There’s a moment late in Camilla Hall’s Copwatch when a rare officer of color from the Ferguson Police Department engages a group of copwatchers, a term used for local, autonomous groups who document policing activity and potential wrongdoing on the side of the law. He’s careful to discuss policies he’s not a fan of while hearing them out. Copwatch isn’t a permanent solution — one would hope with the rise of body cameras and community-based policing it wouldn’t have to be — but there is still unanswered questions regarding police tactics and use of force that supervisors and chiefs remain unwilling to be transparent about for one reason or another. Or, as former NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton used to say, “it looks awful, but it’s lawful.” The conversation that ends Copwatch is lively, even if the Copwatchers occasionally talk over themselves, which could be a read as a metaphor for a movement with decentralized and, at times, disparate leadership.
Jacob Crawford has been at it long before YouTube, Facebook Live, and Periscope allowed anyone with an iPhone to publicly and freely broadcast in the moment. Founding Copwatch, he is at the forefront of documenting police brutality. This all changed on the evening Oscar Grant was shot to death — captured by multiple cell phones — on the BART, sparking a vocal outcry that would serve as a prelude for protests to come in the wake of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Michael Brown in Staten Island, Baltimore and Ferguson, respectively. Copwatch seems to have sprung up almost organically and Jacob takes time off from work to support the efforts of mostly male “cop-watchers” and the women that stand behind them.
Hall’s Copwatch is a minor picture in the canon of documentary films struggling to make sense of Ferguson and police tactics. While Whose Streets? focused primarily on Ferguson, Copwatch brings its attention on the watchers, including Kevin Moore in Baltimore and Dave Whitt in Ferguson as they take to the streets. While Moore and Whitt suffer for their activism (Whitt is also a subject in the more thorough Whose Streets?), Ramsey Orta, who filmed Eric Garner’s death, has caught multiple cases heartlessly tied to his mother’s criminal trial. In the film he doesn’t make a case for his innocence, although his lawyers do. While Moore is courted to testify multiple times in the cases against the officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death, he’s never received a call back from prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s office.
The footage is a good deal more rough and ready than the Terrence Malick-like compositions in Craig Atkinson’s disjointed Do Not Resist. However, Copwatch is equally as disjointed, focusing its attention on work that may be essential without a good deal more transparency. The Copwatchers, apart from their cell phones and digital cameras, have little leverage and it appears minor run-ins with cops that refuse to provide badge numbers and other information rarely yield a result. Still, their presence is felt and, in some neighborhoods, essential to ensure proper use of force is used. Missing from the conversation is the other side, which arguably have megaphones from state and municipal officials and powerful police union heads. Perhaps one day an enterprising documentarian will make a complete portrait of the efforts at reform, vocally blocked by the NYPD PBA’s head loudmouth Patrick Lynch.
Copwatch might have worked better as a short or a web series rather than a feature documentary, which seems rather hollow. Hall occasionally stops the action to ask questions without providing the deeper historical context for these issues that have been present, even in a feature like Nick Berardini’s Taser international expose Killing Them Safely. Achieving transparency is only half the battle — reforming the kind of racist municipal pyramid scheme that caused Ferguson to erupt in the wake of Brown’s shooting is a far more interesting subject for a documentary.
Copwatch premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and opens on September 22.