Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Power’ on Netflix, Yance Ford’s Strong, Salient Documentary Argument for Police Reform

Power is Netflix’s second high-profile documentary about police in the United States, arriving eight years after Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning 13th. Director Yance Ford – a best-director Oscar nominee for 2017’s Strong Island – deep-dives into the topic, digging into the subtext of the current state of policing, tracing its roots and exploring the ways it can undermine democratic principles. It’s a thoughtful and thorough op-ed from a filmmaker with a strong point-of-view.

POWER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film opens with a black screen and Ford’s narration: “This film requires curiosity, or at least suspicion,” he says, and his voice is calm, quiet and collected, but seething beneath, as if trying to maintain a sense of civility in the face of gross injustice. Consider the tone set for an academic, philosophical pursuit of questions such as Who polices the police? and If America was conceptualizing a policing system today, would it look like what we have now? The film organizes its core ideas beneath title cards reading “Property,” “Social Control,” “Resistance” and other broad topics, then whittles those ideas down to more granular commentary by a collection of talking heads including big-thinking university profs; a Black man, Charlie Adams, who’s been a police officer in Minneapolis for 36 years in a district only a few miles outside the one where George Floyd was murdered; and an Indian-American gentleman who shares how New York City’s stop-and-frisk procedures affected him psychologically.

Ford traces the modern policing system back to 18th-century slave patrols – groups of White men who made sure plantation slaves toed the line – 19th-century frontier militias that pushed indigenous peoples out of their land and 20th-century anti-union strike-breakers. The brutal methods of these groups were mirrored by police seeking to quell the “urban riots” of the 1960s, the federal response to which was the Kerner Commission report, which had “something for everyone”: evidence of a racist policing system and assertions that increased federal funding for the police was necessary. The response to the commission leaned heavily on the latter point; cue a montage of every president from Reagen to Biden stumping for more and more money for police to beef up their numbers and increasingly militarized arsenals. Ford’s conclusion? This country is over-policed.

Several discussions spring forth from this core assertion – how police have “a monopoly on violence,” are accountable only to themselves and benefit from laws that permit them pretty much to kill with impunity. Ford intercuts an array of talking heads who support his viewpoint with archival footage, including kitschy vintage films to disturbing footage of past and recent violent riots, police body-cam footage and viral clips depicting incidents of excessive force (including part of the video capturing Floyd’s murder). The modern policing system, Ford asserts, is deeply entrenched and undemocratic – but what will it take to change it?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Beyond similarly themed documentaries 13th and The Force, I couldn’t help but think of Kathryn Bigelow’s potent drama Detroit.

Performance Worth Watching: The aforementioned Indian-American man, identified as Nilesh V, shares his experiences with police injustice. He says he was subject to stop-and-frisk – a policy that allows police to search people on the street for weapons at random, and is a prime example of racial profiling – nearly every day, and asks, “This is what I get? Just for being me?” 

Memorable Dialogue: Ford: “Every arrest, every stop-and-frisk, every moment of police violence, illustrates the paradox of police power.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: To its credit, Power retains a calm, collected and analytical approach to a societal problem that’s prone to inflaming strong emotions. Some may ding Ford’s tone for lacking passion, but his film doesn’t need to further stoke flames that are already towering – it’s better, the film implies, to bury that emotion in the subtext beneath a series of salient, logic-derived points in the argument for police reform. Ford tends to avoid incendiary terms like “defund the police” or “blue lives matter” in an attempt to filter out the noise of partisan politics and focus on core ideas of justice, fairness, equality and, of course, power, and the approach generally works.

That approach sometimes leads talking-head commentary into overly verbose territory that analyzes the topic in depth but doesn’t offer any pragmatic solutions to the problem – that may be too much to ask of a single documentary film. The strongest elements of Power lie in the complexities within Officer Adams’ point-of-view, which illustrates how the power of long-held policing institutions essentially find Black men enforcing a system that ideologically opposes their identity; this is how it’s “always been done,” and changing it feels like a task that’s outside the capabilities of American society. Ford takes audio of a woman being tased by an officer during a traffic stop and superimposes images of a mid-century TV show depicting a friendly cop as a kind, wholesome man – and challenges us to reconcile reality with perception. Can you live with that cognitive dissonance? Ford certainly hopes not.

Our Call: Power channels its rage into a calm, collected and persuasive argument. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.