POWER (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Power, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2024

There's a sense of weariness to Power, a documentary about the history of policing in the United States, that's reasonable, self-defeating, or both. Co-writer/director Yance Ford's occasional narration makes the filmmaker sound, not tired, but exhausted.

Anyone who has paid attention to the increased militarization of police forces across the country, the distinct dichotomy of responses based on the race of those on the other side of a police interaction, and the near absence of any accountability or oversight when the result of those interactions is police violence can understand why Ford might sound that way. Here we are, discussing what should be obvious by this point yet again, and the filmmaker even begins his movie by suggesting that those who should be listening and learning won't hear or discover a damn thing.

His documentary, Ford announces, requires an audience that's either "curious" about or "suspicious" of policing in the United States. One would assume such a mindset is a given, as it is with any system or person who holds power within society. We're quick to question, suspect, and criticize elected officials who make and oversee the laws under which we live, but when it comes to the systems and individuals who directly enforce those laws on a local level, any similar attitude toward that power, oddly, is often perceived with suspicion or criticized.

That makes Ford's approach, which is clear-eyed and well-researched, feel somewhat off for this particular topic. It's missing a sense of urgency that would seem necessary for the subject, especially since the movie does communicate how the centuries-long history of policing in the United States is one of ever-increasing power.

At one point, a montage of U.S. Presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to Joe Biden shows each one (excepting Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter) making speeches about the need for more federal funding to local police departments or congratulating themselves for the billions of dollars they were happy to sign off on for that purpose. Sometimes, agreement between the two major political parties in the country is a reason for optimism, and other times, it feels like a sign of cynical pandering or offering easy, empty solutions to problems that run too deep for a multi-billion-dollar bandage.

To be sure, it's tough to argue against the case Ford, co-screenwriter Ian Olds, and the movie's collection of experts, mainly academics, make. It's not a polemic against the notion of policing, which would be a losing battle in this political climate and almost certainly not a good idea generally, but it is a detailed account of how policing in the United States started, the motives behind the creation of the first police forces in the country, and how the system has evolved in only about a century into one that has a monopoly on violence, is quick to use or threaten use it, and is essentially—and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, practically—infallible in the eyes of the law it's meant to uphold.

The history is a complicated and dark one, to understate it. Ford and his interview subjects explain early police forces, more akin to militias, as being created for three purposes. One was to aid the expansion into the frontier, as settlers would encounter indigenous peoples as land ownership was forcibly or legally taken. The second was as slave patrols, searching for enslaved people who escaped captivity and checking documentation of enslaved persons who would travel on orders from a plantation owner for various errands. The final one involved breaking up worker strikes or acts of protest against employers.

In each of these, we see images and hear language that carry on to this day—"patrols" and ID checks and police using physical force to break up any crowd that is seen as politically or economically inconvenient. Ford employs archival footage with some skill, intercutting film from real-life events since the birth of the motion-picture camera (There's a very old visual document of a woman having her mugshot taken), as well as training materials and fictional depictions of police in the movies. What we observe and hear echoes across more than a century, and if Ford's narration over such imagery feels underwhelming, that might simply be because the filmmaker knows the impact of this documentary is in the repetition of images over the course of decades, with only the equipment and weapons changing with the times.

The editing does have a notable effect, although it does become repetitive as the movie's history lesson progresses. That's part of the point, of course, but it also highlights the movie's relative calmness and gradual shift from making a compelling case to hitting a wall once we start wondering about solutions.

There's a fine line between uncertainty and cynicism, and at a certain point, it's difficult to determine whether the topic is simply too overwhelming for an answer or Ford doesn't want to push the issue too far by offering anything more than vague sentiments about how to fix the problems. Power, then, is a fine primer about the history of policing and a despairing examination of how little the core of a system can change, despite how many changes may appear to happen within it. It may be folly, perhaps, to expect a single movie to have the answers, but as Ford tells us at the start, a little curiosity at least is necessary.

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