Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton has seen the film three times, and encouraged the deputy chief in charge of LAPD's professional standards to pass copies around the department. But Joe Hicks, the longtime African American community activist, believes the movie so distorts the state of race relations that it could hurt Los Angeles' reputation.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa loved the movie. His lawyer, a former member of the county Human Relations Commission, hated it.
"Crash" opened 10 months ago, but it continues to resonate across Los Angeles for reasons that have little to do with the six Oscars it is up for Sunday.
The movie has become something of a Rorschach test for Angelenos, separating those who believe the city's multicultural residents usually get along and those who feel race relations remain an open wound. Is the Los Angeles of "Crash" an accurate depiction of racial strife lurking just below the surface, or is it a cartoonish collection of stereotypes presented as the real L.A.? It's a debate that has played out at dinner tables, in classrooms and online.
While previous films about race relations in Los Angeles, such as "Grand Canyon" and "White Men Can't Jump," focused on main characters who stood for racial tolerance even when society did not, "Crash" offers about a dozen loosely based stories with few heroes.
A young black man complains when a white woman clutches her purse as she walks by him, then carjacks her SUV. An LAPD officer goes on a racist rant against a black employee of an HMO and later saves the life of a black woman. An Iranian shop owner is the victim of a hate crime and takes his anger out on a Latino locksmith. A Latina police detective and a Korean woman exchange racial epithets after a fender bender.
To its fans, "Crash" offers a raw, unsentimental but ultimately honest view of race in Los Angeles.
"There's nothing I saw depicted there that I've not experienced in my own years of policing, that my wife has not," Bratton said in an interview last week. "Just under the surface there is, unfortunately, a tension."
Since he became police chief nearly four years ago, no issue has more consumed Bratton than the fragile relationship between his department and African Americans. He's been called a racial healer and a racist as he grappled with an officer's fatal shooting of a 13-year-old black boy and the videotaped beating of a black car-chase suspect that some compared to the Rodney King assault a decade earlier. More recently, his department has been dealing with reverberations from racial tensions between blacks and Latinos in the county jails and at several high schools.
