It’s an unsettled season in the long history of America’s relationship with the police, one in which the killings of black men and women by law enforcement officers have raised important questions about institutional culture, the possibility of police reform and the value the law places on the lives of African Americans. In this context, and given the high esteem and wide latitude Americans have historically granted to the police, two recent documentaries explore a point of inflection: What turns a police officer from someone we trust into someone we regard as a monster? And why is it so difficult to hold cops accountable before they travel from one extreme on that spectrum to another?  In “Thought Crimes,” Erin Lee Carr explores the case of Gilberto Valle, a former New York police officer who became notorious after his wife discovered logs of his chats with fetishists in which Valle discussed fantasies about torturing, raping, killing and eating women. He was initially convicted of both misuse of a law enforcement database, which he used to find personal data about women, and a conspiracy to commit kidnapping; the kidnapping conviction has been thrown out, though the government has appealed a judge’s decision. Nick Broomfield’s 2014 documentary, “Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” explores the case of Lonnie Franklin, who will go on trial this summer in the killings of 10 Los Angeles women, in a case that advocates say dragged on because the city’s police department didn’t take crimes against black women seriously.  “Thought Crimes,” as its title suggests, focuses more on the question of when fantasies become concrete plans for actions and grounds to prosecute the conspirators who are planning crimes together. But if Valle’s specific fantasies were hugely unnerving on their own, Carr and her sources get at a second reason he was so disturbing to the public. He was a police officer, making his chat logs and use of law enforcement databases to research women he fantasized about not just a potential step toward acting on his thoughts, but also a betrayal of the confidence we are supposed to place in the police to protect us.  “That this guy used police databases to track down women, and he used his privileges as an officer of the law to do that, oh, it just sends a shiver down my spine,” commentator Laurie Penny says in the film. “It’s an extraordinary breach of trust between the police as an entity and the public at large. It wasn’t just thought crime. It’s real crime.” In another scene, Valle’s mother, Liz, comes across his old police uniform in a dry-cleaning bag while she is trying to pick out an outfit for him to wear to court. “I don’t know why I kept it,” she says, the implication obvious. Wearing it again would seem like a deliberate provocation, given how much Valle’s inner life conflicted with the public expectation that police officers be upstanding citizens in both deed and thought.  But part of what’s interesting about the disgust that greeted Valle’s fantasies is that we’ve granted police officers enormous discretion to kill, and enormous discretion to decide whose life is important and whose isn’t.  That second sort of discretion is the subject of the exceptionally disturbing “Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” which, like “Thought Crimes,” aired on HBO this spring. The movie is an investigation into the case of Lonnie Franklin, who is due to go on trial this summer on charges that he killed 10 women, though there are suspicions that the alleged serial murderer, referred to as the Grim Sleeper because of a hiatus in his slayings, may have many times that number of victims.  Broomfield’s interview subjects, most of them black women who lived in Franklin’s neighborhood for decades, are blunt about why they think the killings went on for so long. The Los Angeles Police Department apparently suspected that a serial killer was at work as early as 1985 (Franklin was not arrested until 2010), but the relatives of Barbara Ware, who was killed in 1987, say they weren’t informed of that element of the investigation for more than a decade.  “They said, ‘Well, why are you concerned about it?’ ” recalls Margaret Prescod, who founded the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders in the 1980s to try to warn her neighbors about the Grim Sleeper. “And we were a bit shocked. And they said ‘he’s only killing hookers.’ That was said to us.” Pam Brooks, a former sex worker who became deeply involved in the making of Broomfield’s film, is blunter. “The police don’t care because these are black women,” she says. “We don’t mean nothing to them.”  Gilberto Valle apparently didn’t act on his fantasies; the harm he did to his wife, among others, is thus far confined to the realm of psychology. But the police in the Grim Sleeper case also didn’t take action in a way that may have had much more serious consequences. Many of Broomfield’s sources say they were confounded that the Los Angeles Police Department didn’t at least move aggressively to inform black women and sex workers that they were at risk.  “You’ve allowed black women to walk around here when someone is hunting them, not knowing that they’re being hunted,” Nana Gyamfi, a lawyer who advised Prescod’s coalition, tells Broomfield. “Imagine if they would have treated victim number three as if she was a student over at UCLA with blonde hair and blue eyes. How many other people might still be living? But the lack of concern allowed for this hunting ground to just be free and open for this person.”  At one point, a Los Angeles police officer was arrested in connection with the Grim Sleeper’s crimes; the ballistics evidence that pointed to him as a suspect turned out to be flawed. Had that case continued, that cop might have been deemed a monster in the same way Valle was. “People with sexually violent intentions, not just fantasies, but offenders-to-be may seek out law enforcement positions because of their ability to more easily access prey,” Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist, tells Carr in “Thought Crimes.” The Grim Sleeper investigators, though, seem unlikely to face any sort of consequences for the way they handled the case, even though the community they were supposed to serve felt that their conduct at least breached public trust, and at worst led to more deaths.  Both the Valle and Franklin cases raise many important issues, from the free-speech implications of criminalizing a person’s private thoughts to the historical relationship between the LAPD and Los Angeles’ African American communities. Together they help clarify an important point.  We’ll turn against the police when we feel they’ve grossly betrayed our trust and the freedom we give them to make life-or-death decisions. But we’ve granted the law so much latitude and set the bar for what constitutes an outrage — a disturbing fantasy, a man shot in the back as he flees, a child killed for playing with a toy gun — so high that we’ve made it harder for ourselves to feel the horror and anger about lesser, more common violations or about cases of lethal indifference that might lead us to push for meaningful change.  Alyssa Rosenberg blogs about pop culture for The Washington Post's Opinions section.
Two documentaries suggest that we'll turn against the police for gross violations of our expectations, even while granting them latitude over life and death that can lead to horrifying results.