A new documentary explores California gang laws and the harm they’ve caused to San Diego and beyond.
“California Story” has been seven years in the making. But community members have been living the issue for a lot longer.
“I remember when I was around 12, 13 years old was actually the first time, police would start stopping me and my friends on the street and asking us what gang we were from,” said Khalid Alexander, the film’s executive producer. “And at the time, my friends weren't any more gang members – more or less of gang members – than I was, but out of a kind of a bravado, they would be like, ‘I'm from such and such and this and this and this and that.’ And they didn't know that this was the beginning of a process of documenting people that had real severe consequences moving forward.”
He said when he moved to San Diego in 2009, he was pulled over three times in two weeks. Each time, he was asked: “Are you a gang member?”
“But the question around gang membership really is a threat to your life, because as soon as you label somebody a gang member, you're able to kind of dehumanize them away in a way that people won't question. It was a gang member who was shot. It was a gang member who was beaten up. It was a gang member who was being arrested,” he said.
He hopes the documentary will help correct misperceptions caused by media portrayals of gangs, movies like “Boyz n the Hood.”
“There's this idea that anybody that's in a gang or anybody that's associated in a gang is riding around the street shooting people,” he said. “We don't argue that gang members are angels. The film argues that gang members are human beings, and they should be treated like human beings.”
Alexander called gang enhancements racist because they’re overwhelmingly charged against Black and brown people.
“But when you go to other neighborhoods, or if you look at the behaviors of white fraternities or surf surfers in La Jolla, even though a lot of their actions are exactly the same, a lot of their mannerisms are exactly the same, they don't end up getting gang enhancements,” Alexander said.
According to San Diego Police Department policy, someone can be labeled a gang member for what they wear, where they are, and what hand signs they throw up.
The director of the documentary, David Kuhn, said both the San Diego District Attorney’s Office and the San Diego Police Department declined to be involved or give interviews.
Gang enhancements on criminal charges can extend a sentence by years. Sometimes, they mean the difference between parole and dying in prison.
Alexander said he hopes the documentary will prompt people to think again about “laws that we have that make it easy to send some people, put some people into cages under unbelievably horrible circumstances and enable other people just to get a slap on the wrist.”
UC San Diego is hosting a screening and discussion of “California Story” on Thursday evening. To follow where the documentary will be available for viewing next, visit californiastorydoc.com.
