Police Power: How Did We Get Here?

Conversation with Yance Ford, Director of the Netflix Documentary “POWER”

By Bree Spencer and Rachel Hooper

“POWER” portrays the origins of the institution of policing and how we got here — from the slave patrols of the 1700s, westward expansion land grabs, suppression of labor movements, and the first publicly funded police departments of the 1800s to the uprisings of the 1960s and 2020s. As the film’s website states, “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.”

Yance Ford (he/him), who wrote, directed, and produced the documentary, is an Oscar-nominated director and producer based in New York City. His feature documentary film “Strong Island,” which premiered at Sundance in 2017, won a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film and numerous other awards.

Bree Spencer (she/her) is the senior director of the justice program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Bree: What motivated your decision to create the film “POWER” about policing in America, and is there anything special about the timing — now — in 2024?

Yance: The process really kicked off in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd when I was watching the police response to civil disobedience and the protests that erupted around the world. In New York and around the country, there was a very sharp edge to the police response. I was watching these things happen and asked myself: Is this what policing is for? This very particular thing — the suppression of dissent? And the answer at that moment was obviously ‘yes.’ That began the process of asking more questions, as is often the beginning of making a documentary film. Ironically, the process of making the documentary film began in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and we just marked four years since his passing. So, for me, it feels like a full circle moment, and I’m glad that the film can be part of the conversation around policing right now.

Bree: One thing that makes this film exceptional is that it is accessible and relevant to everyone, no matter how much that individual knows about policing. How did you choose the approach/perspective for this film? 

Yance: As we were developing “POWER,” it was during a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was ascendant. There was a very specific conflict playing out in the mainstream media over the question of whether one “valued Black Lives” or “backed the Blue.” It struck me as reductionist and served to distract from  the question of how police power is accumulated, used, and abused in our society. In “POWER,” we zoom out as far as possible and look at policing from an institutional vantage point as opposed to the ‘good cop’ vs. ‘bad cop’ or ‘good apple’ vs. ‘bad apple’ dichotomy that is used as an excuse whenever someone like Derek Chauvin abuses their power and takes a life. These instances are held up as exceptions to the rule of the norm of the heroic police officer.

As we did our research, we realized how important it was to reset people’s understanding of why policing came to be via these relationships to property that we discuss in the film. Whether you were property as an enslaved person, whether your land was coveted and seized by the United States government if you were an Indigenous person, or whether you attempted to organize unions to advocate for higher wages or better working conditions, as Italian, Irish, or other immigrants who were not yet considered ‘white’ tried to do in northeastern cities — all of those things are about your relationship to property or to property owners.

Bree: The film showcases an example of a police department partnering with the community in dialogue with the Minneapolis 4th precinct. There’s that discussion that was filmed about the Black community not having access to criminal-justice alternatives and diversions and interventions. How did you find the inspector, and why did you choose the 4th precinct? Why was it important to include that in this film?

Yance: In the search to find people to help us understand this paradox of policing, we found Inspector Adams from the 4th precinct, which is just a bit north of the precinct where George Floyd was murdered. One of the things that jumped out to us about Charlie Adams is that he is from the community — he grew up in the 4th precinct.

So, he’s got a 16-year-old girl who’s got 20 carjackings under her belt, and in one breath he says, we don’t want to criminalize our kids, and in the next breath he’ll say, but we don’t want to recognize when they are criminals. And then he’s challenged on that point by a community member. What people should understand about that scene is that he’s the only police officer in the room. Every other Black man around that table is from the community. He meets with this men’s group from the community on a monthly basis, and they challenge him. They say, “the kind of interventions that are given to white kids in a town not very far from here are not being made available to our kids.” Inspector Adams can’t really dispute that. Charlie Adams is this incredible manifestation of the paradox of policing. He feels one way, but he is bound to behave in another. As a result, the kids in his precinct go to the county home school instead of treatment or intervention programs. A county home school is a “pre-incarceration” residence for young people who have been sentenced to live there by our criminal-legal system.

Bree: I think it goes to the point that you made in the film, that it’s about property. It’s about suppression. It’s about controlling disorder as opposed to making people safe. If it were about making people safe, the institution would be much more open to alternatives, to shrinking the criminalization footprint in the universe of policing. If it were about making people safe, it would also consider the safety of the 16-year-old girl.

Yance: In the institution within which he works, that 16-year-old girl is the threat — she is not someone who is potentially threatened. And that right there is the perfect example of how Black and Brown kids wind up in the preschool-to-prison pipeline. They are not thought of as potential victims in many situations. No one seems to ask what could  motivate a 16-year-old to commit so many carjackings. Policing does not question whether or not there are circumstances in her life that force or coerce her into committing crime. Even though Inspector Adams is concerned about her safety, the institution of policing is not.

Bree: From a civil rights perspective, the film presents a very clear message on the unregulated power of police and the intersection of racism and policing. We know that Black and Brown people are overpoliced and over incarcerated. “POWER” looks at policing from a 30,000-foot view and interrogates its impact on our democracy and our society. Can you say more about the problem of police overreach as a threat specifically to our democracy?

Yance: Police overreach is best exemplified by the fact that an individual officer can decide that something is reasonable. From the use of deadly force down to who they decide to pull over and what they consider probable cause. The fact that we have a million or so police officers in this country means that we have a million or so interpretations of the law and a million or so justifications in the application of the law. That massive variable in applying the law is the greatest threat to our democracy because it means you can’t know how you will be treated from situation to situation. There’s no consistency, only individual police discretion.

There are also things that police are used to enforce that are direct threats to our democracy. For example, in the state of Georgia, distributing water to people who are waiting in line to vote in one of the hottest states in the country is a crime. And who will be called to enforce that law? The police. Part of that law was recently struck down, but it still begs the question of why police would be used to arrest people for handing out water. What the police are going to do in situations like that is show up and enforce the law as they are told to enforce it. So that’s also a huge threat to our democracy because this individual discretion is both really broad and, at the same time, incredibly specific. It doesn’t allow for someone to exercise their common sense and say, I’m not going to call distributing bottles of water a crime.

The thing that “POWER” also tries to do is show police acting with impunity because the institution tells them ‘you are immune’ and free from accountability. The institution says “we will question ordinary people’s ability to define what they see” and claim that police alone determine what is real. In cases when civilians request body-cam footage, police make it seem that this footage can’t possibly be understood because it’s so complex — that it falls within this special knowledge of police expertise. Even though police experts are always hired by police and trained by police, they may not be considered experts by any institution outside policing. There is so much about this that is a threat to our democracy.

Bree: What do you want to leave with the individuals who watch the film?

Yance: When people watch the film, it’s important for folks to understand that we end with that quote by Frederick Douglass on purpose. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. We want people to think about the demand they will make of policing. I want people to understand that without making a demand, nothing about policing will change. So, from my perspective, we must all have an idea about what we will demand of the police and then be prepared to act on those demands. And that demand has to be exercised in several different ways, including through the electoral process and who we decide is going to represent us as governor, mayor, or city councilperson, or as our representatives in the House or Senate.

But it also concerns what we are willing to say to police. One of the things that makes demanding things of police difficult — like the two people in the George Floyd video challenging Office Tao — is that the response to challenges is so often met with violence. We can’t reliably be at a protest or observe police activity and say, “I’m a member of the press, or I’m a legal observer, or even I’m on my front stoop and have a right to observe what’s going on outside my home” without being met with police violence. You can’t say that “it’s illegal for you to close off this block at both ends and arrest everybody here” without being arrested yourself. Any resistance to the exercise of absolute power by the police is always met with violence and the reality of the violence of incarceration. In order to reimagine public safety, we have to be willing to make a demand of police despite their threat of violence. In “POWER,” there are no rhetorical questions in the film. ‘Who are we, where is here?’ We share this place called America, but are we living in the same country? You have a right to demand a different relationship to “law enforcement,” which you get to define — the definition must come from the community. It cannot continue to come from the police. We have been trying that model for generations, and vulnerable, over-policed communities are no safer now than they have been in the past because they live in a state of police occupation where everyone is considered a suspect.

This statement about making a demand of police is real, and we want people to take it seriously.

Yance and The Leadership Conference encourage people to watch the film in community — at a YMCA, a community center, a Boys & Girls club, or an LGBTQ center — and to set up a screening, watch it, and then talk about it. This film is meant to be watched with other people and shared as a group.   

For more on “POWER” and to watch the trailer, visit https://www.powerthefilm.com/.

For more information about how to engage, educate, and empower communities to reimagine public safety and transform policing and the criminal-legal system, visit our Vision for Justice policy platform at VisionForJustice.org. If you are new to advocating for change, consider checking out our Vision for Justice Companion Guide. If you would like to read about specific examples of effective justice advocacy, please check out our Vision for Justice Organizing Toolkit.