer was that the raid wasn’t necessary – but it seemed like a fun and relatively low-risk outing for the armored adolescents that compose the local SWAT team. Their attitude as they approached the Guerena home doesn’t suggest that they were genuinely concerned about the possibility of danger. The officers were cheerful and light-hearted as they were decanted from their armored vehicle to inflict terror on an innocent family. 

After being shaken awake by his terrified wife, Jose grabbed a legally acquired AR-15 rifle and told his wife and their four-year-old son, Jose, Jr.,  to hide in a closet while he confronted the unidentified intruders. 

Within seconds of forcing their way into the home, the raiders -- who were armed with high-capacity “assault weapons” of the kind that would be banned for civilian use if Obama, Biden, Feinstein and their ilk prevail – had flung 71 rounds at Guerena. In keeping with established custom, the uniformed murderers lied by claiming that their victim had fired the first shot after growling a cinematic imprecation at the SWAT team.  It was later established that Jose didn’t even disengage the safety on his rifle.  He was hit with twenty-two rounds. 



During the assault, Vanessa called 911. Paramedics arrived on the scene in minutes. The SWAT team turned them away. According to the coroner’s report, the injuries Jose sustained were not fatal – if he had received immediate medical attention. There was at least one combat medic in the SWAT team that attacked the Guerena home. He was morally and legally required to provide aid. Doing so, however, might have posed an immeasurably small risk to that most precious of things, “officer safety” – so the team simply waited for Jose to die. 

One of the raiders expressed dissatisfaction with that decision -- but because he wanted to “finish” what they had started by cleanly killing off their victim, rather than doing whatever was necessary to save his life.

Vanessa pleads for someone to help her husband.

When a tearful and horrified Vanessa emerged from the home to plead for someone to help her husband, she was assaulted and dragged away to be interrogated without the benefit of legal counsel. Her abductors maintained the pretense that her husband was alive and getting medical assistance. After a lengthy interval, four-year-old Joel wandered out of the house. He most likely has vivid memories of seeing his father’s bloody and lifeless body on their living room floor.

Jose was a peripheral figure in the narcotics investigation. The marauders who attacked the Guerena family’s home did not know what they were looking for, and found no evidence that Jose was involved in criminal activity. They most likely wanted to blackmail him into becoming an undercover asset. 

"Mom, was my dad a bad guy?" six-year-old Joel tearfully asked his newly widowed mother after the child -- who was at school during the shooting -- had absorbed the full horror of what had happened. "They killed my dad! Police killed my dad! Why? What did my dad do?" 

Vanessa assaulted by Pima County SWAT Team.

Vanessa should have been offered the opportunity to tell that story before the Senate panel – and in front of the national audience commanded by the January 30 hearing. Jose, Jr., who is now six years old, might also have been able to testify. But this wouldn’t have been compatible with the purpose of the event, which was to advance a “conversation” intended to promote the disarmament of the public, with the ultimate objective of creating a government monopoly on the use of force. That disarmament program would be carried out by, among others, the state-licensed assassins who murdered Jose Guerena. 

Among those who were invited to testify before the Senate panel was Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson, who insisted that “we are long overdue” in enacting federal measures intended to prevent citizens from owning what he described as “firepower originally designed for combat.”

For us, but not for you: Chief Johnson with ammo magazines.

“Like assault weapons, high-capacity magazines are not used for hunting, and they do not belong in our homes,” proclaimed Chief Johnson. He urged the Senate to “stand with law enforcement on these common-sense public safety measures” – by which he means not a “ban” on those weapons and high-capacity magazines, but rather policies that would deny the public legal parity of weaponry with state-licensed home invaders like those who murdered Jose Guerena. 

According Johnson’s biography, he began his law enforcement career “as a police cadet at the age of 18” and has been employed with the Baltimore County Police Department for more than 30 years. In addition to documenting that Johnson has never held an honest job in the productive sector, that bio implicates the Chief in the January 2005 murder of 51-year-old Cheryl Lynn Noel.

During a traffic stop the previous October, Mrs. Noel’s 18-year-old son Matthew was found in possession of a plastic bag containing an unidentified “white dust.” A warrantless search of the trash outside the Noel family’s home yielded what the police described as “trace amounts” of drugs – that is, marijuana seeds -- and drug “paraphernalia.” It was at that point the police applied for a “no-knock” search warrant of the family’s home.

Although her husband had a thirty-year-old conviction for second-degree murder, Cheryl Lynn – who held Bible studies in the home -- had no criminal record. However, both she and her son Jacob owned legally registered firearms. That fact was listed among the details cited to justify a “no-knock” SWAT raid to arrest her younger son Matthew on a narcotics charge. Of course, the police didn’t explain why it was “necessary” to stage a pre-dawn home invasion, as opposed to conducting a conventional arrest. 

What Cheryl Lynn saw: Baltimore County SWAT operators.

At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of January 21, Cheryl Lynn and her husband were startled awake by the concussion of a flash-bang grenade and the sound of a battering ram being used to force open the front door. 

Mrs. Noel reached for her handgun and pointed it at the bedroom door, which was forced open by a figure in battle fatigues, whose face was covered with the visor of a black ballistic helmet, and who carried a large ballistic shield. 

Before Cheryl Lynn could fire a shot in her own defense, the intruder – Officer Carlos Artson – fired two shots into her upper torso. Cheryl's grasp on her handgun slackened – not surprisingly, since she most likely was already dead. Artson continued his approach, yelling at Cheryl to move further away from the gun. When the victim couldn’t comply, Artson shot her a third time, administering the coup de grace from point-blank range.

It’s important to point out that Matthew, who was the subject of the raid, was sleeping downstairs at the time. Even if the raid was justified – which, of course, it wasn’t – there was no need for the officers to barge into the upstairs master bedroom in order to carry out an arrest.

Charles Noel filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore County Police Department. Acting out of tribal reflex, then-Chief Terrence Sheridan responded by awarding Cheryl Lynn’s murderer the Silver Star, the department’s second-highest award for valor. The citation claims that Artson “saved himself and his fellow officers from being shot” after being “confronted by a woman pointing a loaded handgun at him, during the service of a high risk, `no knock' search warrant for an ongoing narcotics investigation.”

Artson was “confronted” by Mrs. Noel in exactly the same sense that any armed robber could make that claim. Of course that comparison is unfair: Armed robbers don't give each other puerile little baubles to celebrate their “valor.” 


At the time of the fatal home invasion that resulted in the murder of Cheryl Lynn Noel, then-Colonel Johnson supervised the department’s tactical unit. This means that he had “command responsibility” for the SWAT team’s actions. In June 2007, Johnson was chosen to replace Sheridan as Police Chief when the latter was appointed head of the Maryland State Police. I’m cynical enough to believe that Johnson’s promotion, like the “valor” award presented to Artson, was intended – at least in part – as a defiant gesture of contempt toward those who had condemned the murder of Mrs. Noel.

The Noel family lost their case, and Artson remains at large. Last July, in a incident that was eerily similar to the murder of Cheryl Lynn Noel, Artson murdered Ronald Cox in the course of a paramilitary raid to arrest suspects in an attempted murder case. Like Mrs. Noel, Mr. Cox, the owner of the home invaded by the police, was not a criminal suspect. Like Mrs. Noel, he was armed when he encountered the police in his upstairs bedroom. However, he didn’t have a gun; he had what was described as a “large sword.” The police report complained that Cox had “damaged” Artson’s ballistic shield. 

Apparently, summary execution is appropriate punishment for Mundanes who impudently disfigure government property in that fashion.

According to Clarence Dupnik – the craven, dim-witted functionary who presides over the Pima County Sheriff’s Office – about fifty SWAT raids of the kind that led to the murder of Jose Guerena occur within his jurisdiction every year, which is shocking. In Baltimore County, Chief Johnson’s Einsatzgruppen conduct more than 120 attacks of that kind annually, which are among the 1,600 military assaults carried out in Maryland each year, a figure that is genuinely horrifying. Gun-related violence by government-licensed killers is ubiquitous – and it is also a forbidden subject in the “national conversation” our rulers have orchestrated for their benefit. 

(Note: This version was edited slightly edited by removing a reference to Guerea's legally acquired rifle being "properly registered.")

 Once again, thank you for your continued support to help keep Pro Libertate on-line. We honestly couldn't make it without your help. God bless!

 Dum spiro, pugno!