“A Different Kind of Force”, the documentary I spent most of last year editing, has won a Peabody Award. It’s a real honor to share this award with Ed Ou and Kitra Cahana, two of the most conscientious filmmakers I’ve had the pleasure to work with.
I’ve been sitting on this news for the last two weeks with a sense of dread. It’s roughly a year old, and in that time my feelings and perspective, particularly on the police’s role in society, have shifted quite dramatically. I was ready to disregard the documentary as an embarrassing byproduct of my ignorance and privilege.
Having watched it again last night for the first time in months, I am relieved it isn’t quite that. If anything, it’s a tightly organized pile of puzzle pieces, a series of societal problems I wasn’t quite sure fit together. Now, it’s so incredibly, glaringly obvious they do that I’m unsure how I missed it.
The police officers in this documentary, as well-meaning and earnest as they are, should not be doing this work. The societal need is in qualified mental health workers that do not carry weapons. It is in mental health facilities that don’t release their patients as soon as they’re stabilized. It is in Medicare-For-All, so that everyone in need can receive the long-term treatment necessary for chronic mental health problems. We need to reallocate the resources we put into training cops back into the community, thereby simultaneously reducing the scope of their job description and their community’s reliance on them in the first place.
You can’t train officers to both be active assessors of dangerous risk and also empathetic caseworkers. Those impulses are fundamentally at odds with one another. In what remains the most telling part of the documentary for me, Tre is asked to reconcile the fact that he’s called to save citizens while holstering a weapon that can kill them. Understandably, he gets tripped up. As a cop, the majority of his training is to recognize and neutralize threats. His mental health speciality, the CIT training, is a thin veneer, and it’s incredibly dangerous to mistake it for the substance of policing. The substance is a protective, antagonistic fraternity that upholds the culture of white supremacy while resisting scrutiny and accountability, a system that directly targeted Ed as a member of the press a week ago in Minneapolis, leaving him with literal scars.
This is the bedrock, I believe, of “Defund the Police.” We need to completely rethink societal services, what purpose they serve, and most importantly, WHO they serve and don’t serve. To pretend that reform is an achievable goal, that all we need is “more training” and “body cameras”, is a disingenuous and dangerous platitude.
So, if you decide to watch the documentary, please keep in mind this sobering afterward. Hopefully, the film can be a tool in building a more equitable world that serves all of its citizens.