Patrolling the Neighborhood
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- ctv
- added this
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- groups:
- On Current TV, Intro, Outro, News Current
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- tags:
- On Current TV, Intro, Outro, News Current
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- credits:
- Vanessa Wruble Starring
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MitchKoss
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Tracey Chang and I shot this story in early June of 2005, the first week that we started on the job at Current, back when there was no Los Angeles office--it's gotten fairly large now--and we were trying to set up stories from a sidewalk table at the Starbucks in Larchmont Village... The more that Vanguard moves away from producing random, unrelated pods and the more it goes toward trying to cover the largely under-reported forces that are shaping the rapidly changing world that you must adapt to, the more that one piece seems to shed light on another. For example, the relative success that the Los Angeles Police Department gang unit had out of Newton in suppressing gang activity, seems to shed light on the trouble that the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department was having down the road in Compton, then the per capita murder capital of America, as chronicled in Saturday Night in Compton. That juxtaposition would lead one to think that the more that you invest in personnel on the ground--more cops in Newton than in Compton--the safer it gets... But the more Vanguard stories that you start to juxtapose, the more a couple of nights riding with the LAPD south of downtown LA seems to illuminate a wider array of issues. If the difference between Newton and Compton actually boils down to the level of community sacrifice--the amount of tax dollars that were invested in each area to hire police officers--then what might that tell us about what we would need to collectively ante up if we really wanted to effectively accomplish other national goals? Vanguard hasn't covered enough stories yet to draw the graph out on that one, but the question is there.
- 4 years ago
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MitchKoss
