Power

Driven to contain threats to social order, American policing has exploded in scope and scale over hundreds of years. Now, it can be described by one word: power.

In the United States, police have been granted extraordinary power over our individual lives. The police decide who is suspicious and who ‘fits the description.’ They define the threats and decide how to respond. They demand obedience and carry the constant threat of violence. Thousands of these interactions play out in our cities and towns every day, according to real and perceived ideas of criminality and threats to social order—as decided by the police. Police make the abstract power of the state real.

POWER traces the accumulation of money, the consolidation of political power, and the nearly unrestricted bipartisan support that has created the institution of policing as we know it. The film offers a visceral and immersive journey to demonstrate how we’ve arrived at this moment in history, from the slave patrols of the 1700s and the first publicly funded police departments of the 1800s to the uprisings of the 1960s

and 2020s.

Part essay, part interview, and part archival collage, POWER uses historical materials to illustrate our contemporary realities and examines urgent questions about a growing and largely unchecked authority—who is policed, who is protected, who gets to decide, and why.