“We Will Always Win”

I sometimes forget how naive and uninformed most people are. Some recent chattering on CNN concerning the Christopher Dorner incident brought this back to my attention.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Christopher Dorner was an LAPD police officer who was fired in 2008. I won't go into a lot of details, you can get a high level overview here. Basically, he felt he was treated unfairly by the LAPD and decided to take revenge by killing some police officers and their families.

The point I want to focus on here is how the whole incident ended. Dorner was pinned down in a cabin near Big Bear CA, and was surrounded by legions of police. Eventually the cabin Dorner was in caught fire and was completely consumed. A charred corpse was recovered, and as of the time of this writing testing is underway to positively ID it.

Some “controversy” has erupted over whether the police intentionally burned down the cabin with Dorner in it. A couple audio tapes have emerged that clearly shows officers directly calling for the burning of the cabin. Quotes such as “Burn the fucking house down” and “Burners deployed and we have a fire” can be clearly heard. Such tapes were played on CNN.

Some people seem shocked and appalled that sworn police officers would do such a thing! I just have to shake my head...

I will let the words of a veteran SWAT cop sum up what is common knowledge among informed people:

When I was on SWAT our view is that "We will always win....even if we have to burn down your entire house by bombing it....we will win". Period.

I'm not saying that this is standard operating procedure in all departments everywhere, but it is a highly prevalent attitude among a large number of departments. I understand that the politicians in various departments don't like this information becoming common knowledge – but that doesn't make it less true.

It has always been my position that it is better to know and understand reality than to believe untrue things that may be comforting. I know that this puts me in a very small minority, but what "is" and what "ought" are sometimes two very different things.

OK – so what does this have to do with the type of stuff I normally write in this blog? The point is to simply understand that tactically, a flammable structure is not a defensible position. If you find yourself in the aftermath of a major hurricane or earthquake (or if the zombies rise), and you have to defend your house and/or neighborhood from gangs and/or looters, you need to have enough people to be able to secure a perimeter around any flammable structures. Otherwise, someone will find your charred corpse after the smoke clears.