“Power” begins with archival video of goose-stepping cops from what looks like the early 20th century. A talking head voiceover: “We never can figure out who polices the police. We never can figure out what gives the police authority over the people.” Footage of a Black activist from the 1960s: “The police occupy our area like a foreign troop occupies territory.” A disembodied voice: “There are a lot of people who feel policing is out of control.” A Black woman’s voice: “The brutality of police indicates we have not achieved full citizenship. And that is why the police are the spark for such outsized protests. Because it is a direct affront to our belonging, to our ability to be here.”
And by now, we’re only one minute into the documentary!
Then video of heavily armed cops in riot gear marching on some kind of protest while a cop from a loudspeaker warns, “You need to disperse immediately or you will be subject to arrest.” It was exactly what I witnessed on that October night in 2011 when Occupy Oakland swarmed City Hall—a night that did not end well when the protesters rioted and wrecked downtown.
“Police power is enormous, omnipotent, and hard to pin down,” says another voice, while the screen depicts images of an atomic bomb explosion. (!!!) “In the United States the police are effectively unregulated. Who is more powerful: the people, or the police?” Images of strikebreaking cops in the 1920s and 1930s and, yes, they were violent. Voiceover: “Violence that lives in the distant past. Does that violence stay in the past, or move through time?”
“Historically law and order has meant restraining small portions of the population for the benefit of the larger portion of the population.” This, from an historian. He asks, “How much of ‘law and order’ is orderly society as defined by whom?”
Well, you get the idea. This Netflix documentary is an anti-police cartoon that might have been scripted by Cat Brooks. There’s virtually nothing from the cops’ point of view, or for that matter from the perspective of innocent civilians who depend on the police to protect them. All the talking heads are woke academics: sociologists, historians and so forth, with an obvious bias.
The reviews have been rapturous. RogerEbert.com called it “thought provoking…carefully dissect[ed] in pieces so that this audience learns something new about this centuries-old issue.” For CNN, it was “provocative…intellectual.” Rotten Tomatoes scored it 81%; one “top critic” (from the L.A. Times) said “it lands plenty of hard truths and harder questions.” The director, Lance Ford, is a trans person; the producer, Multitude Films, describes itself as “a queer- and women-led independent production company dedicated to telling nonfiction stories by and about historically excluded and underrepresented communities.”
I celebrate the ability of marginalized artists to tell the stories of their communities, although for the life of me I don’t know why so many LGBTQ people hate cops. But I have to warn you that “Power” is really one-sided. It presents itself as “asking questions” but it really answered them all in its first visual moments, with those awful images. “Power” begins with resentment of police and never manages to break through that critical limitation. It also never manages to tackle the question of how we, as society, are supposed to deal with the violence and mayhem we have in Oakland, if not through the police. But “Power” isn’t interested in solutions. Its goal is to muckrake, to stir up anti-cop emotions and feed them with curated images and biased commentary that in no way can be considered fair.
Steve Heimoff