Statistically, it’s a war. More than 300 African-Americans shot and killed by police in 2015 – nearly 9% of them in Chicago, the US’s third city and the adopted hometown of President Obama. Fifty-four this May, 252 so far this year. Added to that, more than 2,500 black-on-black shootings last year, more than 350 of them fatal.
As ever with a war, the cause – or causes – are disputed. Reggie Yates: Life and Death in Chicago (BBC1) set out to discover who is responsible for the carnage. Truth be told, it did a less than stellar job at providing more that the barest outline of America’s ongoing and apparently increasingly (or possibly just increasingly filmed, which is about all we’ve got left to hope for in this godforsaken world) police brutality problem. Yates’s skill is in his unforced interest in his subjects and his absolute honesty and naturalness as a presenter, rather than in delineating arguments or setting out a sociological stall. But if it failed to unpick the problem, it at least provided a wealth of valuable stories from victims’ families, who have historically gone unheard.
And the stories are unbelievable. The daughter holding her shot mother in the street and being told by the police: “Your mother’s dead – get over it.” The Reverend Catherine Brown finding herself (with her two small children in the back seat) bumper to bumper with a police car in an alleyway and being told: “Bitch, move that fucking car,” by a cop who then drew his gun on them. She threw the car into reverse “out of the alley, so they’d have to kill me in front of everybody”. You can see on the footage recorded by a witness, one of the cops grinning as she is dragged out through the car window and the inside of the vehicle is peppersprayed.
People gather and march against the Chicago police department. Meetings are held between the police review board and the community every month. A broken-voiced, broken-hearted mother speaks: “My son’s supposed to be here right now, today. But instead, he’s layin’ over at Mount Hope Cemetery. And you all,” she says, not loudly, “don’t give no fuck because it wasn’t one of y’all kids. It wasn’t your kids. So y’all don’t care.”
At a memorial gathering for police killed in the line of duty, a bereaved daughter says shooting reports are biased, the police are unsupported and “outgunned right now”.
A man called Michael, who mentored 22-year-old former gang member Lee McCullen until he was killed (in a non-police shooting), listed many things in his take on what the problems were. Lack of trust in the police (“The system is broken. You can’t fix it. You got to replace it”), lack of education, lack of respect and lack of men “standing up and being men to our wives, girlfriends, baby mamas, nieces and nephews. Until they start seeing what a real man is, they gonna do what they gonna do.”
Until someone finds a way to uproot all this, more broken bodies, broken voices and broken hearts will fill the city. It is a war.
Lighter fare was on offer in The Victorian Slum, the latest slice of social-living-history-reality-docu-whatsit from BBC2, presented by Dr Michael Mosley because he’s – uh – a doctor of Victorian slums? No matter. The deal is: a tenement still standing in the East End has been got up with grime, straw pallets and every other slumcoutrement short of cholera. Then some modern families move in to experience life in the pre-welfare state raw for five episodes. They are cast as skilled and general labourers, a shopkeeping couple who must choose between making a living and not letting their neighbours starve, and a single mother.
It is – if you ignore the possibility that this is a public information film in disguise and we should all be taking notes for a future that is hurtling towards us – fun, of a kind. But more than ever before – and there have been a lot of these things before – it seems to have been made for children. There is nothing in it about slum or Victorian life that a 12-year-old won’t have already picked up along the way. Bar one overt comparison of labourers’ employment uncertainty with modern zero-hour contracts, it is left up to the viewer to draw any deeper lessons from the families’ desperate scratching together of the weekly rent and inability to do more than just survive within the system as it stands. This may change as we move through the increasingly turbulent late-Victorian decades over the next four weeks. I hope so.
