There was an atypical scene on television recently: Sitting side-by-side were Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Clippers point guard Baron Davis, and former skateboarder-turned-film director Stacy Peralta.
The occasion was an episode of "The Tavis Smiley Show," which followed PBS' premiere of "Made in America: Crips and Bloods," a documentary film produced through Davis' Verso Entertainment and directed by Peralta, who also directed the acclaimed skateboarding documentary "Dogtown and the Z Boys."
The appearance of the three men together marked the rare occasion when art and reality occupy the same space at the same time. "Made in America" is the latest attempt to explain Los Angeles gang warfare, which has permeated pop culture and Hollywood for the past 20 years.
"The whole purpose of making the film was trying to search for a human face," Peralta said in the interview. "The fact of the matter is our evening news and newspapers encourage us to look at these young black and Latino men as monsters."
Whether a documentary or feature in nature, each film about gangs has offered something slightly different. The Denzel Washington blockbuster "Training Day" offered an indictment of crooked cops. The Hollywood hit also featured an appearance by an inactive member of the Bloods named Cle "Bone" Sloan, who went on to direct a documentary with "Training Day" director Antoine Fuqua in 2005. That documentary, "Bastards of the Party," first aired on HBO, offering a deep, genuine perspective that attributed the rise of the Crips and Bloods to the vacuum left when the Black Panthers and other black civil rights organizations dissipated.
"'Bastards' was the first story told from the inside out," Sloan told the L.A. Watts Times. The former Athens Park Blood, who currently serves as a consultant on the NBC drama "Southland," said he set out to do the movie because "no one could really tell me how this all (gangs) got started."
"'Bastards' has reached a lot of the brothers," Sloan said. "Not a day goes by that I don't get stopped in the street to talk about the film. The film saved my life. I don't know what I'd have been doing. I'd be dead or locked up for life. The subculture of banging was my whole world."
Aqeela Sherrills, a former gang member who has become an outspoken activist to end gang violence, said he appreciates what the documentaries are trying to do. But, simultaneously, he pointed out that they don't necessarily capture the whole picture — such as effective solutions, including the truce of 1992 between Crip and Blood gangs.
"Things are much calmer on the streets today thanks to the peace movement of 1992 and those who work to sustain the ideas today, although there are real wars that are happening in neighborhoods," Sherrills said. "I feel that we have a deeper relationship amongst the current generation of key players."
The mayor's Gang Reduction and Youth Development office, established in July 2008, is overseen by the Rev. Jeff Carr. In February, Carr told the City Council that the office "had made significant strides in its first six months, and helped achieve record lows in gang homicides during the summer of 2008 — including an 86% reduction in gang homicides in neighborhoods suffering most from gang violence," according to a news release.
Carr's office replaced the L.A. Bridges gang prevention and intervention programs with more than $13 million in city funds diverted to 12 neighborhoods — referred to as "grid zones" — with the highest levels of gang violence.
Sherrills said he feels city officials have been on the right course with centralizing operations under one department and having police better engage with the community. Yet, he said he thinks some city measures — including the much-touted grid zones — are ineffective.
"Why is USC determining which of our youth need help in our community?" Sherrills asked rhetorically. "The whole assessment is theoretically a good idea but it doesn't practically work. Many of the funded agencies have served a fraction of the children they have been funded to serve."
That is something that Skipp Townsend, a former Rolling '20s Blood who appears in "Made in America," agrees with.
"A lot of individuals (gang intervention activists) are going to turn away from the communities that are not funded," Townsend said. "There's not enough money."
Still, Townsend believes that Villaraigosa and his "gang czar," Jeff Carr, have done an "outstanding job" assigning project managers to each of the 12 grid zones — where gang activity is the most rampant.
Sherrills said he thinks the city could initiate an advertising campaign highlighting intervention workers to give them greater visibility.
"We are not going to prevent conflicts but we can say in a PSA or a 30-second cable clip, '... a gun is not always the best way to handle a problem — think about the consequences," Sherrills said. "That would go a long way."
The long-term solution to gangs, Sherrills added, may not be within the city officials' domain and it's something that the "community needs to do for themselves."
In his interview with Tavis Smiley, Stacy Peralta put gangs in another perspective, framing it as an American war.
"We defeated Nazi Germany and Japan in a single war in less than a decade and we can't solve this in four decades?" Peralta said. "To me what it says is that we're valuing children by color differently and we must take a hard look. That's the only way (Villaraigosa) and Jeff Carr will have the power to fix this."
The L.A. Watts Times could not get comments from the mayor's office for this story by presstime.
Slav Kandyba is a writer for the L.A. Watts Times.
Photo of Skipp Townsend from L.A. Watts Times; poster graphic of "Crips and Bloods: Made in America" from www.cripsandbloodsmovie.com
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