Local residents say that after that shooting, which involved seven LAPD officers and over 70 bullets, with nobody returning fire, the street and surrounding houses were pockmarked with bullet holes. The Los Angeles Times reports that in the area, there are "bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs."
Roofs?
What we had here was an example of a controversial tactic that the military employed in the Iraq War, and still employs in Afghanistan, called "spray and pray" -- a tactic that led directly to the massive civilian casualties during that US war.
We shouldn't be surprised that two brown-skinned women were almost mowed down by the LAPD--only that they somehow survived all that deadly firing directed at them with clear intent to kill.
The approach taken by those cop-hunting-cops of shooting first and asking questions later suggests that the LAPD in this "manhunt" for one of their own has no intention of capturing Dorner alive and letting him talk about what he knows about the evils rampant in the 10,000-member department. They want him dead.
When I lived in Los Angeles back in the 1970s, it was common for LAPD cops to bust into homes, gestapo-like, at 5 in the morning, guns out, to arrest people for minor things like outstanding court warrants for unpaid parking tickets, bald tires, or jaywalking.
Police helicopters also used to tail me -- then an editor of an alternative news weekly -- and my wife, a music graduate student, as we drove home at night. Sometimes, they would follow us from our car to front door with a brilliant spotlight, when we'd come home at night to our house in Echo Park. It was an act of deliberate intimidation. (They also infiltrated our newspaper with an undercover cop posing as a wannabe journalist. Her job, we later learned, was to learn who our sources were inside the LAPD -- sources who had disclosed such things as that the LAPD had, and probably still has, a "shoot-to-kill" policy for police who fire their weapons.)
Friends in Los Angeles tell me nothing has changed, though of course the police weaponry has gotten heavier and their surveillance capabilities have gotten more sophisticated and invasive.
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