SYNOPSIS
In the United States, police have been granted extraordinary power over our individual lives. The police determine who is suspicious and who ‘fits the description.’ They define the threats and decide how to respond. They demand obedience and carry the constant threat of violence. Thousands of these interactions play out in our cities and towns every day, according to real and perceived ideas of criminality and threats to social order—as decided by the police. Police make the abstract power of the state real.
Power traces the accumulation of money, the consolidation of political power, and the nearly unrestricted bipartisan support that has created the institution of policing as we know it. The film offers a visceral and immersive journey to demonstrate how we’ve arrived at this moment in history, from the slave patrols of the 1700’s and the first publicly funded police departments of the 1800’s to the uprisings of the 1960’s and 2020’s.
Part essay, part interview, and part archival collage, Power uses historical materials to illustrate our contemporary realities and examines urgent questions about a growing and largely unchecked authority—who is policed, who is protected, who gets to decide, and why.
DIRECTOR’S
STATEMENT
In the summer of 2020, I – along with the rest of the world – watched a police officer commit murder on television. Then, in the ensuing months, I watched again and again as police forces around the country arrested, beat, and tear gassed protesters who were outraged by the murder of George Floyd and the violence of policing. Over and over again, I thought: what, exactly, do the police exist to do?
With Power, I was motivated to attach the historical origins of the police to this contemporary moment and I went into this film with a real curiosity about what makes the institution of policing so powerful. My team and I dug into decades of academic research and police footage dating back to the early 20th century. The patterns that emerged clearly traced the domestic and global forces that have shaped policing into what it is today.
The film intentionally bleeds together timelines and archival material to break down the evolution of policing over centuries and draw attention to the repetition of the images of police coercion, control, and violence throughout history. The film moves deliberately from theme to theme and non chronologically to illustrate how past and present policing could easily be confused. In Power, time does the work of showing people what they may not have seen before now.
My role as a narrator is one of radical transparency. I ask you, the viewer, take an honest assessment of policing as you know it. Are you and I policed in the same way in this country? If not, why? The answer to that question is complex, disturbing to some, but it is absolutely necessary to arrive at the answer. With that answer we can begin to reimagine where the power that is held by the police truly needs to to be held — by the people.
Until we incorporate the questions of who has power and who is subjected to that power, we cannot truly talk about safety and security for all of us. We've thrown more and more police at every ill of society, expanding the scope and power of police into almost every aspect of our lives. The history of policing over centuries is the best evidence we have to show that we need to imagine something new.