‘Reporters’ Segment on Gang Violence to Air

Fox Broadcasting’s “The Reporters” will air a segment Saturday looking at South-Central Los Angeles gang violence with videotape footage that producer Pamela Brown likens to war-zone coverage.

Brown and cameraman David Garfinkel were here for five days late last month and early this month to research the story, “Caught in the Crossfire,” which will air at 8 p.m. Saturday on Channels 11 and 6. They accompanied police to the scenes of three separate shootings that left two dead and one wounded. At one point, while interviewing four gang members, gunfire erupted around them, Brown said.

“I’ve been doing this 14 years,” she said from Fox station WNYW in New York, where she was editing the piece, “and it reminded me of some of the war zone stuff I’ve done. It’s very raw, very gritty.”

Time magazine and other media outlets had reporters on the scene of various shootouts, she added. “It seems everybody’s poised to cover this story and ask what the hell is going on out there.”

Although she also talked to a number of officials and sociologists while she was here, she seemed most impressed by the sheer volume and deadliness of the violence she encountered.

At one shooting scene, she said, “we arrived before the paramedics to the home of a young man who was shot in the back seven times for wearing the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood.”