Jonathan Alcorn/Getty Images
The funeral procession on Wednesday for Officer Michael Crain in Riverside, Calif., one of two police officers Christopher J. Dorner is suspected of shooting last week. The other officer survived.
LOS ANGELES — Christopher J. Dorner had a long list of grievances and potential victims, most of them police officers he had once worked with, and he was already suspected of killing the daughter of a retired police official and her fiancé. So law enforcement officials moved rapidly to protect their own, removing officers from the streets and setting up the largest security detail in any city in recent history.
"I've not seen anything like this in my time anywhere," said William J. Bratton, a former police chief in Los Angeles and former police commissioner in New York. "The threats being made against families, the actual commission of murder, that is a line that is not crossed in America. The department had to create a plan of historic proportions."
Some 50 police department officials each had as many as eight plainclothes officers assigned to protect them and their families by patrolling their neighborhoods — an unprecedented level of protection for such a large group of officers. The focus meant that hundreds of officers were taken off regular duties, leaving some nonemergency calls to go unanswered. And the presence of plainclothes officers transformed life in dozens of suburban neighborhoods, as the police stood guard on porches with shotguns and used dogs to sniff for bombs in backyards.
Most of the officers stayed off the street, forgoing their normal work to protect themselves. Some had their children stay home from school, and several went out of state.
In all, as many as 500 officers — roughly 5 percent of the entire Los Angeles Police Department — spent the last week focusing on protecting one another from Mr. Dorner, a former police officer and Navy reservist. Law enforcement officials said Wednesday that they believed that Mr. Dorner died the day before as he barricaded himself in a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains.
"We believe the investigation is over at this point," Sheriff John McMahon of San Bernardino County said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Still, more than a dozen officers will remain under protection until the body is officially identified, a process that could take days, perhaps weeks.
"We don't just stop a murder case simply because we think the suspect in that case is no longer with us," Lt. Andy Neiman of the Los Angeles police said Wednesday.
Los Angeles officials would not comment on the details of the security force, for fear that it would compromise security. But interviews with several police officers, neighbors and crime experts suggest the vast scale of the undertaking and how seriously the city took the threats from Mr. Dorner, who was believed to be heavily armed.
Mr. Dorner's training and knowledge made the search even more complex, officials said. The police believe that Mr. Dorner, who was fired from the force in 2008, not only was listening to news media reports, but also would have known the right frequencies on the police radio.
Patrol officers were pulled from regular duties like securing murder scenes, or from simply monitoring their regular areas, to provide extra officers for the security detail. In several cases, plainclothes officers were sent to crime scenes to protect the area because detectives in uniform feared being targets. The police believed that their marked cars would be targets themselves; Mr. Dorner is accused of shooting two Riverside police officers who were sitting at a red light last Thursday, as he continued to elude the authorities. One of the officers was killed, the other wounded.
Hundreds of officers were put on overtime as they were asked to cover extra shifts. Officials say it is too early to measure the costs of the security precautions, but Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa estimated it would be around $2 million.
"I told the chief to spare no expense," Mr. Villaraigosa said in an interview Wednesday. Over the last week, the mayor spoke to nearly all of the officers who were under protection, and he said many of them felt "terrorized by this individual."
Jennifer Medina reported from Los Angeles; Ian Lovett from Big Bear Lake, Calif.; and Fernanda Santos from Angelus Oaks, Calif. Erica Goode contributed reporting from Washington; Rebecca Fairley Raney from Riverside, Calif.; and Kitty Bennett from Tampa, Fla.
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