A new documentary renews the conversation about policing in the United States and how inappropriate military tools are for this job.
This amazing piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker shows the continuing problems of police militarization in the U.S. Or, more precisely, the article reports on the new documentary film “Do Not Resist” by Craig Atkinson, which won the best documentary prize at the Tribeca Film Festival last month, which tells that story.
From the article:
Watching “Do Not Resist,” …is an eye-opening experience. The film takes a series of events that might appear unrelated—the heavy-handed police response to the demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; the use of heavily armed swat teams in South Carolina to carry out routine drug arrests—and shows that they are part of a pattern that has taken hold in many police departments across the country. ‘What we discovered is that the there had been a massive change in the tactics used by swat teams,’ Atkinson told me. ‘And that happened as the federal government was giving away military equipment to police departments.’ Read the full article.
Since FCNL first brought attention to the Pentagon program that allows military weapons to go to local U.S. police departments, President Obama has issued an executive order limiting the program. Yet many departments still have these weapons — and Atkins’ documentary shows the results.
Filkins describes one scene from the documentary:
The Richland County Sheriff’s Department deploys its Special Response Team to raid a home in a run-down neighborhood where the inhabitants were suspected of keeping marijuana. The team members, who are dressed for full combat—black fatigues, helmets, and assault rifles—smash the doors and windows, enter the house, and arrest the owner’s son. They seize eight hundred and seventy-three dollars in cash from him, which he tells police he needs to run his landscaping business. They end up finding a gram and a half of marijuana—enough to fill about a teaspoon. The suspect’s mother, who is in the house at the time, is not arrested. ‘They tore down the house,’ she tells the filmmakers. ‘My son went to jail for a gram and a half that they shook out of a bottom of a book bag.’
I hope this documentary renews the conversation about policing in the United States and how inappropriate military tools are for this job. As FCNL wrote in the summer of 2014, as police violence in Ferguson, Missouri captured our attention, “The equipment is only a symptom of the larger problem. Too many police departments follow the pattern that emerged in Ferguson, with officers treating people in the communities they are employed to protect as enemies to be subjugated.”
