A lot of people say he wasn’t. Here is his deposition.
A report from the Guardian UK about the kicking incident.
Fresh out of the navy reserves, where he had served in Bahrain and Kuwait, Dorner, a trained marksman, was a rookie police officer on 28 July 2007, when he accompanied a training officer, Teresa Evans, to a reported disturbance at the Doubletree Hotel in San Pedro.
They encountered a mentally ill homeless man, Christopher Gettler. Evans tasered him after he threw a punch. Gettler was later returned to his father and that seemed to be the end of the incident.
Two weeks later, however, according to LAPD records published by the LA Times, Dorner told a superior, Sergeant Donald Deming of the harbour division, that after the tasering, Evans had kicked Gettler in the chest and face, snapping his head back and causing him to bleed.
An internal affairs investigation ruled that the kicking did not happen and that Dorner had lied. This led to a disciplinary hearing in 2008.
Dorner’s attorney, Randal Quan, a former police captain, called the case against his client “very, very ugly” said he “wasn’t given a fair shake.” Quan said: “In fact, what’s happening here is this officer is being made a scapegoat.”
Dorner said he had not immediately reported the kicks because he had filed other complaints against fellow officers and feared retaliation.
Dorner harkens back to an older era where a man’s honor was important to him. That culture still survives to some extent in the military.