The haunting thing about the new policing documentary Do Not Resist is what it doesnt show. There are no images of cops beating people. No viral videos of horrifying shootings. Sure, there are scenes from the Ferguson protests in which riot cops deploy tear gas. But theres no blood, no Tasings, no death. Yet when it was over, I had to force myself to exhale.
What makes this movie so powerful is its terrifying portrayal of the mundanities of modern policing. I watched the movie weeks ago, but there are scenes that still flicker in my head. We all remember the clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson. Weve seen the photos. We saw the anger and the animus exchanged across the protest lines. What we didnt see were the hours and hours before and after those moments. We didnt see the MRAPs and other armored vehicles roll in, one at a time, slowly transforming an American town into a war zone. We didnt hear the clomp of combat boots on asphalt in the quiet hours of the early morning, interrupted only by fuzzy dispatches over police radio.
Its one thing to show an MRAP a vehicle built for war, and for a very specific purpose in a very specific type of war being misused after a small-town police agency obtained it from the Defense Department. Do Not Resist takes you to the base where those vehicles are stored. A camera trained on the window captures hundreds of MRAPs rows and rows and rows of them scrolling by, all destined for a police agency somewhere in America. Meanwhile, an Army specialist explains how the troops who use the vehicles get hours and hours of training before theyre entrusted to drive the trucks on a battlefield. The Pentagon then gives the trucks to police agencies to use on U.S. streets with no accompanying training at all. Sometimes, the specialist says, a police agency will find a body part in one of the trucks. They try to avoid that. But after all, these are machines of war.
The film crew then takes a ride with a small-town sheriff as he drives his hulking new MRAP through business districts and quiet neighborhoods that is, once he figures out how to operate it. The most disturbing thing about this scene isnt the truck itself, or the striking images of the truck in the town, or even the sheriffs statement that it will probably mostly be used for drug raids. The most disturbing thing is that it simply doesnt occur to the sheriff that the footage might be disturbing. He has no problem letting a film crew show this massive contraption built to withstand roadside bombs in a military convoy lumbering through his small town, because the notion that military vehicles arent appropriate for domestic policing is foreign to him.
