So it’s a PR issue for the police.
That’s a PR thing, yeah. The other thing is that the LAPD are politically accountable to the richer part of the city. So their priority is to serve that part of the city. Because so many people in South Central are disenfranchised—I mean, if you have a felony conviction you can’t vote for at least seven years—they don’t feel any accountability to that population. I think that’s obviously the problem that happened in Ferguson too. You had this big community, this black community—in South Central it’s black and Hispanic—that the police don’t in any way feel accountable to. Which is a sort of democratic problem, or a representation problem. And I think that’s a nationwide problem.
Do you think being English gives you a different perspective on these problems from American journalists?
I don’t know. I studied law before I became a filmmaker, and I actually have a great belief in the justice system and the rule of law. I think it’s the thing that separates us from animals [laughs]. Occasionally that kind of breaks down, but I really believe in the rule of law because it’s an attempt to bring rational accountability to human behavior, which has a great capability of becoming irrational.
It’s funny to hear you say that, since your films tend to be about notorious lawbreakers.
Well yes, there’s a certain glamour to notorious law-breakers who have a worldview of their own. They’re fascinating to look at. But I also think—and this sounds incredibly boring—a cornerstone of any well-functioning democracy is a rule of law, and there is accountability. Then people have representation, they have a say, and they furthermore believe that they have a say, which is the most important thing to a healthy, functioning community. I’m not saying that Britain is any better, I’m not getting into that at all.
Some people would say that some of the characters in Grim Sleeper, who obviously have drug problems, are not exactly reliable witnesses or storytellers.
The way the law is set up at the moment is that, there’s been this war on drugs, and the first thing is that there’s been this massive distinction made between cocaine and crack, although they’re essentially the same thing. Cocaine is a middle-class drug. Crack is a poor person’s drug, which carries a felony conviction for possession. And once you get this felony conviction, which given that the whole community is pretty much strung out on it, or a large part of the community has been, you become basically sidelined into an alternative kind of lifestyle. You become completely marginalized. You can’t get public housing, you can’t get a lot of jobs, you can’t vote. You have a real problem doing anything to get you out of the rut that you’re in. You become basically a non-person.