The other day I sat down on a living room sofa and watched The Interrupters. To my right was a TV documentarian who handled the remote and frequently stopped the movie to discuss it. To my left was his friend, a retired gang crimes officer. When The Interrupters was done the documentarian said how well it was made. Watching through very different eyes, the cop was skeptical.
But the gang crimes cop gives credit where he thinks it’s due. The Chicago PD is so computer oriented, he says, that “talking to people on the street is a lost art. The interrupters do it the old way.”
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And watching interrupter Ameena Matthews get in the face of some street toughs, the cop allows, “The way she talks to them, you got to talk to them that way. You got to talk to them at their level. She talked real good.” But he goes on, “Maybe some of this was put on for the camera.” Serious gang members don’t want to be on camera, he says. “The guys out there selling drugs and doing dirt, they’re more scared of cameras than guns.”
In the film, a mother tells Williams she got so weary dealing with her sons’ trying to kill each other because they belonged to rival “cliques” that she finally moved and now won’t tell them where she lives. Williams finds the sons, sets them down with their mom, and seems to drill a little sense into their heads.
Kotlowitz also acknowledged that the gang crime cop’s skepticism about cameras is fair. “This is the question we always ask—what effect do we have on people and on moments? But it’s difficult for people to act different. They are who they are.” There’s a scene of Cobe Williams trying to talk down “Flamo,” a hothead whose mom and brother were just cuffed when cops swept their home looking for guns. Flamo has a gun and he’s heading out to do something with it. “What you’re doin’ and everything, that’s cool,” he says to Williams. “[But] where was y’all when these mothers came kickin’?”
Despite what Hardiman has to say early in the movie about gangs, if you’re waiting for the scene in which CeaseFire sits at a table with today’s young warlords and brokers peace, you’re at the wrong movie. The difference between the black ghetto and Latino barrios like Little Village, the gang crimes cop tells me, is that the Latinos “are much more macho and they’re doing much more of what I call gangbanging. They’re much more territorial. When I started, that’s the way it was with the black gangs.” But the black gangs grew up and became entrepreneurial (do you remember “Stringer” Bell trying to bring MBA principles to the streets of Baltimore in The Wire?), and, as the cop says, “gangbanging is bad for business. Black gangs are trying to make money. The Spanish gangs—they’ll just go.”
“But the film is very experiential. That’s the power of film. You’ve got to have a good story, good characters, and good visuals. The camera doesn’t like everybody.”
