The Police Crisis You’re Not Hearing About

lapd 2You made this documentary before the Ferguson riots. When you were watching all of that unfold, what were you thinking?

It happened to happen in Ferguson, but it could have happened in any number of inner-city areas across the United States. It’s basically the same situation, and it reflects a political situation that is untenable. And I think Tales of the Grim Sleeper deals with this too. In South Central, until the end of the ’70s, there were a number of very positive social programs in existence. There were good medical centers operating, there were re-schooling programs. There was a real attempt to integrate the town that existed in South Central with the rest of the city. When those programs finished, and the funding was removed, it’s like a wall came down between South Central and the rest of Los Angeles. People from Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and so on no longer traveled into South Central. So that kind of exchange that you have in a normal, healthy community ceased to be. And then with the influx of drugs, which were never really treated as an epidemic—I mean, there’s been an epidemic of drugs in South Central since the early ’80s, and it’s been treated as as an individual problem. It’s never been treated as an epidemic that needs to be dealt with on a community level. And so it’s an ongoing problem now. It’s destroyed the community and it’s enabled crazy things like the Lonnie Franklin thing to exist.

In another one of your movies, Biggie and Tupac, you get into the irresponsibility of the LAPD, too, from a different angle. I’m guessing that police department doesn’t like you very much at this point.

[Laughs] I mean, actually, one of the detectives in charge of the Lonnie Franklin case was a big fan of the Biggie and Tupac film and he started off very friendly. And then when I started asking some questions, the gates came down, and the DA decided she hated me. You know, we tried very hard to get some kind of insight as to what was going on. We got Pam Brooks, the woman in the film, the main character, to contact the LAPD officers in Vice that she’d been dealing with to try and get some kind of perspective, and even they refused. I think a directive had gone out not to communicate, to contribute to the film.

Do you think there’s a bureaucratic problem within the LAPD?

I think there’s two things here. One is that this particular case is extremely politically embarrassing to them. They want it to go away. They want Lonnie Franklin to be sentenced and then they can close the book. So this period of having announced that they caught the Grim Sleeper, they now don’t want the follow-up questions of, why did it take 25 years? Why didn’t you tell the public that you knew there was a serial killer from 1987 onward? They don’t want those questions. They’ve gone around to the victims’ families and said, “You must not talk to the press. If you do so, you’ll delay the trial.” Which is complete bullshit, because none of them are material witnesses. They just don’t want bad publicity.

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