“There was no excuse for them to barrage a truck with bullets without giving them warning and without it matching the description of Dorner's vehicle. And similarly, we need to ask questions about whether they started the fire [in the cabin] on purpose to take killing Dorner into their own hands before he could kill more police or reveal more information about his wrongful termination,” she says. Dorner maintained in an online manifesto that he had been wrongly terminated from his job as an LAPD officer in 2008.
The public is focused on satisfying its immediate demands for both transparency and accountability, says Donald Tibbs, professor at the Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University in Philadelphia. But police are focused on the process of investigation itself – which yields partial answers over a period of time that rarely coincides with the demands of press conferences. Beyond that, he says, “they have civil liability to think about. Anything they say could be used in a civil lawsuit that might be brought by the Dorner family, for instance."
The pressure to respond to questions during a criminal investigation has exploded in the Internet age, says former Los Angeles deputy sheriff and FBI agent Frank Scafidi.
“There is a growing population of less-than-professional journalists who, armed with smart phones and a blog, tend to stretch the definition of responsible reporting by catering to the immediacy of the digital age with snippets of information not fully vetted or even accurate,” he wrote in an e-mail. In turn, this cycle feeds the even-larger population of people who see conspiracies behind every government or law-enforcement activity, he says.
