(soft, eerie music)
- At its core, this is a story
of deep and systemic injustice
of people who were harmed
and all the ways in which society failed them.
Systems that had been built to protect, did not work.
Not by accident, but by design.
This is a different story
than the stories that have been told
because yes, it is a story about Dahmer,
but it's also a story about the victims.
It is a story, not just about the victims who were murdered,
but about the community,
about the chilling impact
of not just what Jeffrey Dahmer was able to do
in all the harm,
but all of the ways in which the police,
which the larger leadership in Milwaukee,
which the media and so many others in society
were complicit.
This was not a situation of a lone wolf,
which is oftentimes the story that gets told about Dahmer.
And so what makes this different
is that we get to understand and see the humanity
of those who were murdered by Jeffrey Dahmer.
But we get to understand and see it
not as unfortunate but as unjust.
As the producer on this project
and in my role as the leader of Color of Change,
I wanted to make sure that
we really enhanced the deep understanding
of the systemic racism in the Milwaukee Police Department,
that we
really enhance all the ways in which policing failed
throughout each and every stage,
the incentive structures that allowed a blonde-haired guy
to continually kill and harm people,
particularly black and brown people.
And the ways in which homophobia also played a role.
The ways in which police
and those in power turned their backs
instead of actually dealing with the situation.
I wanted to enforce
the humanity of these victims
and their families.
I wanted to make sure that we, as viewers,
got to truly sort of understand
how a situation like this takes place
not just through Jeffrey Dahmer's eyes,
but through the eyes of people who had their own hopes
and aspirations and dreams.
And I wanted those things to be connected.
I also wanted people to get a sense from activism, right?
To see sort of the ways in which community leaders,
whether they be the Ronald Flowers character
or it be Jesse Jackson,
to see the engagement in activism.
And of course, I also wanted people to see Glenda Cleveland
as a real person
and also as a larger representative of the ways in which
we don't treat people
who should be the protagonists in our stories
as the protagonists, and as a result,
we make the wrong decisions about who to listen to.
But I have to say that the Ronald Flowers character,
not just sort of the position that he was put in
inside of Dahmer's grandmother's house,
but his fight to get out and his survival,
and then moving to be an activist
to work to help other young men in the community
make sense of the situations
and the challenges they were going through.
I think that the arc of his character is important
for viewers to see that
people were responding and engaging
and dealing with the harm and the trauma
in a range of different ways,
and the sort of fight of gay black men
to be heard and to be seen,
and to dictate on their own terms, a better world.
I thought that that was really important.
And it's a character that,
whose scenes were both challenging,
but whose scenes were also deeply important
for us to not just see the victimization,
but the aspiration. (soft, eerie music)