TV REVIEWS : Channel 4 Probes L.A.’s ‘Gang Crisis’

Nature abhors a vacuum, so when the culture of industrialized, well-paying jobs vanishes from an area, a substitute culture rises up in its place--most likely a culture driven by pure survival instincts, based on protecting what little is left.

That is one cause for the explosion in Los Angeles’ gang culture, and there’s a very telling moment in Marlo Coleman Bendau’s report on the explosion, “Dreams Under Fire: The Gang Crisis” (at 5 p.m. Sunday on KNBC-TV Channel 4) when a mother stares down her neighborhood street, comparing it to a jungle: “If you have a baby and leave it alone in this jungle, some animal will come along and eat that baby. So the baby learns how to survive.”

Bendau’s study is at once harsh and empathetic, superficial and profound. Filming between October, 1991, and last May, her cameras have tenaciously prowled the streets of not just East L.A. and South-Central but also of gang-plagued Granada Hills to record the voices of youth caught up in crime, of mothers of gang kids sending a message of tough love, and of authority figures trying to get ahead of the growing crisis.

In trying to hear from everybody in an hour’s time (a live, hourlong discussion follows), “Dreams Under Fire” tends to scan the scene without deeply examining anything in particular. We hear a citation of the causes of gangs--the substitute family, economic/social decay, peer pressure, the allure of money and power--but little about why the problems are with us. Too often, there’s a sense floating through this report of gang culture as a mysterious disease, rather than what it is: a natural response to a society in decay.

As was his wont, Father Gregory Boyle, the recently departed head of Dolores Mission and hero to countless ex-gang members, charts the solution here quickly and clearly: Bring work and well-paying jobs into the inner city, and gangs will shrivel away. Channel the smarts, intestinal fortitude and sheer will it takes to create a gang into socially useful work, Boyle and others say, and you turn a community around. Without this, Bendau’s violent, emotional images suggest that the bloody alternative will only get worse.