Mark Reviews Movies: HOLD YOUR FIRE

Hold Your Fire, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 19, 2022

Four Black men entered a sporting goods store in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on January 19, 1973. They wanted firearms. At least one of the men pulled out a pistol, ordering the store owner to fill a bag with as many rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition, as he could fit into it.

That's the beginning of Hold Your Fire, which throws us into this situation with as much information as anyone in that store, apart from the four robbers, and everyone outside of it, primarily the police who surrounded the building after receiving a call from a passer-by, could know. Director Stefan Forbes immediately begins the story of this documentary, about a little-known but significant hostage crisis, with only the simple, woefully incomplete facts. The underlying story here, then, is as much about assumptions and prejudices and other rushes to judgment as it is about the truth.

The former ways of thinking are, of course and unfortunately, all too easy and, back then, far too common (although the film reveals that much of that hasn't changed for certain people, no matter how hard they may argue against it—a subject for later). When the cops hear that four Black men have held up a shop and stolen a bunch of weapons, their immediate assumption is that the perpetrators are part of a radical group. Calls on police radios go out, announcing that members of the Black Liberation Army are committing a terrorist act in Brooklyn. For those who are too quick and unthinking to suggest that overt racism somehow stopped in the 1960s, the description of those men is a single word.

Obviously, the reality of this situation isn't what those initial reports suggest. That makes the film both a real-life thriller—with archival footage and photographs offering a surprisingly detailed re-construction of the geography and a vital sense of the tense atmosphere of the scene—and a mystery. We hear from the members of the police who were there, as they describe the tactics the employed, the ones the higher-ups wanted to test out this time around, and a bit too much—for their own reputations, at least—of their honest feelings about the necessity of violence and matters of race.

In regards to those new tactics, they're the modern basics of hostage negotiation, developed and championed by Harvey Schlossberg, a traffic cop who also held a PhD. in psychiatry. After the prisoner uprising at Attica and another robbery on a particular dog-day afternoon, the big brass of the New York City Police Department thought it was time to employ Schlossberg's method, which involved listening to hostage-takers, de-escalating tensions, and avoid violence—much to the chagrin of a bunch of cops who were almost too eager to start shooting into a store filled with innocent people.

We also hear from the hostages, including that store owner, a woman who was 16 at the time, and the daughter of another. Jerry Riccio, the man who owned the store and who clearly has little sympathy for the men who kept him and others hostage for 47 hours, counters at least one part of the official police report.

They say the shooting into the store was aimed high, in order to protect the hostages. If the contemporary photos of a bullet hole through the window isn't enough, Riccio confirms that he and the others in the store had bullets whizzing by them at chest level. There's also the tricky fact, ignored by the interviewed cops, that only robber to be shot in the initial shooting was hit in the stomach.

The mystery of the narrative isn't just in learning what happened and why it occurred. It's also in uncovering which accounts can be believed. Forbes often cuts from one account to another, as if the film itself is serving as a conversation, not only with the truth, but also through the lies that somehow persist, even to this day. Forbes may give the cops who were on the scene their chance to tell that side of the story, but in doing so, the director also allows some of them to double down on those inconsistent or flat-out untrue details and to reveal a foundational belief that violence should be the single answer. In a notably disturbing case, one of those retired officers casually espouses a racial philosophy that might as well be in a white nationalist's manifesto.

Most surprisingly, perhaps, we hear from Shu'aib Raheem and Dawud Rahman, the two still-living robbers, who speak plainly and without evasion in their interviews. Yes, the two—both in their early 20s at the time—and a couple friends robbed the store. No, it wasn't an act of terrorism or on behalf of a radical organization, although knowing the cops believed that to be the case made him especially convinced that they would kill them—escalating the tensions even more. There's a real potency in hearing first-hand how the police's initial reaction, which made surrender seem impossible, and deviations from Schlossberg's methods only worsened things for everyone involved.

Yes, the two admit throughout Hold Your Fire, it was dumb, dangerous, and had consequences that they have had to live with since. Watching video of the interview with that daughter of one of the hostages, Raheem learns details of previously unknown repercussions here. If Schlossberg's pacifist and empathetic philosophy toward this area of policing holds any deeper and widespread relevance, it's in the example set by Raheem: that human life matters, because people are capable of genuine change.

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