Policing the Police (Documentary)
Status: Finished 12/20/2021
Rating: 3/5
- Good Frontline documentary
- Focused on problems in the Newark police department. Originally filmed in 2016.
- The documentary made the Newark police department look really bad.
- A Black reporter, Jelania Cobb, follows gang squad around as they essentially practice “stop and frisk”
- The police are incredibly brazen and lacking in self-awareness.
- They think they are behaving in a justified manner, despite it appearing like they are engaged in a horrible/dangerous form of racist harassment.
- There was one clip that was particularly indefensible. Cobb showed the clip to the shift supervisor who seemed to agree that it was a “bad stop.”
- They cited some study from the Justice Department that said that, when reviewed afterwards, the majority (~75%) of stops did not meet the standards for reasonable suspicion.
- From the perspective of the police, any stop that took a gun off the street was highly successful.
- The documentary was written by James Jacoby (or whatever). He’s great. Cobb also did a great job.
- The community seemed to unanimously agree that there was a problem.
- The mayor was trying to reform the police system.
- His own leadership that he appointed was ineffective and the mayor was frustrated.
- He felt there was a need for “intelligence,” but it wasn’t obvious exactly what he was thinking.
- They had some kind of call center that seemed like a disorganized clusterfuck.
- They interviewed the police union head, who said exactly what you would expect a police union chief to say.
- There is one hopeful section showing a Black police officer who was an advocate for a form of community policing. He seemed to face resistance from the community.
- At the end, the city forms a citizens tribunal where the citizens can give feedback (make policy?) about the police department. The ACLU touted this as a big success, but I wasn’t sure it was going to do that much.