Christopher Dorner is not John Rambo. Sure, the parallels are evident: a disgraced ex-military man, spurned and pursued by local authorities, flees into the wilderness, where he waits for an opportunity to exact his revenge. But Stallone’s Rambo is a fictional hero, and between Dorner’s murderous tactics and the Los Angeles Police Department’s utter lack of restraint, there are no heroes in this story.

If you’re not up to speed with what will surely be 2013’s wildest news story, Dorner, five years after being dismissed from the LAPD, began his vengeful killing spree Feb. 3 with the murder of engaged couple Keith Lawrence and Monica Quan. Quan was the daughter of Randal Quan, an LAPD captain who represented Dorner’s failed appeal for reinstatement to the Board of Rights. The murders were part of Dorner’s plan to seek vengeance on members of the LAPD who, he alleged in an 11,000 word manifesto posted to Facebook, had wronged him during the trial that ended his career.
Wanted in connection with the murder of Quan and Lawrence, Dorner fled to the mountains of San Bernardino County, where he was cornered and killed last Tuesday by one of the largest manhunts in California history.

Over the course of this 10-day debacle, the LAPD fired at three unarmed civilians (wounding two) without confirming their identities. Then, after surrounding Dorner in the California wilderness, they chose to burn the cabin that he had taken refuge in by firing pyrotechnic tear gas canisters into it.
Police audio from the incident tells the story best. Quotes from broadcast from police scanners include: “Burn it down,” “F*cking burn this motherf*cker,” “We’re gonna go forward with the plan, with the burn. . . like we talked about.”
The local fire department, on scene by this point, was not allowed to extinguish the blaze. As the fire burned, a single shot rang out, followed by the explosion of Dorner’s ammunition stockpiles.
At best, this information suggests that the police hoped to flush Dorner out of the structure by torching it around him. At worst… they sought to burn him alive. In his manifesto, Dorner detailed how the LAPD had wronged him. He recounted an incident during his career in which another officer had kicked a helpless suspect. Dorner believed that his fellow officers were violent and irresponsible in their use of force, so he filed a complaint to his superiors. The accused officer was acquitted. Dorner was fired.
I’m not “on Dorner’s side,” so to speak. I think he’s a bad person, and I don’t think any of the four people he killed deserved to die. However, if Dorner’s goal was to show that the LAPD was a corrupt system that treds on the rights of those it swears to protect, then I think he made his point clear.
If we’re going to compare the parties in this story to a Stallone movie, I think Dorner has less in common with Rambo than the LAPD does with Judge Dredd. Dorner was a bad man, but the role of our nation’s police is to apprehend bad men, not judge and execute them.