As fear courses through San Bernardino, police chief cautions against paralysis
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Version 0 of 1. SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Jarrod Burguan says, “Mind if I sit back here?” and slips into a corner seat that lets him keep an eye on the door and everything else coming and going at the sandwich shop — a veteran cop move that, he says, annoys his wife but is a habit he has had his entire professional life. A lot of people around here are watching doors, eyeballing strangers, feeling jumpy as they eat in what the anti-terrorism authorities would refer to as a soft target. But Burguan, the police chief of San Bernardino, is not a nervous man, or certainly has not shown it. What has distinguished him in the two weeks since a terrorist attack here has been his steady demeanor. Burguan has a message: Don’t live in fear. Be aware but not afraid. He will tell you that there are people who act violently for a variety of reasons — because of mental illness, a workplace grudge, a fanatical ideology or simply because they’re evil. “People have to realize that that’s part of the world that we live in,” he said. “You gotta live your life. You can’t be scared. Let’s not have our head in the sand. Those people are out there.” The go-on-with-your-life message is not an easy sell these days. It can be lost amid the rumors, prejudices and hysteria of this period. The frazzled psyche of the region was never more evident than Tuesday, when Los Angeles public school officials suddenly closed 900 schools because of a threatening email. On closer examination, the email had the hallmarks of a hoax, but it disrupted the lives of huge numbers of people. [Facing similar threats, schools in Los Angeles, New York take different tacks] And there have been other, less publicized threats. Manhattan Beach closed two schools last week. So did San Bernardino College on Tuesday. Bomb threats have become a kind of background music to the California lifestyle. The FBI is investigating the San Bernardino attacks carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, and trying to determine whether they were part of a larger terrorist network or operationally connected to the Islamic State or other terrorist organizations overseas. The bureau has not indicated that there was a larger conspiracy. But the Dec. 2 attack was a devastating blow to people’s sense of security. If it could happen at a holiday party, it could seemingly happen anywhere. First came Paris — assaults on cafes, a soccer stadium and a concert hall — on Nov. 13, then San Bernardino less than three weeks later. So it’s a rational issue: How does one contemplate the possibility of terrorism as one goes to work, or goes to school, or stops at a sandwich shop for lunch? The terrorism fears have roiled Redlands, the historic citrus town just to the east of San Bernardino. As far back as October, conservative activists beseeched the city council to block any possible resettlement of Syrian refugees. The activists renewed those concerns at the council meeting on the night of Dec. 1. The next day, the terrorist attack occurred — and it turned out that the slaughter was the handiwork of two residents of Redlands, living about half a mile from the council chambers. On Tuesday, activists held a news conference in which speakers denounced any plans to bring Syrian refugees into the community and spoke of their fear of future attacks. [Americans doubt U.S. can stop ‘lone wolf’ attacks, poll finds] “It’s not a question of if but when and where. Where came to our community — here and now,” said Donald Dix, a radio talk show host who is involved with a group called Act for America. John Berry, another activist, said that Redlands has always considered itself a Norman Rockwell slice of Americana: “When you get a terrorist bomb factory so close, it kind of shatters the image we have of ourselves.” Robert Lauten, 70, a retired warehouse worker, said: “A high percentage of them that are coming here must be coming here to conquer America.” The attack was not carried out by Syrian refugees. Farook, one of the two shooters, was an American citizen born in Chicago. Malik was a Pakistani who entered the United States on a fiancee visa and married Farook in August 2014. They had a baby girl, and the three of them lived with Farook’s mother on Center Street, not far from downtown Redlands, with its pedestrian retail street, a mall, numerous large churches and a museum devoted to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. [What happens next to the baby orphaned by the San Bernardino shooters] This is a beautiful area when the smog has blown away and the jagged molars of the San Bernardino Mountains dominate the skyline. Redlands is particularly charming, a place where fortunes were aplenty a century ago as the citrus industry boomed and the orange crates with their “Redlands” labels carried fruit around the country. But San Bernardino, pretty much next door, is a rougher place, bigger, grittier, poorer. Burguan’s world is not an easy one, and never has been. San Bernardino is fighting its way out of bankruptcy and all manner of civic hardship including lost industrial jobs, a closed Air Force base and gang violence. “I’ll be the first to admit that I think that our community was as susceptible as any community for a mass-shooter event,” Burguan said. Burguan is 45. He has been a cop for almost 24 years, and worked his way up through the ranks, in different jobs. As a former public information officer, he has always been comfortable with the media, a fact evident on Dec. 2 and thereafter. At those early news conferences, he answered every question. He avoided dramatic declarations. He had been in a meeting when one of his captains tried to reach him on the morning of Dec. 2. He disregarded the first couple of calls but finally answered. His captain said, “Chief, we’ve got an active shooter in the Regional Center.” Burguan was there quickly, and set up a command post in a bus outside the Inland Regional Center. As officers searched for gunmen, he realized he and his men were way too close and decided to pull back to a safer position. “I was told there was everything from two shooters, two shooters plus a getaway driver, three shooters, three shooters plus a getaway driver,” he said. “My original description was two to three white males.” He addressed the persistent rumor that there was a third shooter, saying it was not true and that it reflected the chaos of the moment and the shaky nature of witness testimony in an emergency. Why would Farook shoot up the office party? “It defies logic,” Burguan said, but added, “In most mass-shooting events, mass shooters go into places that they’re familiar with.” The FBI is running the investigation now, and Burguan said he doesn’t know whether there was a larger conspiracy. But in general, he said, “there’s always people that know. There’s always people that know who the bad guys are.” Of the possibility that Farook and Malik kept their terrorist inclinations secret, he said, “I find it hard to believe that they could completely lead two separate lives in that regard.” His people trained for active-shooter events. They handled the case as they would any other mass shooting. The motivation, Burguan suggested, doesn’t really change anything. “It would be just as tragic and just as horrific had it turned out to be an extreme case of workplace violence,” he said. “We just live in that day and age now.” Even Burguan is not entirely immune to moments of jumpiness. The other night in his relatively isolated home in the mountains, he heard an unexpected knocking at the door and activity outside. He momentarily thought of how prominent he had been in the media. What if? But no. It was just Christmas carolers. |