No Human Involved - Nick Broomfield on 'Disposable People'

Nick Broomfield, an award winning filmmaker, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about his work. 

He says that his current film, 

about the ‘Grim Sleeper,’ 

alleged serial killer Lonnie Franklin, 

is about ‘Disposable People.’ 

The Police used to use the slang term 

‘no human involved,’ 

or NHI, to describe 

murdered prostitutes 

or gang members. 

They wouldn’t bother ‘doing proper forensics,’ 

would lose evidence so it didn’t take up too much room, 

and generally not put too much effort into investigating it.

There was an attitude that 

as these were disposable people, 

‘it didn’t really matter.’ 

He thinks it is more to do with class than colour, 

those who have little political weight, 

people who are not regarded as ‘proper citizens.’ 

It is, however, seen particularly in black communities 

like south central, or Ferguson, for example. 

He says that he’s ‘not sure The Police has changed their attitude very much, 

I think their PR departments [but] 

I think the attitude of NHI still very much exists today.’ 

He says that people feel the police racism 

in Ferguson could have happened across the States, 

and there is an ‘intrinsic racism’ 

in both the Republican and Democrat parties.

He also made a film about the 

23 Chinese cockle pickers 

who died in Morecambe Bay, 

which revealed the ‘exploitation’ 

of undocumented workers by a lot of big companies, 

yet no government has been prepared to take on the issue 

of immigration. 

He says that ‘Waitrose, Sainsburys, Tesco, are very dependent on this labour force to pick their vegetables, work in slaughter houses’ – the low paid, unregulated jobs, where immigrants make a huge contribution to the standard of living in Britain.

He argues that the political system in the US is ‘designed to disenfranchise’ minority communities, pointing out that possession of crack, something predominantly in black communities, you get an automatic felony conviction that excludes you from voting for minimum 7 years, whereas the white drug of choice, cocaine, would be a misdemeanour with no felony conviction, and he argues this has been the way since ‘the end of slavery.’ 

The reason he went to America to make films was down to the reaction to his first film, Juvenile Liaison, about police in a poor community in Blackburn, dealing mainly with juveniles. It is still banned to this day, he alleges, by police ‘putting enough pressure on the BFI,’ and available only for specialised groups.