Saturday, July 17, 2010

Street Dogs, the Movie


Hat tip to Anton W. for sending this!

Street Dogs of South Central is a movie about what it says. Narrated by the always-great Queen Latifah.

Back when I was writing about street drug markets, a foundation paid me to look into what was going on in a part of East Los Angeles, then the most violent place on earth (not hyperbole, but a documented fact).

In the early evening, after viewing things and interviewing people in East L.A. all day, and before the night shift in the same neighbourhood, my partner and I drove to South Central to see the smoldering ruins from the 1992 riots.

What struck me at the time was the story that the press seemed to have missed: the L.A. Riots were not random lootings and burnings. This was a kind of American retail Kristallnacht in which specific business were targeted to burn. A did not see a single Track Auto that was not gutted. There would be two stores, right next to each other, and one would be burned to the ground and the other unscathed. Very clearly, retail resentment, of one form or another, was being unleashed.

I do not remember seeing stray dogs in South Central (an area now trying to be rename itself "South Los Angeles"), but I do remember how many young men there were in wheelchairs.

If you sold colostomy bags, South Central would have been a good sales area to have. I am pretty sure they never shoot the colostomy bag salesman.... or the guy from the Public Defenders Service.
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3 comments:

Anton said...

Supposedly will be released in 2010 by Lionsgate & Animal Planet.

Viatecio said...

I'll be waiting for this to come out on DVD! Looks very interesting.

Of course, my first thought while watching it was "They to TNR for cats, as futile as that is...why not do it for these guys instead of catching them and penning them up for adoption or euth?"

PBurns said...

Mainly due to size and behavior. Large feral dogs attack people all the time, and they attack pet dogs and cats even more often than that. How many ripped up kids do we need? And how many traffic accidents do we need caused by people swerving their cars to avoid feral dogs?

The real question is why no one talks about the over-breeding of pit bulls.

P