About a half hour into Craig Atkinson’s police militarization doc, “Do Not Resist,” we’re witness to a SWAT raid conducted in South Carolina’s Richland County. The particulars of this operation revolve around a drug bust, and demand preparations that include, but are not limited to, jamming a team of big tough men into a big tough truck armed with big tough guns. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were about to head into a warzone, though in the spirit of charity, it’s possible that that the men each think that’s exactly where they’re heading: into the breach, into danger, into a pure combat scenario that will test their mettle and maybe give them a chance to go nuts with of the many totally badass firearms they’re packing.
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But that’s a fantasy scenario, proven out by what the team finds: a family minding their own business at home. The suspect at the center of the brouhaha is guilty not of peddling drugs, but of having just the tiniest dash of weed in his backpack, though we in the audience know that he is actually guilty of the much more grievous crime of being black in America. And for that, we need a SWAT team driving an MRAP — a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle used by the military that’s designed to absorb the impact of an IED blast. As you take the scene in, you may feel your blood pressure creep up on you, and such is the infuriating power of “Do Not Resist.” The good news is that the film is only about an hour and ten minutes long. The bad news is that each of those minutes will likely make you want to tear out your hair.
Stylistically, “Do Not Resist” can most often be described as “adequate,” though Atkinson’s fly on the wall approach lends the film a refreshing layer of restraint. We don’t hear from anyone who isn’t caught in or nearby Atkinson’s frame; there are no voiceovers and scarcely any title cards to speak of. In part, that’s because they aren’t needed. Atkinson’s material is fresh, of the moment, finding its point of origin in 2014 during the protest in Ferguson, Missouri ten days after officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Mike Brown. In the strictest sense possible, this is recent history, but history has this weird habit of repeating itself, and the deaths of Terrence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, Philando Castile, Tyree King, Alfred Olango, and Alton Sterling each serve as the ultimate reminder: Brown’s death wasn’t an anomaly, a one-time thing, an unavoidable tragedy.
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Atkinson’s film surveys the conclusions of this sobering thought through the lenses of America’s problems with institutionalized racism and unconscious bias, and its problem with over-armed, under-trained police forces. In the Richland incident, we see the intersection of both, as heavily geared men who only have basic instruction and minimal experience piloting MRAPs bust in on innocent people, terrorizing them before presenting them with heaps of shitty excuses for their rank ignorance. But “Do Not Resist” isn’t always about racism and police militarization at the same time. It’s more often about one independent of the other, though it never keeps them wholly separate, either, because they’re connected on a molecular level. They go together hand in hand, two peas in a toxic, oppressive pod.
If you’re skeptical of the relationship between the two, well, watch the movie and see how you feel. When Ferguson protesters cry “There is no looting, there is no fighting tonight,” and the police response is made through dispersal of tear gas, is there any room to argue that the there isn’t a problem? When “Do Not Resist” touches on technology in law enforcement, shining a spotlight on Ross McNutt and his airborne crime-solving wide area motion imagery (WAMI for short) system, is it possible to claim that the civil rights of minority citizens wouldn’t be disproportionately impacted by widespread use of said tech? Where do we draw the line that divides “helping” from “hurting?” Drill back down to the MRAPs, and watch as Brent Oleson, sheriff of Juneau County, Wisconsin, takes a pleasure drive around his sleepy town in one of those hulking beasts. “Oopsie,” he says as he starts the vehicle’s engine, which is maybe the second to last thing you want to hear come out of a lawman’s mouth when he’s trying to operate a machine that makes your Rebel TRX look like a Tonka Truck.
As “Do Not Resist” ends, its title takes on dual meaning. Do not resist: “If you’re standing still, you may be subject to arrest,” bark the policemen serving and protecting during the Ferguson protests, as though the protesters aren’t Americans exercising rights afforded them by virtue of their Americanness. Do not resist: WAMI, body cameras, and MRAPs are the way of the future (the way of the future). But as much as the film has criticism to spare for police toys, the bulk of its emphasis is placed on emotion, the culture of fear that police are mired in that teaches them to be afraid of what might happen to them if they go knocking on doors. We get a glimpse of that kind of indoctrination at a seminar run by Dave Grossman, a lunatic who somehow has become the country’s number one trainer for police and military; to hear it from him, law enforcement is at war with everyone, and so must be prepared for everything.
This is why the police in Concord, New Hampshire need a Bearcat, why SWAT teams can bust out the windows on a residence as a component of “tactics,” why cops have rifles that’d make Arnold Schwarzenegger feel hot and bothered, why officers in nobody towns lump “ISIS” in with “protesters” on their threat lists. (This is also where your taxpayer dollars are going, if that’s the kind of thing you concern yourself with above human dignity and quality of life.) “Do Not Resist” lays all of this bare, and if Atkinson’s presentation is just a hair above “competent,” it does the job of exposing the corroded heart of American policing. [B+]