Life & Times - Transcript

About Us \| Contact Us

Life & Times Transcript

1/25/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

You may not recognize one of Los Angeles's most recognizable landmarks. What turned MacArthur Park around?

Joe Colletti>> We're now all sitting around one table and talking about how we can work together and how we can do this in a way that it would be a win-win for all of us in the community, and that's exactly what's unfolded in the last half a dozen years.

Val Zavala>> And then, this mob movie is loaded with action and a star-studded cast, but will it strike our critics as top caliber?

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> I'm here at MacArthur Park near downtown Los Angeles. It's one of Los Angeles's oldest, best-known and most elegant parks. But a few years ago, I'd be a little nervous about being here. It was a mecca for guns, drugs and gangs. Today it's undergoing a promising transformation.

James Hill>> This is a sight you probably never would have seen as little as three years ago: first graders from nearby Esperanza Elementary School happily trekking through MacArthur Park.

[Film Clip]

James Hill>> They're on a nature field trip here to see the ducks, the long-necked geese and the gulls, to find interesting bugs hiding in the green grass.

Nicole Reich>> I was a little concerned to come. My image of MacArthur Park was not good and I was a little concerned for us and our safety, but I'm really pleasantly pleased. This is quite beautiful. It's cool. The water is nice.

James Hill>> Anyone who knows the recent history of MacArthur Park can understand how important it is to see kids here or joggers or strolling couples. This is one of the oldest parks in Los Angeles, built in the 1880s and renamed for General Douglas MacArthur after World War II.

But starting in the 1980s, the park west of downtown was becoming a symbol of almost everything that could go wrong with an inner city neighborhood. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, this park named after a war hero had become a war zone of sorts.

The eight square miles patrolled by the police department's Rampart Division consistently turned in some of the highest homicide rates in the city. Many of the killings were linked to a half dozen street gangs that battled over drugs and a range of illegal activities that took place here in the park and on the surrounding streets. Los Angeles Police Commander, Charlie Beck, used to head the Rampart Division.

Commander Charlie Beck>> Literally, there's not a street corner in sight of this park and probably not a piece of the park that has not had a homicide in the last ten years. Crime was at a point here where it made all the other parts of Los Angeles look positive by comparison.

James Hill>> Many of the people here are Central American immigrants who fled the civil war in El Salvador. The MacArthur Park neighborhood became their entry point. City Councilman, Ed Reyes, says much of the violence and upheaval of El Salvador's war followed the refugees here.

Ed Reyes>> And that intensity didn't change and they changed coats in terms of one political force against another. It became one gang force against the other. It was all about --

James Hill>> -- and they killed each other.

Ed Reyes>> And they killed each other. It was a sub-economy based on drug transactions and they were fighting for territory. So the same tactics you had in guerilla warfare amongst the gangs was occurring here. That's how deadly it was.

James Hill>> At night, the park was too dangerous to attract anyone but gang members or the occasional homeless person. Police cruised the mean streets past storefronts secured behind heavy steel shutters. This was the MacArthur Park that William Bratton faced in 2002 as Los Angeles's new top cop. Councilman Reyes says it was the first place he took Bratton after the Council voted to confirm him as chief.

Ed Reyes>> I told him that, if he could turn MacArthur Park around and the neighborhoods around it, we could turn anything around in this city.

James Hill>> Police say that they first targeted drugs and the gangs that sold them.

Commander Charlie Beck>> We sent in undercover police officers. We used cameras. We used observation posts and we arrested a bunch of sellers. But then, also in conjunction with that, we did what we called reverses -- they're still called reverses -- where we would pose as drug dealers and arrest people that came to buy drugs here and then widely publicize it.

[Film Clip]

James Hill>> That laid the groundwork for what Chief Bratton has called "broken windows" policing. Patrols like this one became common within the park as officers targeted lesser offenses which had nonetheless helped create an atmosphere of lawlessness. Sergeant Ryan Shatz and other officers now crack down on things like sleeping on park benches, graffiti, vandalism, even leash laws.

>> "Hey, try to control that dog, all right?"

[Film Clip]

James Hill>> Business people like Sandy Romero were also hard at work. She now runs Mama's Hot Tamales Caf� across Seventh Street from the park. It's a nonprofit set up to organize the vendors who used to jam the sidewalks and park.

Sandy Romero>> The problem was horrendous. We had, in front of our storefronts here, between Lake and Alvarado, you couldn't even walk the sidewalks. You'd have to walk literally on the curb because people had CDs lined up selling them, had their cars parked with their trunks open selling clothing, videotapes --

James Hill>> -- vendors everywhere.

Sandy Romero>> Yeah. It was a mess, it was a mess.

James Hill>> Now vendors are licensed, schooled in health codes and they cook tamales in the restaurant's kitchen. They sell them through the Caf�, splitting the proceeds.

Joe Colletti>> We're now all sitting around one table and talking about how we can work together and how we can do this in a way that it would be a win-win for all of us in the community, and that's exactly what's unfolded in the last half a dozen years.

James Hill>> The park is once again well-maintained, the landscaping trimmed and flowering. The park has the cool, inviting look that a park is supposed to have. The gangs seem to have given up and left in search of easier territory to conquer.

Sandy Romero>> I personally live across the street from the park too and I freely and happily will bring my grandson and my family to the park and enjoy the beauty that's right there.

James Hill>> But as fast as graffiti is painted over, at least some is sprayed back, often right over the new paint. The homeless can still be spotted now and then asleep on park benches. As one man said, "We used to have thirty-five illegal document sellers on the block. Now we have ten." But the people we talked with say they're confident the improvements will grow and, what's most important, that they will last.

Bertha Wooldridge is a one-woman example. Ten years ago, the hardware store owner survived a terrifying robbery as five gang members burst into her store.

Bertha Wooldridge>> They took me and kneeled me by the rack by the pipes.

James Hill>> They made you kneel down?

Bertha Wooldridge>> Yeah. They kneeled me down and put a gun at my head.

James Hill>> Since then, she's helped run the Westlake Protectors, organizing cleanups, neighborhood watch, and forging close ties with the police.

Bertha Wooldridge>> All the communities are involved and are really, really there for us. So I don't think that we go back to where we were at. Nobody likes that, especially me (laughter). That's right, and we won't. We won't go back.

James Hill>> I'm James Hill for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Not everything is rosy in MacArthur Park. Recently, a Los Angeles police officer was shot and seriously hurt just a few blocks from here, a reminder that there's still plenty of work to do.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> For most of us, life in southern California can be pretty good, but it's also deceiving. There are hundreds of thousands of Angelenos living in the middle of gang territory, many of them children and, for them, life can be as frightening as living in Baghdad and that's no exaggeration.

That's one of the findings of a major new report on gangs in Los Angeles County. It also found that, of all the youth gang homicides in California, seventy-five percent of them happen in Los Angeles. The lead author of the report is civil rights attorney, Connie Rice, co-director of the Advancement Project.

You've spent, what, six months looking intensely at gangs, although you've been very familiar with the problem for a long time. It's being called an epidemic and that's not just a word. It really is an epidemic?

Connie Rice>> It is an epidemic, an epidemic that epidemiologists have confirmed, so it's not just lawyers and officers and gang intervention workers hyping a problem. You have epidemiologists who study violence as a disease and they have determined that Los Angeles and Chicago are the two most violent cities, but Chicago is a distant second to Los Angeles.

If you sink two billion dollars every year into solving a problem and you've been fighting gangs for twenty-five years, twenty-five years later we have six times as many gangs and at least double the number of gang members --

Val Zavala>> -- despite all these millions.

Connie Rice>> Despite the billions, not millions, billions of dollars that we have spent in twenty-five years, you have to ask yourself why are we stuck on stupid? Well, it isn't because our brave officers and gang intervention workers aren't doing a good job. They're doing as much as they can with the piece that they have. Suppression is very important. We need more officers. We need better equipment. LAPD is right on that. But we have to match the strategic suppression, law enforcement, with very, very robust prevention and intervention wraparound systems.

In other words, you've got to organize these neighborhoods to fight this syndrome. The World Health Organization just came out with two studies of school children in Baghdad and Mosul, Iraq. Their levels of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, are similar to the levels of PTSD in a Los Angeles Unified survey of school children, ninety percent of whom have been exposed to high levels of violence and have been victims of violence.

Val Zavala>> You call for comprehensive change. There are so many recommendations, but what's a key one?

Connie Rice>> You really have to go neighborhood by neighborhood and do a wraparound strategy. You have to organize every city agency, every county agency, all of law enforcement in the civic sector, all the folks in a neighborhood, diagnose the gang culture, the violence pattern, get the schools open until eleven o'clock at night and get all of the teachers together with all of the parents and you sit down and you do a community stabilization plan. That way, everybody is operating on the same diagnosis of what the problem is and what the right solution is.

It's very interesting. The research shows that gangs don't exist in a vacuum. They need a neighborhood to root and spawn in. So we're talking about cleaning out the Petrie dish, getting rid of the neighborhood conditions and, in addition to suppression -- because law enforcement is very important -- but in addition to suppression, getting rid of the conditions that keep creating generation after generation.

Val Zavala>> Now you call for one over-arching entity that would coordinate all this gang prevention program. Right now, we have this one and that one and they all seem to be doing good and we hear about them, so we think there's something being done, but it's not effective? Not coherent?

Connie Rice>> It's not effective. It's uncoordinated, and here's the bottom line. Who do you go to in the city to ask how many kids do we get out of gangs? Right now, there is no one in the city that can answer that question. So this report says you have a lot of really good work being done, but it's being done at a tiny, tiny level. The city of Los Angeles spends, for example, twenty-six million dollars on gang intervention and prevention programs that are specifically designated for that, to intervene in gangs.

If you take that twenty-six million and you spread it out over the three hundred thousand children who are trapped in high gang areas, it's about seventeen cents per kid. So the investment isn't robust enough, but we're not organizing all of the city's resources. It can't just be about a program. It's not about a program. It's about a paradigm. We need an entire approach that takes all of the city's resources. Government cannot do this alone.

There is a lot of responsibility in families. There are personal responsibilities. You have to have campaigns against gun violence and killing. Right now, we glorify violence from "Scarface" all the way through to the violence in our movies today. People who rule with a gun are glorified and we have got to counter that. We need help from Hollywood with an anti-violence campaign, anti-killing campaign and campaigns against access to guns by young people.

That's what Chicago does and Chicago does that quite well, but these aren't just candlelight vigils after a child has been murdered. These are around-the-clock campaigns to change the culture of destruction. We allow our kids to worship violence and we don't do anything to stop it. It's no wonder the gangs are glorified. Bottom line is, it is a martial plan level response. It is not about a program. It is about an entire city getting on a footing to solve the problem.

Val Zavala>> Now you're getting a lot of attention from this. In fact, the Daily News called it Los Angeles's Martial Plan and they're coming out in favor of something like this. Yet they're the Valley, which we often think is isolated or immune from gang violence.

Connie Rice>> The San Fernando Valley has seen an astronomical spike in gangs and gang crimes. Well, here's the thing. If you leave parts of your community desperately mired in a problem like this, you can't contain it forever. The police are now saying, "We've reached the end of our ability to contain gang violence." It will spread to gang culture and now youth culture and the violence will follow. So what we need to do is to stabilize the communities that are beginning to have it spread.

We need to keep tipping-point communities from tipping into routine violence and we need to take the gang-saturated areas and do the martial plan saturation and wraparound twenty-four hours. We interviewed Admiral Brewer, the new superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District. We said to him, "Superintendent, your schools need to be open until eleven o'clock at night and until two o'clock in the morning on the weekends. We need activities around the clock."

Here's the point. We don't compete for our children. The gangs compete for them. We don't compete for them. We have to be there 24/7 and organize those neighborhoods so that the children have alternatives to gang life. That's how you pull the plug. You block the entrance ramps and make sure there are real exit ramps and, guess what? The gangs will die. They will die because the children won't be joining them.

Val Zavala>> Connie Rice, thank you for all your work. Let's hope the city and the people of Los Angeles will listen.

Connie Rice>> Thank you, Val.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is "Catch and Release". It's written and directed by Susannah Grant and stars Jennifer Garner.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Lael Loewenstein of Variety and Ella Taylor of the L.A. Weekly. Lael, what did you think of "Catch and Release"?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, this is just a so-so romantic comedy that really should have been a lot better. Jennifer Garner is left single on the eve of her wedding when her fianc� dies and she ends up striking up a relationship with one of his best friends, sort of against her better judgment.

One of the problems of the film for me is that it deals with fairly serious subjects like death and grief and infidelity in a light-hearted way. So the times when it is true and emotionally honest don't ring as true because of the fallacies of the rest of the film.

So I thought it really should have been a lot better. There's a few nice performances. Juliette Lewis is just sort of annoying as this girl from Jennifer Garner's boyfriend's past who just suddenly pops up. There's a few other things that are sort of nice, but it's just so-so.

Larry Mantle>> All right. Ella, what did you think?

Ella Taylor>> It really is a pity because Susannah Grant who wrote and directed the film, this is her directing debut. She's something of an aristocrat amongst women screenwriters. She wrote "Erin Brockovich" and "In Her Shoes", but you don't see any of that glittering dialog here in this rather slack comedy-drama.

The performances of Jennifer Garner are barely serviceable. Kevin Smith is quite charming as the fat friend who never stops talking and eating. He's like an inverse of "Silent Bob", very vocal Bob, but he wears his welcome out very, very quickly.

I think part of the problem is that the film flashes its emotional cards about twenty minutes into the film and, after that, there's really nowhere to go but fishing and scenes of Colorado while being extremely nice to your friends. Grief is a very ungovernable emotion and she really puts it into a five-step program.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week is a kind of throwback to the wild action films of the 1970s. The film is "Smokin' Aces". It stars an ensemble cast and is written and directed by Joe Carnahan.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "Smokin' Aces", Lael?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, this is just a mess. Joe Carnahan, who did a film called "Narc", goes into kind of a Quentin Tarantino mode here in a great expression of style over substance. This is about a sleazy magician played by Jeremy Piven who has become a rising figure in the mob in Lake Tahoe. When the FBI agents, Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds, discover that there's a hit out on him, they set out to protect him. Meanwhile, there's about five other people who are trying to kill Piven.

It's just really a lot of shoot-em-up and lots of loud violence and flash. Alicia Keys is sort of nice in a small part as one of the assassins, but it's just a real mess. I think some guys would probably enjoy the action and the violence, but I didn't care for it at all.

Larry Mantle>> "Seraphim Falls" is a western chase film. It stars Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "Seraphim Falls", Ella?

Ella Taylor>> Well, this may be one of the slowest western chase movies ever made, which doesn't necessarily count against it. Liam Neeson plays a colonel just after the end of the Civil War who pursues Pierce Brosnan across a west that is at once very, very silent and also very, very wild. That's about it. The movie does have pretensions to thematic grandeur. It's kind of an anti-war movie. The war is over and yet there's all this unfocused rage still left between these two men.

The acting is very, very good. The movie is certainly a vehicle for two late-stage careers, Neeson and Brosnan. Brosnan is very wonderful in this shaggy beard, but one keeps getting reminded of that Monty Python character who rises out of the wave (laughter). It's an intelligent movie, but I found it so emotionally attenuated that my attention began to wander after a while.

Larry Mantle>> Lael?

Lael Loewenstein>> I went back and forth on this film. On the one hand, it was really nice to have a chase movie that's so primal and so simple and so pared down. It doesn't have all the shoot-em-up and the splashy effects, so that was really kind of nice. On the other hand, I felt like it took every kind of clich� of the western that I'd ever seen before and played them out over and over and over again. It was clearly written by people with a love of the western genre, but it just felt a bit hollow in that it recycled so many of these same conventions.

There is gorgeous cinematography by John Toll, who's really a master of natural lighting. I enjoyed that aspect of it. The performances are okay, but I think it was lacking something. I mean, if you're going to take a western at this point, you have to kind of reinvent it in a way like "Unforgiven" or even going back further like "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and do something really different.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, the documentary "Verdict on Auschwitz" which details the mid-1960s long-term trial in the perpetrators of genocide.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Ella, what did you think of "Verdict on Auschwitz"?

Ella Taylor>> I've seen a lot of Holocaust documentaries and people should not be put off by the fact that this one is nearly three hours long, cut down from a much longer one that was made in 1993. It's about the trial of Nazi employees at Auschwitz, those who ran the camp, which took place in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965. It's based on audio recordings. The content will not shock anybody. It will not surprise anybody who has been following Holocaust history.

What is incendiary is the context because this is the beginning of Germany's baby steps towards acknowledging its past. In that sense, it's really quite riveting. The big fat elephant in the room is that, at the trial, hardly anybody says the word "Jew". The emphasis is all on the perpetrators and not on the victims.

Larry Mantle>> And that does it for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Ella Taylor of the L.A. Weekly and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. Please join us again next week for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> For the full hour of Filmweek, tune in to KPCC public radio Fridays at eleven a.m. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


Home \| Features \| Arts \| Health/Science \| OC Edition \| L&T Blog \| Archives \| About Us \| Contact Us \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use © 2007 COMMUNITY TELEVISION OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA