[There was a video here]

From around 1985 to 2007, a serial killer known as the “Grim Sleeper” murdered black women in South Central Los Angeles. He had 10 known victims (one woman he attempted to murder survived) and is suspected of killing more than 100 more. In 2010, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., the suspected Grim Sleeper, was arrested. He is currently in jail awaiting trial.

Last night HBO aired Nick Broomfield’s excellent documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper, which chronicles Franklin’s case, the community he’s accused of terrorizing, and the LAPD’s handling of the case. Detrimentally, decades passed before the police alerted the public of a presence of a serial killer.

“You’ve allowed black women to walk around here when someone is hunting them not knowing that they’re being hunted,” says Nana Gyamfi, an attorney who’s part of the grassroots organization Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, in the clip below. “The lack of concern allowed so many more people to be murdered.”

As Gyamfi’s BCFBSM colleague Margaret Prescod explains in the clip above, “When we went and said we were concerned about it, they said, ‘Well, why are you concerned about it?’ And we were a bit shocked. And they said, ‘He’s only killing hookers.’ That was said to us by the captain or whoever the hell it was down there.”

Pam Brooks, a former prostitute, guided Broomfield and his crew through South Central Los Angeles and helped them connect with relevant interview subjects (at one point in the movie, Broomfield credited her with running their production). She knew and hung out with Franklin. She explained the LAPD’s apathy like this:

We don’t mean nothing to them. We black. What the fuck? Just another nigga dead. Bitch shouldn’t have been out there on them drugs. This cace is not a high-profile case because they didn’t make it one. Now, if I was a fuckin’ celebrity or a white woman, maybe…that would have put more of an emphasis on it. But I’m a black woman. Who gives a fuck about me?

[There was a video here]