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L.A. MANHUNT

Police Warn African-American Men to Cooperate in Search for Suspected L.A. Cop Killer

'If you're an African-American man, you could be stopped and questioned'

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by Lisa Fine

Staff Writer t

Image: Image: Buzzfeed

As the manhunt for suspected Los Angeles cop killer Christopher Dorner intensifies, a black police officers' group is warning African-American men about the increased risk of mistaken identity and 'suspect profiling,' Fox 5 San Diego reports.

The San Diego Black Police Officers Association has advised African-American men to cooperate with police.

"If you're an African-American man, you could be stopped and questioned," the group's president Sgt. Benjamin Kelso, told Fox 5. "There are many people that may look like Chris Dorner, myself included. If you are stopped and questioned, it's important to cooperate with officers."

The article said the group released a list of tips Monday for the community:


1). If you are stopped or confronted by officers, cooperate and follow instructions.


2). Do not escalate the situation by becoming argumentative, belligerent or non-compliant.


3). Once the situation has de-escalated, ask the officers for an explanation.


4). Be willing to listen to what the officer has to say. The consequences of failure to comply are high for everyone involved, citizens, and law enforcement officers included.

With a $1 million award now being offered in the search for Dorner, San Diego attorney Doug Oden told Fox 5 that more African-American men could be racially targeted by members of the public. "There may be people thinking, there's a large black man, it could be him, I could get paid, so I think that $1 million reward could be counterproductive," Oden said.

Via Fox 5 San Diego
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Comments (view in Forum)

  • Knightkore
    !
    This kind of lends to creedence to the ex-cop's claims of racism....I'm not too quick to call racism but these kinds of warnings are profiling....perhaps mistaking two women for a large man the other day got them to issue this warning but again....this....just doesn't sound good....so far nothing from the ex-cop lately....only some indiscriminate shots from LAPD and a racist sounding warning....at this rate public opinion isn't going to be on LAPD's side....haven't they learned?
  • u
    seedtick
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    Absolutely correct. But, I cannot believe that they would actually "stoop" to racial profiling. What does it mean if racial profiling is only allowed when the police are threatened? Don't the rest of us count?
  • Thegrif
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    @seedtick lol for crying old loud.
    If a old white guy with a flat top hair cut had killed a few people and let it be known he had a hit list. So the cops warn old white guys with flat tops to cooperate with law enforcement, then I should be insulted.
    It's not profiling, it is simply warning anyone with the same, most basic description (skin color), that LEO's may be lookin at them.
    Holy crap, thats the samething people do everyday, we profile. We say, that guy gives me the creeps, or that person is a bum, or those people are homeless, Well that is profiling. We have no facts to really know if someone is a bum, or creepy, or homeless.
    This over sensitive America needs to just get over it. Profiling is that gut feeling you get about a person, place or thing, it's natures security alarm and it saves lives, if it hurts someones feelings, well, to bad.
    We all do it, weather we admit it or not.
  • DARSB
    !
    @Thegrif "We all do it, weather we admit it or not."

    That's the worst spell of "whether" I've ever been through.:)

    (Sorry,@thegrif - that was irresistible.)
  • u
    seedtick
    !
    @Thegrif Hey I was being facetious...but, it does make one wonder why a warning like this comes out. Hell, we can't give Muslims the same warning at airports because that is profiling. What's the difference?
    If a man stops on the road in front of my house...I will profile him every way I can. How else do I access the situation?
  • View all 11 replies >
  • trytakemygun1
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    Lets cut to the chase here folks, it's Black, not African American. Please! Quit changing names every 30 years. You're Black. That's it! It's embarrassing already
  • View all 22 replies >
  • Neo_NtheMatrix
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    Christopher Dorner just so happens to be a black man. Of course the police are going to look for a black man. There's nothing racist there. When a suspect is a white man or an Asian man, guess what, police look for that type of person. I see nothing controversial here.

    As for the advice, it's something black men should already be doing. Why assume just because you were pulled over that it is some type of racist conspiracy? Since when do black people never commit crimes and are above being questioned? If black people didn't react with such hyperbole and being egged on by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton you'd probably still have someone like Trayvon Martin still here. Seems like this advice is just common sense.
  • Brownie
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    The first paragraph, I agree with. But, a black person or any person of color can't flick off a judge, curse out a cop, ride around naked and ect. and get away with it. Unlike some whites. With that said, blacks and people of color should know better to not be uncivil with authority. But, hell it is L.A.
  • Rightwing
    !
    Stop race baiting, not ok to show your pillow case color,this thread has nothing to do with jesse/al its about a military veteran that help protect numbnuts like yourself so you can fly around this great country of ours without blowing up are crashing into buildings ! Dorner could be suffering from PSD,unlike the killers in CO,AZ,and newtown that were given insanity passes for their conditions,which they neither served in any combat zones other than the ones they created,yet due to the color of their skin !
  • o
    SomethinsFishy
    !
    Don't forget they riddled the vehicle those two (2) poor HISPANIC WOMEN were riding in even though they weren't African-American, nor male, and the vehicle there were in did not fit the BOLO's description. These folks have a problem. Why is it they DON'T have to make these kinds of announcements when they are looking for WHITE suspects? Think about it.
  • o
    OhWiseOne
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    @Brownie Not true. I've personally seen a black guy spit at a judge and he was charged with contempt of court. Miraculously, it was dropped and he didn't even have to apologize.
  • Neo_NtheMatrix
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    @Rightwing - Race baiting? Pillow cases? What in the world? I'm just giving my opinion on Sgt. Benjamin Kelso's advice to young black males. In addition to giving my opinion I also stated that I didn't think what he said was controversial. I'm not understanding your overreaction. This is the type of thing that gets young black men killed. Stay calm, answer the questions authority asks, and don't jump to conclusions. The advice that Sgt. Benjamin Kelso gave could save a lot of lives. Think!
  • View all 15 replies >
  • u
    fistv
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    A very tough situation, when I first saw the picture my first thought was 'What's LL Cool J from NCIS LA doing on there'. I'm hoping he turns himself in and does not either commit suicide or get suicided by cop. Either way it's a sad state when a Naval Officer does something like this. He should have taken that entire firing thing into civil court.
  • jessejaymes
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    He's a former cop. He knows that should he turn himself in he will be killed in jail. By cops. He will not turn himself in. He will die by the gun. One way or the other.
  • Tralee
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    White men don't tend to be overly sensitive to any police action and they also don't tend to over react to a routine traffic stop or routine stop of someone who looks like a wanted criminal. Unfortunately, young black men in particular, have a culture of suspicion regarding the police. This has been perpetuated by the likes of Al Sharpton and others who blame the police,ot the criminal, for an arrest. If the police are looking for a black male, of a certain height, age and weight, then they have every right to stop and question a man of that description, especially in light of the fact that this guy is very clear that he's not done yet.
  • PoliticalSpice
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    @Tralee I'd say over reaction to police harassment is exactly what is needed. If they used their second amendment rights more often maybe police departments would start being more respectful and less abusive to them...
  • jessejaymes
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    And so it starts. I can see this as the beginning of racial war like this country has never seen. There is absolutely no rational denial that the majority of urban young black men were raised in the rap culture and are not inclined to respect any kind of authority. You can argue cause and effect, justifiable or otherwise but that is a reality. But they do fear the police despite their bravado and they despise the "po po's". To your average young black male, mobbed up 6 in a car with cheech and chong type pot cloud emanating from the car and rap thumping at 120 decibels is not doing anything wrong. When it gets them stopped by the police and three have warrants (because they didn't have the money to pay for the last pot bust) and are sagging pants and wearing gang attire, the police search the car, find the drugs, might find a gun, the car is illegal as illegal gets without tags or insurance, then it escalates. We have long since passed the point of rational discourse between the police and urban young black men.

    The fact that the hunted man is a former police officer means little to these street wanna be's. Or to your average blue collar black working man. They have been, by their view, harassed by the police their entire lives. What they are glorifying is that a black man stood up to the racist police and he shot some. That's a good thing to them. The fact that the police have been unable to date to get the guy is the stuff of urban folklore. It's straight out of the fantasy of thug rap. What every wanna be dreams he could be.

    This is going to have ramifications far beyond the hunted man himself. It is going to embolden street gangs, it is going to embolden cops. The LAPD is a racist organization to my view and I am white. Over the years it's been documented that gangs of police by race exist within the department and they have little use for other cops of other races. But they pull together to fight anyone who fights them.

    There is no good ending going to come of all this and it could easily become more of an impact than the L.A. riots.
  • Knightkore
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    Ah you're starting to see it too....like I said I really dislike when people throw out the race card....more often than not it is not relevant but in this instance....an circumstances with the ex-cops claims....this warning and profiling feeds into the whole racial stigma that LAPD already has....
  • jessejaymes
    !
    @Knightmare there is no solution here. If you live in L.A. you'd know what I mean. For decades the police brutalized blacks and illegals. After the Watts riots the liberals said they'd make things better and to this day you can drive through Watts and see the burnt out buildings from those days. Then came the Reagan amnesty. Latinos FLOODED Los Angeles and their gang's superiority in numbers pushed back on the black gangs and Latinos took over traditional black areas squeezing black tighter and tighter. Even notorious Compton is now majority Latino. Then came the Rodney King thing and that joke of a verdict and the cauldron bubbled over again and again the Liberals said they would make things better for blacks and again they didn't. Long Beach California moved 50,000 Cambodians in and dumped them right in the middle of a black area. You know how well that has gone over. Now we have Cambodian gangs, Latino gangs and Black gangs all fighting within a few square mile area. And the cops can't control it. Not enough of them, too restricted by "civil rights' liberals (a Long Beach Latina Councilwoman actually went ballistic over ICE coming in and taking out about 100 wanted felony criminals in the Latino community. Her bitch? She wasn't notified in advance so she could "alert" her constituents to lock down against the raids.) The cops, in some respects due to necessity, have become gangs of their own. No matter what they do they are wrong. Right wingers blame them for every single minority crime not being prevented and left wingers blame them for every single time they try to prevent a crime. So they've become a rogue organization. They have no allies for the most part in urban L.A.. There is simply put, no solution. We will see major race wars in large urban areas in our lifetime.
  • harold_lloyd
    !
    Translated from bureaucratese, it goes like this," The LAPD officers are scared half to death, and they may open fire on anyone at any time, randomly."
  • Tralee
    !
    It was a good idea to try to tamp down on the cries of racism this man is throwing out, I understand that his face book page is getting more and more "likes" by the day. Seems some relate to this man despite the fact that he is a stone cold killer. He's killed innocent people in his quest of fame and his "Fifteen Minutes" and in his rambling he blames racism for his actions. Really? Too many uninformed and ill informed young black men will see any attempt to catch him as just more picking on the "Black Man" while skipping over the little fact that he's a killer, has killed for no reason other than he feels "bad". I hope it works.
  • jessejaymes
    !
    Honestly I don't think the man himself has as much to do with the "response" by the urban world as it does the frustration of the inner cities. When you have no skills, have no money to go to college, no clothes to interview and you realize that "being cool" in school is actually working against you as an adult then the frustration sits in. You adapt to the ghetto yet everything you do the cops don't like. People are telling you to act like the middle class suburbs act but you can't because you have no ability to act like that even if you want. You either adapt to your surroundings or you die. With frustration comes fear, followed by hatred (the cops hate you why shouldn't you hate them?) and finally you have the reality that everyone wants to belong somewhere. So the street wins. The "enemy" is the cops for most of urban area big city just as the Taliban is for our troops in Afghanistan. In the end what you have is celebrations of any minor "victory" over the cops because you have nothing else to celebrate.
  • Tralee
    !
    @jessejaymes So we just sit back and let them act out? That's not a solution. I understand the background, but letting them have this crutch is just not going to help at all. Sure, they have it rough, so do a lot of white kids. Life's a beach and all, but why do so many others rise above it? Look at that Dr. that put down Obama, Ben Carson, he and his brother both rose above "Growing up in a single parent home with dire poverty, poor grades, a horrible temper, and low self-esteem appeared to preclude the realization of that dream until his mother, with only a third-grade education, challenged her sons to strive for excellence." We all know what he became and all his success and his brother achieved extraordinary success of his own. Maybe rather than giving them an excuse, we should challenge them to higher expectations.
  • jessejaymes
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    @Tralee then stop welfare, institute workfare, reward people for doing the right thing instead of only punishing them for doing the wrong thing.
  • Tralee
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    @jessejaymes That absolutely works for me, I have been saying that no one should receive any welfare without doing something, anything for it.
  • u
    Yank
    !
    If you are a black man you may be stopped and searched, if you are an old Latino women you will be shot on sight.
  • o
    OhWiseOne
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    For anyone on here who says that white men never get profiled may I remind you of the DC sniper shootings where white males driving white vans were stopped at gunpoint. And the shooters ended up being black. Just a friendly reminder.
  • Thegrif
    !
    Look, cops are people too, are they perhaps a little edgie right now? Probably.
    Besides that it is never a good idea to disrespect LEO's, right now is really a bad time to do so.
    If a LEO feels his safety or life is being threatened, deadly force is warranted.
    This warning is just trying to let others know to keep themselves in check.
    Which is good advice anytime.
  • Thegrif
    !
    @Knightmare everyone does not fit the most basic description.
    But okay,
    Show LEO's common and simple respect, everyone.
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