“As I thought about this, if it was not our department involved in this event, we would be watching this event on TV, looking at what they were doing and asking ourselves, 'If this occurred in our county, would we be prepared to deal with it, and how would we deal with it?' So this is a learning event for law enforcement across the country. This is a very significant event.”
–San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon, in his first extended interview since the Big Bear firefight that took the lives of one of his detectives and former Orange County resident Christopher Jordan Dorner.
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McMahon has withstood criticism for the fiery way it all ended for Dorner, an ex-LAPD officer and former La Palma resident suspected also of killing an Irvine couple and a Riverside cop and terrorizing Southern California for several days last month. In his exclusive interview with the San Bernardino Sun, the sheriff seems to hint that the operation could have been handled better.
“Hopefully, this type of event doesn't occur again, or, if it does, it's a long time from now,” McMahon is quoted as saying. “But clearly, everybody can learn something from an event like this, and I believe we'll learn some things from this event. Not that we did anything wrong, but maybe there's something we could have done better, and, when you experience an event like this, it's always an opportunity to learn.”
Only sworn in as sheriff two months before the deadly Feb. 12 standoff, McMahon says in his talk with reporter John Nelson, “This type of an event is
tragic, and no law enforcement leader ever wants to be in that position–where you lose an officer and one gets seriously injured in a gun
battle. It's tragic. It's terrible and I hope I'm never
in that position again.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.