Oscar-nominated director Yance Ford’s new documentary, “Power, which chronicles policing in America, was released just before the fourth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis Police Department officer.
Unlike productions such as Colin Kaepernick’s 2023 docuseries “Killing County,” which spotlights the high rate of police killings in Kern County, California, “Power” zooms out to the historical role law enforcement has played in America. News clips, scenes from Hollywood movies, archival material, CCTV footage, images from police body and dash cameras, and cell phone videos are intricately woven together with commentary from a cast of scholars, historians, journalists, and police officers. Ford constructs a compelling counter-narrative to the depiction of cops as “peace officers” tasked with “public safety.” This movie is the filmic equivalent of “the talk.”
Conventional police propaganda, known as “copaganda,” conditions viewers via the news, television, and movies to view law enforcement officers as, in the words of President Ronald Reagan, “manning the thin blue line that holds back a jungle.” As Black Lives Matter organizer and independent vice presidential candidate Melina Abdullah told The Progressive in 2022, “When Black people are killed or harmed by police, the first thing we’re trained [and] socialized to do is say, ‘What did he or she do?’ Next is the argument, ‘If she or he had just complied’ … Copaganda is used to train us to think about Black people as automatically guilty, and police as automatically right in their actions.”
But “Power” cuts through the veil of copaganda to expose the true purpose of policing, which began before the United States was even established as a nation. Julian Go, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, notes in the documentary that the term “patrolman” is derived from slave patrols originating in 1704 in South Carolina. According to New York University Professor Nikhil Pal Singh, today’s police force evolved out of Western frontier militias that enforced Manifest Destiny and White encroachment on Indigenous land.
“Power” highlights how police were also used, as Go says, “to regulate the White working class”—including immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe—and to violently bust labor strikes. Police, Singh adds, enforced the law for “those who have property, against those who don’t.”
The film explores the role of police in the rebellions and civil unrest that occurred in the late 20th century in the United States, such as the urban uprisings in cities like Newark and Detroit during the “Long, Hot Summer of 1967.” In one clip, Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton declares: “The police are not in our community to protect us, but to contain and brutalize us. The police deny us due process of law.”
“Power” also details the insidious role of August Vollmer in the U.S. occupation of foreign lands such as the Philippines, dubbing him “the father of modern policing.” A Spanish-American War veteran, Vollmer brought the military enforcement tactics used in the Philippines back to the United States, where he became the first police chief of Berkeley, California. In 1916, Vollmer headed a new criminal justice department at the University of California-Berkeley.
Stuart Schrader, author of “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing,” asserts in the film: “Police understood communism and Black Power [were] similar to liberation movements around the globe.” Police and authorities try to explain these movements away, contending that protesters are “dupes of the Soviet Union, [which has] convinced Blacks to rebel.” Of course, like the old “outside agitator” myth, this denies that people are responding to real societal problems that must be dealt with.
This analytical, thoughtful, and accessible documentary includes glimpses of some of the most infamous acts of police abuse of power, including Rodney King’s 1991 beating in Los Angeles, Eric Garner’s 2014 killing on Staten Island, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
This powerful documentary asks the audience, where are we now, four years after Floyd’s murder and, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery reminds us, “a decade after Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown”? Ex-prosecutor Paul Butler, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and frequent MSNBC commentator, chillingly states, “It’s hard to prosecute police killings of Black [people] because it’s usually legal.”
Christy Lopez, Butler’s Georgetown colleague, echoes this point: “Most of the harm police cause is perfectly legal … It’s scary, right?”
There are, according to the film, currently 18,000 police departments in the United States—lavishly funded in 2023 with $129 billion taxpayer dollars.
Go insists that “one of the first things fascists do is increase police power”—an especially unsettling thought as pro-Palestine protests encampments across America’s college campuses are torn down by campus and municipal police forces. The police are, Go says, “the fourth branch of government.”
“Power” is available on Netflix.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This review originally appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2024
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