DO NOT RESIST (Craig Atkinson). 72 minutes. Opens Friday (November 11). See listing. Rating: NNNNN
In a little more than an hour, Craig Atkinson’s Do Not Resist explains the horrific state of the American policing system and why it’s been destroying civil liberties over the past decade: arms manufacturers are using a Homeland Security grant program to sell their surplus weapons to domestic police.
The result is an over-militarized police force itching to use their shiny new toys and trained to see every civilian interaction as a life-or-death throwdown. Atkinson eavesdrops on a motivational speaker whose entire pitch is that cops are superheroes battling “monsters” and follows a small-town SWAT team on drug busts that display an unnerving level of testosterone and ordnance.
Security experts treat entertainments like Minority Report and Person Of Interest as if they were real, fantasizing about stopping crimes before they happen and even using DNA profiling to figure out which citizens are likely to grow up to be lawbreakers. It’d be funny if people weren’t buying into their bullshit.
Meanwhile, those caught in the middle of botched drug raids wind up losing their livelihoods because the police need to justify their disproportionate actions. This is a sad, sickening portrait of modern America – and one of the most important docs you’ll see this year.
