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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