Netflix’s Police Documentary ‘Power’ Feels More Relevant Than Ever Following the Mass Arrests of Student Protestors

If you watch just one thing on Netflix this weekend, make it Power, a new documentary that traces the history of policing in the United States.

Police brutality was thrust to the forefront of American minds in the summer of 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who police officers choked to death by kneeling on his neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Floyd’s killing—which acts as the documentary’s climax—clearly inspired filmmaker Yance Ford to pursue the project.

But in the weeks leading up to the film’s release on Netflix today, student protestors on college campuses across the country have been arrested en masse. Ever since Columbia University called the police to arrest over 100 peaceful student protestors last month, videos of officers yanking teenagers through the air and slamming college Econ professors to the ground spread like wildfire on social media. Floyd’s murder undeniably still looms large in the American consciousness, but the overwhelming and immediate police response to the student protests in support of Palestine is just another reason that feels more vital than ever to understand how, exactly, American cops attained this level of power over civilians.

Power is director Yance Ford’s follow-up to his 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary, Strong Island. Before the start of the film, Ford, in a dreamy voiceover, asks his audience for “curiosity, or, at least, suspicion” for what they are about to watch—an acknowledgment of the highly political, controversial, and partisan nature of the issue of policing. But it’s hard to imagine anyone who actually watches the film will be able to poke holes in Ford’s meticulous-researched, carefully-built, airtight argument: Police power in the U.S. was born out of racism and classism, and it’s spiraled completely out of control.

Though talking head interviews with prestigious university professors, Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, a Black Minneapolis police inspector, victims of police harassment, and more, Power walks viewers through the murky origins of U.S. policing. The story they tell draws a clear line from the capture of escaped slaves, the displacement of indigenous people, and the containment of labor strikes—all of which came before the first publicly-funded police force in Boston in 1838—to modern-day policing.

From there, Ford delves into the history of overseas military colonialism, including a crash course on August Vollmer, a police chief who brought “counterinsurgency” techniques that he learned as a military officer in the Philippines back to the U.S. The police, the film argues, began to treat the American public the same way the U.S. military treats its perceived foreign enemies. One can’t help but think of the recent image of hoards of NYPD officers marching, military style, onto Columbia University campus.

Power truly finds its footing in the final third of the film, when the history lesson finally catches up to the state of modern-day policing. Ford has no shortage of horrifying footage of modern-day police brutality to demonstrate his point. It all culminates in the infamous footage of George Floyd’s murder, which Ford censors the footage in such a way that you don’t see Floyd as he dies on screen. But you do see, and hear, the civilians begging officers to stop, to check his pulse, to get him help.

As a history lesson, Power is a clear, comprehensive timeline of how policing in this country came to be. But, more urgently, the film functions as a warning: a dire plea for American citizens to realize that, with every increased police budget and new officer on the street, we are one step closer to living under an authoritarian regime. The biggest threat to democracy—to freedom—one interviewee argues, isn’t Donald Trump, or Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton, any other politician. It’s the police.