TV Review: Tales of the Grim Sleeper

True-crime documentary takes a hard look at race issues.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

A series of murders – at least ten, but possibly as many as 100 – took place in South Central Los Angeles between 1985 and 2007. All were women, many of them prostitutes. In 2010, police arrested a man named Lonnie Franklin for the crimes. Franklin, whom many of his friends and neighbors considered pleasant and nonthreatening, if a little sexually quirky, is presently in jail awaiting trial.

Noted documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield examines the case in HBO’s Tales of the Grim Sleeper, but the film doesn’t take the tack one might assume. Broomfield isn’t overly interested in the sordid details of Franklin’s alleged crimes. Those do come up, unavoidably, but they aren’t the aspect of the case that Broomfield is most captivated by. Denied access to police personnel for interviews, Broomfield takes to the streets to speak to the denizens of Franklin’s neighborhood, talking to people who knew him and people who knew of him. The filmmaker, in particular, spends much of his time with women who could have easily been one of the victims.

The through-line of Tales of the Grim Sleeper concerns how such heinous crimes could have gone on, largely unnoticed, for so many years. The explanation given by the majority of Broomfield’s subjects, which is difficult to argue with, is that the police tend to turn a blind eye to this impoverished corner of the world. With everyday violence occurring so regularly in the alleys and on the street corners of South Central L.A., and the victims of the Sleeper slayings being, in large part, prostitutes or drug addicts, there appears to have been little incentive for the police to pursue a more aggressive investigation, effectively allowing a killer free reign for decades. One interviewee argues that if something like this had happened in Beverly Hills, it would have been locked down immediately. It’s difficult to dispute that.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper doesn’t contain many earth-shattering revelations. It’s not exactly a stop-the-presses revelation that the police tend to deprioritize justice in the black community. What makes the film powerful is Broomfield, who takes a largely recessive presence, ceding the floor to the members of that community, giving them a platform to speak of their hardships and place in the world that they would have otherwise been denied. The palpable sense of devaluation expressed is heartbreaking.

The most chilling and pertinent facet of Tales of the Grim Sleeper comes late into the film, where we are informed that many of the murders were classified by the LAPD as NHI, or “No Humans Involved,” a designation attributed to crimes against sex workers and drug addicts. It’s one thing to argue that the police don’t see such people as humans, but it’s quite another when the police themselves create acronyms expressly stating it.

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