Does the Los Santos PD really discriminate? The bizarre emergent racial dynamics in Rockstar’s billion-dollar blockbuster.
Grand Theft Auto V is, among many other things, the most immersive simulation of Southern California — and Los Angeles — ever created. And people on the internet have started to read into the game some of that region's most vexed dynamics, particularly the relationship between police and people of color.
Franklin, one of the game's three playable characters, is black, and as the MacArthur fellow Mike Davis wrote in his seminal history of L.A., City of Quartz, "Since the early 1950s, the LAPD has been regarded by L.A.'s Black community as a redneck army of occupation."
Dozens of tweets and forum posts, sampled below, detail how players believe that Franklin is treated differently from the other two, white, playable characters, by the Los Santos Police Department (the game's stand-in for the LAPD):
So, I was strolling down a boulevard, innocuous as any upstanding citizen, and suddenly, a white man begins assaulting me, making me flee as he pursued me with his frantic violence. Abruptly, I have 1 star - absolutely no reason besides the fact a citizen reported the situation and I was presumed the culprit... and the cops arrive. As I'm innocent, I raise my hands, knowing they'll understand, but they abruptly say 'HE HAS A WEAPON' whilst I'm unarmed, opening fire.....
2 minutes later, I'm running down an alley as eight LAPD cops are behind me, GUNS DRAWN, and I still have absolutely no clue as to why. "Is it because I am black? Is this what happens? They think I am immediately guilty? I am armed? I am a huge threat? I've done something?" I see an escape, a rooftop with a ladder up it, and I begin climbing, but the police murder me - shooting me in the back multiple times as an 'armed suspect'..... execution-style as I have my back to them.
I was driving around as Franklin and stopped at a gas station in a more rural part of town. Got out of my car, walked up to this white trash woman. The fella she was with punched her in the face, ran away, she looks at me, calls the cops. 1 star."
