Film Review: ‘Grim Sleeper’ awakens chilling documentary

The majority of high-profile complaints about police behavior in African-American communities involve what could be euphemistically called “overzealousness” — mostly the use of unnecessary and clearly disproportionate force in responding to black suspects. From Rodney King to Michael Brown, there have been officers who felt — even if only subconsciously — that black suspects are more dangerous in general than whites and that it’s better to err on the side of what their own department defines as excessive force.

“Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” the latest from British documentarian Nick Broomfield (“Aileen Wuornos,” “Biggie and Tupac”), probes into what, on the surface, seems like the exact opposite — underzealousness in tracking a black serial killer. The reason it only “seems” that way is that the neglect stems from the same cultural pools of racism: In the case of the Grim Sleeper, the victims were all black women, many of them hookers and/or crack addicts.

Broomfield tells us that for years the unofficial police designation for such victims was NHI — No Human Involved. In this case, a dozen murders received less official attention and press coverage than the death of any single upper- and middle-class white victim. The perp was given his nickname by the L.A. Weekly, which revealed that, based on DNA evidence, the same man was likely responsible for almost a dozen killings in the mid-’80s and then, after a 13-year hiatus, more killings between 2001 and 2010. No one knows the exact number of lives he took. The evidence connects the one killer to roughly 20 murders. But Lonnie Franklin, the man currently awaiting trial in the case, had photos — often sexually explicit — of hundreds of women, many of whom have yet to be identified.

Broomfield barely mentions the “strangest” aspect of the case; that is, why did the perpetrator stop when he did and then start again after so many years? This is simply not the way serial killers are known to operate. It may be that the issue is given short shrift because no one has any credible hypotheses, let alone actual answers. But the main reason for Broomfield’s decision is that he’s interested in a broader issue — the lowered values those in power put on the lives of minorities, particularly the homeless, the poor, the unemployed, the addicted, and those who make their living through prostitution. According to Franklin’s son — not necessarily the most reliable source — “My father had a lot of fans in law enforcement for cleaning up the streets.”

Broomfield has a tendency, going back at least as far as his first Aileen Wuornos documentary, to center his films on his own quest for the truth about a subject rather than on the alleged subject itself — particularly when he’s running into obstacles getting the interviews he needs to tell the story he’s contracted to deliver. (This is the “dog ate my homework” school of documentary filmmaking.)

Here he indulges himself less, perhaps because he gets swept away by the energy of Pam Brooks, an ex-prostitute who becomes his tour guide through the South L.A. neighborhoods where Franklin lived and the murders were committed. Broomfield is not a particularly formidable physical presence, and Pam enthusiastically blazes a path, in whose wake Broomfield and his crew are drawn along.

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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).