Block Cinema Presents: Do Not Resist (2016)

This riveting documentary, a Grand Prize winner at the Tribeca Film Festival, looks at the increasing militarization of police departments across the country in the years following 9/11. Director Craig Atkinson gained first-hand access to those central to the issue, police officers and equipment and technology manufacturers and dealers, at police conventions, equipment expos, and on the ground, including by embedding with several SWAT teams. He chronicles the new state of law enforcement, one that finds it increasingly easy to acquire military hardware, powerful computer tools, and ever-more-deadly weaponry, and that then must make use of them. Reality intrudes on the unparalleled and surprising cooperation Atkinson received with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; his contacts no longer are as forthcoming, but the incident becomes a stark example on a larger scale of the very issue Atkinson is documenting.

An eye-opening experience.—Dexter Filkins, "Do Not Resist and the Crisis of Police Militarization," The New Yorker (2016)

Presented as part of the Block Cinema series Watching the Detectives