Violence, Crime, and Economic Poverty

Bayview-Hunter's Point


Oakland

The Real State of Emergency

Earlier this year, a 17-year-old East Oakland native used a camcorder to explore the impact of the high number of slayings in the city's toughest neighborhoods. See the video essay Elliott McGregor produced last spring for San Francisco's Conscious Youth Media Crew, a digital media production company that trains inner city youth to create films that represent their experiences. (12 minutes)

Straight Outta Hunter's Point

These two video excerpts are from "Straight Outta Hunters Point", the award-winning Hip Hop documentary by Hunters Point filmmaker Kevin Epps.

It is a stark cinematic portrait of a community struggling to stop the forces of gentrification -- denial of jobs, police brutality, environmental racism and more -- that have pushed 23 percent of San Francisco's Black population out of the City in the past decade. It has won the acclaim of critics and audiences at independent film festivals around the U.S., including Sundance and the Santa Fe Film Fest, where it was described as "a gritty, uncompromising film about the evolution and perseverance of a black culture in the shadow of poverty, race riots and gang-related rap wars."

These next two videos are excerpts from the film. They begin with some common footage/narration, but they diverge to address different issues: the first focuses on the history of Hunter's Point and the second focuses on recent problems with gang-related violence.




This is a music video by RBL Posse ("Ruthless By Law"--a gangsta rap group from Hunter's Point) for the film. It's kinda heavy on the chorus (which is kinda heavy itself), but the verses bring up topics like crime, drugs, and violence in the neighborhood: