We definitely needed a sequel. Ava DuVernay convinced Netflix to make a college thesis masterpiece with 13th, where she tied the evolution of the end of slavery into the increase in incarcerations over the past 150+ years. You can’t arrest that many people without providing a large amount of police arresting more and more individuals. Ava laid the groundwork, and Yance Ford filled in the rest of the pieces. Power looks at its title through the eyes of the police, the “legal violent” arm of the government, with similar chilling results for anyone who’s found themself at the wrong end of the law.
Ford’s doc gives us a comprehensive look at the concept of modern policing. We go back to its origins, and work our way to present day, with various experts providing context around each new theme presented. We also push past 2016, where 13th ended, into the last few years, including the changes that have happened since the George Floyd protests of 2020.
The first half the doc does similar work DuVernay’s doc did, almost like a “previously on” segment of a TV show. We see the beginnings of modern policing, built around slave patrols and rich people’s desire for “order.” Through the framework of politics, we see how politicians weaponized this legal violence to maintain their own power, criminalizing the “bad” people using the cops to physically represent their rhetoric. And there’s no way around it: since it’s inception, policing goes hand in hand with exuding power over African American’s. Decades of media footage has taught us how this “power” is almost always at the expense of black people, who bear all the physical, financial, and emotional burdens of their lack of power. Even when African-Americans become policemen to crusade from the inside, the system forces them to submit to the status quo, usually transforming these well-meaning individuals into either pariahs if they don’t shut up or even worse, the “token black cop” that shows the system works.
The great new wrinkle Yance Ford brings to the table is problem framing. You’d think after years of unpopular policies, why does policing continue unchecked as is? That’s because it is constantly evolving and changing with the times. Early on, when it was easy to be outwardly racist, the cops proudly pursued and captured the bad black people for their crimes of wanting to leave slavery. But as we get to the 1960s and see the consequences of racist policy, the cops and politicians change their tune, siding with popular sentiments at the time. This is no better identified than the 1968 Kiernan Commission which identified causes for civil unrest. The politicians only adopted the policies they agree with (increasing size of the police force) and ignored ALL of the other recommendations of that commission (extensive racism claims, overhaul of tactics, etc). Onto Reagan and the Cold War, the cops now started to resemble the military more, using that “order” and “structure” when “counter insurgencies” eg riots would break out in the US. All of this reframing is for the police to maintain power and control over especially black people, which the doc points out over and over again, as the evidence is pretty daming….and vast.
Power closes with the embarrassing/sobering/potentially uplifiting Frederick Douglass quote: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” We are responsible for the police force as it exists today. But we can also change it if we collectively have the will to. Does that will exist? I guess we’ll never know unless we try right?