Power
Seen at the 2024 Atlanta Film Festival
In 2000, I was going up to north Georgia to do some studying for school with two of my friends from Georgia State. At the time, I was driving a brown 1984 Buick Skyhawk. The felt ceiling was falling down on my head. As I was driving, some police pulled beside me in the next lane. I noticed them, they saw me notice them, and they proceeded to pull me over. I got out of the car when they asked, and they searched the whole vehicle. They never did offer what they were looking for, but my friend and I deduced that it was likely drugs. If I were black, the odds are higher that I would have never even made it to my friend’s house.
This has come back to mind as I’ve considered Yance Ford’s “Power” over the past two days. While there isn’t an emotional throughline in the film besides that of anger and rage against how we’ve let the machine metastasize to the point it is now, Ford’s examination of how the police have expanded in size, but stayed fairly consistent in their aims. The question now is, how do we demand change to a force that has shown, time and again, that it is unafraid to kill those they claim to protect?
The main thing we learn in “Power” is that every major inflection point for the creation of a police force has to do with white economic power over “the other,” whether it’s hunting down runaway slaves (whom were property), enforcing white land rights over Native Americans, or immigrants who were making their way into this country. Throughout the film, we hear from historians, professors and even police themselves (one former, one current) as they lay out their ideas of what police have been, what they are now, and how that transition has occurred.
Seeing all of the footage of police over the years, the constant brutality, and their desire to not be held accountable for their actions, makes as clear as ever how- while not every officer is bad- the institution has arguably more power to destabilize the US than any one person. That is because there do not seem to be enough politicians at any level to truly challenge the police and the fascist ways in which they exert their power. (The building of several “Cop City” sites throughout the country, which will only continue to solidify their behavior, is a slap in the face to the mass outcries for reform after the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder.) Ford’s film is not an easy watch, but it is an important one. If nothing else, it will have you asking the same question I posed early- how do we make sure our demands for a drastic change in the nature of policing are met? I’m not optimistic it will be happen anytime soon.
