Santa Maria Police Department Lieutenant Daniel Cohen has been investigating and policing local gangs for more than a decade, and has seen firsthand the multitude of victims left in the wake of gang crimes. He has seen young men mature behind bars and others who never got the chance.
He remembered one particular interrogation with a gang member that took place years ago, a young man who had just confessed to shooting someone. The man broke down into tears at the interrogation table.
“I asked him, ‘Do you have any regrets?’” Cohen said. “And he said, ‘I wish someone would have just warned me.’”
Experiences like that one planted the seed of an idea in Cohen’s mind: He wanted to find a way to expose young people intrigued by the mystique of gang culture to the realities a life within it could entail. While the SMPD engaged in youth outreach throughout the city via local schools and organizations focused on gangs, it was police doing the speaking. Outreach efforts lacked the impact that direct information from the mouth of a gang member could have. Cohen believed that kind of testimony could serve as a powerful inoculation for young people.
“I can’t stand in front of a classroom wearing a badge and uniform and tell the kids, ‘Trust me kids, I’ve been investigating gangs for years: Don’t do it,’ and have the effect,” he said. “But when a gang member who has lived it, and was enamored by the lifestyle, and was drawn into it, they can tell them that it’s not worth it. It has a different credibility to it.”
In the early 2000s, the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office started rigorously applying several gang enhancement laws that had been on the books since the 1980s. Because of that, local gang members were being sent to jail for longer stretches of time, Cohen explained, which re-shaped the local gang culture in an unprecedented way. Notorious for never speaking with police, more gang members came forward with information about gangs and their own experiences within the groups. Some even agreed to speak while being filmed.
“Some of these gang members decided it just wasn’t worth it anymore, and a lot of them dropped out,” Cohen said. “As some gang members did the unthinkable and dropped out and began to speak with us, other gang members began to follow.
It reached a point where so many gang members were open to talk to us that we had trouble communicating with all of them.”
Cohen would often use these clips at the end of outreach presentations, but he knew it was just scratching the surface. He reached out to local filmmaker Matt Yoon and began producing a documentary film aimed at gang prevention at the beginning of 2013. The result of more than a year of organization, interviews, and editing resulted in Life Facing Bars: A Gang Prevention Documentary, which the SMPD uploaded onto YouTube in March of last year and released again with Spanish dubbing last month. Cohen has also sent hundreds of DVDs of the film to organizations across the country, as the poignancy of the nearly 40-minute video isn’t lost on organizations outside of the county or even the state.
Heart of an issue
A local spiritual support group enjoyed one of the first screenings of the film’s Spanish version in early December 2014, explained local school district translator Elsa Hernandez, who procured a copy for an Amor y Servicio meeting that included a crowd of more than 2,000 Spanish speakers. The group is designed around the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous and screened the documentary as a service to help raise awareness among local families whose youth are vulnerable to the gangs.
“The material in there was astonishing,” Hernandez said. “A lot of our Spanish community members, especially those that are first-generation immigrants, they have no idea how our children can get easily hooked into the gangs and all the aspects they bring to the youth. They don’t know how to read hand symbols, their choice of clothes, their mannerisms.”
Life Facing Bars is divided into five chapters. The first chapter includes incarcerated gang members opening up about their experiences, addressing the distinct ways the cult operates. The second chapter covers gang enhancement laws, which lengthens sentences not just for gang members, but those who commit a crime with one or more gang members.
The third chapter carries the most impact by far, as it shares the stories of families who have lost parents and children to gang violence and incarceration. Through such scenes as of the young boy whose father is serving a life sentence, the parents crying over their son who was stabbed to death at 18 years old, or Dystiny Myers’ family visiting her grave, the message is clear about how harmful gangs can be to the innocent. It had a profound effect on the audience at the Amor y Servicio meeting, Hernandez explained.
“It was just amazing when we showed that video, the reactions of the people that were there, it was like, ‘That could be my son,’” she said. “There is nothing stronger for that group than family, so when you present them with this type of material in their language, you really create an awareness, and now, they just need to do something about it.”
Offering a solution
While Life Facing Bars does address a hugely negative issue, the film also provides a wealth of content that offers a potential solution to the massively complex issue of gang involvement. The fourth chapter, titled “Escaping Your Environment,” includes interviews with local educators like Pete Flores, Santa Maria High School’s assistant principal of student affairs, who explains the importance mentors have in education and shares his own story of a counselor who kept him in school.
Flores became assistant principal at Santa Maria High in 2010 at the behest of Principal Joseph Domingues, who saw the change Flores had wrought on a high school campus in Soledad five years earlier. Flores implemented a number of tools in Soledad, including a school-wide standard of excellence, to help abate the more than weekly occurrences of violence between students from rivaling neighborhoods.
“One of my main goals when I got there was to try and make it a safe campus,” Flores said. “Because pretty much everyone knows that for kids to focus on learning, they have to feel that they are coming to a safe campus. We kind of coined the phrase: ‘This is a learning institution, not an extension of the streets.’”
Many factors have helped curtail violent outbreaks on Santa Maria’s campus, Flores explained, including a baseball cap ban, spirit assemblies, and now, the film. Many teachers at Santa Mara High have shown the film to their classes, but Flores also uses it as a training tool for the teachers.
“The one thing I’ve always said is that, particularly for law enforcement, probation, and schools, there should be consequences for gang-type behavior, but I really believe there has to be relationship building too,” Flores said. “For example, I will go pay a home visit to some of these kids, and the parents and the student, they view that as a huge step, someone who really cares.”
Flores and others advocate for this mentoring approach in the film, and it’s an idea that aligns with the mission statements of many local organizations. The Boys and Girls Club of Santa Maria Valley uses the film as part of the organization’s national gang prevention program, Street Smart, which offers education on gangs and nonviolent conflict resolution, explained area director Anna Libbon.
“We use the video when we run the program here with our members,” Libbon said. “And I do know that many of the kids had already seen it, and some were even related to the gang members speaking in the video, so they did relate.”
When producing Life Facing Bars, Cohen had junior high and high school students specifically in mind. Classroom presentations were the intended forum, he explained, which is the main reason why he kept the film’s length shorter than 40 minutes. This allows for a screening of the film with 20 minutes leftover for questions and discussion, all within the usual hour time slot allotted for visiting presenters.
Addressing the issue of gangs with young people directly is especially important, Cohen explained, because they are the gangs’ target audience and are especially vulnerable to them. A young person who is exposed to the truth early enough is much less likely to join, he contended, and thus saves themselves, their families, and the community from the collective heartbreak that follows gang activity.
“If we were to go into any strategic plan to have an impact on the gang problem in Santa Maria, and our goal was just to make arrests, I can tell you that we are going to fail,” Cohen said. “We have to have a multi-pronged approach, and it’s so much easier to prevent a youth from getting involved in gangs than it is to remove them from the gangs once they’ve been indoctrinated.”
“And we don’t want them to get involved in this for their own good,” he added. “We can’t just sit back and do nothing; we have to try something different.”
Digital effect
The Santa Maria Police Department has distributed more than 450 copies of Life Facing Bars, many of which were requested via email from several different organizations and law enforcement agencies, Cohen explained. It has been screened for training officers, incarcerated juveniles, and parolees, and in youth outreach programs in several California counties. This widespread demand is a direct result of the viral exposure the film has received on the Internet, something Cohen didn’t foresee when he started the project.
“You would laugh if you heard my thought process going into it,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘I wonder if we can get 1,000 people to this, or maybe in a dream fantasy world 10,000 would watch it.”
Within a few months of the YoutTube release last year, the video had been viewed tens of thousands of times from 50 countries and every state in the U.S., Cohen explained. The English version of the video now has more than 170,000 views on YouTube. This isn’t a truly accurate representation of the number of people who have seen the film, however, as it is often used for group settings like a classroom.
Many YouTube users have taken the time to sign in and leave their comments on the video’s page. Most applaud the documentary as money and time well spent, but not all comments are positive. Some leave nothing more than posturing, either talking up the “thug life” or challenging other YouTube users, while others attack law enforcement and District Attorney Joyce Dudley personally, decrying the gang enhancements as draconian, though the vocabulary used is far from decent. Cohen understood those feelings would abound regarding the gang enhancement laws, but decided to include certain examples in the film, regardless.
“I think we used an example where some people stole some chips and they got a long time in prison,” Cohen said. “And using an example like that, it is going to incite those feelings in people, and I knew that going into it.”
“I wanted kids to know that this is real, this is not a joke,” he continued. “I understand that perspective, but I live from a vantage point where I see the people who are shot and killed for nothing, for walking down the sidewalk, for wearing the wrong color, or for being in the wrong neighborhood.”
Though the punishments are harsh, nobody understands the gravity of them better than those serving the sentences. The orange-jumpsuit-clad men in Life Facing Bars speak with clarity about the way gangs operate. Their voices reveal a kind of pain, though it doesn’t indicate any anger with the system or law enforcement. They also make no hesitation in elucidating why they made such poor decisions and what it takes to change a mindset and escape that world.
“I was blown away that not only were they able to sit down in a really articulate manner and explain some pretty complex topics, but they were able to do it in a way that people understand. I was very impressed by them,” Cohen said. “But the thing that is great about this project is these guys did this because they believe in it; this was 100 percent unscripted, and we told them we just wanted to sit down and talk with them, have a conversation.”
While many YouTube comments called out individual inmates, claiming they were never real gangsters or that they are just snitches, those comments are far outweighed by the number of voices praising the documentary and the awareness it’s creating. Individuals, gang prevention groups, and other agencies have shared the video across many social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, spreading the conversation to those forums and beyond.
“I think the documentary did a really good job of coming full circle by not just being one of these films that wags its finger at our kids or our community and says that, ‘You’re the negative in the community, you’re going to get locked up, and we will eradicate you,’” SMHS Assistant Principal Pete Flores said. “Obviously, it’s a negative topic, but the message I think it conveys is that there is hope and there is help, and so, while I don’t have any data or anything to prove it, I can tell you that I think it’s made a difference with a lot of our kids.”
See for yourself
Life Facing Bars: A Gang Prevention Documentary is available for viewing on youtube.com in English at http://youtu.be/wal5QFvTSWw and in Spainish at http://youtu.be/cPSIU7ZZhAU. More information is available through the Santa Maria Police Department at 928-3781 or cityofsantamaria.org.
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 15-22, 2015.