Abstract

In February 2013, ex-LAPD officer Christopher Dorner went on a violent rampage against his former colleagues, a killing spree and manhunt that consumed the attention of Southern California for more than a week. For the students in my “Introduction to Criminal Justice Research, Writing, and Reasoning” course at California State University, Long Beach, the Dorner affair was their first real opportunity to apply the theories of criminology and criminal justice they were learning about in our classroom to an event that was happening right outside our door. This event was no less of a discovery for me, a discovery of the applicability of a very different kind of knowledge. My Ph.D. is in English. My dissertation was about Shakespeare. What was a Shakespeare scholar doing teaching criminal justice classes? I was asking myself the same thing, but it was a time when jobs in English departments were hard to come by, and it turned into a powerful example of “academic drift.” This chapter takes a look back at the week that started this project, the week of Christopher Dorner.

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