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The Raw Videos That Have Sparked Outrage Over Police Treatment of Blacks
11-year-old girl
A police body camera video shows an 11-year-old girl being held at gunpoint and then handcuffed as she screamed. Chief David Rahinsky of the Grand Rapids Police Department said in a news conference that the episode was “inappropriate.”
Grand Rapids Police DepartmentRichard Hubbard III
A police dashcam video shows Richard Hubbard III, 25, being beaten during a traffic stop in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid, Ohio. Officer Michael Amiott can be seen repeatedly punching Mr. Hubbard, who is black, and hitting his head on the pavement.
Euclid Police DepartmentDemetrius Bryan Hollins
Cellphone video shows Demetrius B. Hollins, 21, being kicked in the head and punched in the face by two officers during a traffic stop. The Gwinnett County Police Department later dismissed 89 cases involving the officers, Robert McDonald and Sgt. Michael F. Bongiovanni, who were fired and face criminal charges.
Black Lives Matter Greater AtlantaNania Cain
Footage from a dashboard camera and a cellphone shows Nania Cain being thrown to the ground and repeatedly punched in the face by an officer who claims Mr. Cain had allegedly jaywalked. Mr. Cain, 24, was initially charged with resisting arrest, but was released the next morning. The Sacramento police officer was placed on paid administrative leave.
Naomi Montaie via Facebook, Sacramento Police DepartmentDejuan Hall
Dejuan Hall, 23, was chased and apprehended by a police officer who is seen punching Mr. Hall and striking him with an object. In a bystander video, people can be heard yelling, “Police brutality.” The Vallejo police officer then shouts back: “Shut up. Get back,” and brandishes his gun.
A Rolesville High School student
Cellphone video shows a police officer slamming a 15-year-old female to the floor in effort to stop a fight involving three students. Officer Ruben De Los Santos was placed on paid administrative leave, and did not face criminal charges. He resigned in March.
@ahunnaaa_ via TwitterJacqueline Craig and her children
Jacqueline Craig, 46, and her daughters, ages 15 and 19, were arrested after reporting to police that a neighbor had choked her 7-year-old son for littering. Bodycam video shows the responder, Officer William Martin, asking the mother, “Why don’t you teach your son not to litter?” Later, he aims a Taser toward the family and then handcuffs the women. Mr. Martin received a 10-day suspension for excessive force and continues to defend his actions.
YouTube video uploaded by Shaun KingCharles Kinsey
Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist, was trying to help a young man who has autism when Mr. Kinsey was shot in the leg by a North Miami police officer. Jonathan Aledda, the officer, was fired for shooting the 47-year-old. His commander, Emile Hollant, is to be fired as well.
@toddtongen via TwitterCarnell Snell Jr.
Carnell Snell Jr., 18, was fatally shot by the police in a strip mall parking lot. Surveillance video shows Mr. Snell running into the parking lot while tucking what appeared to be a handgun into his pants. The video was released after two days of protests over the shooting.
Los Angeles Police DepartmentKeith Lamont Scott
Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was fatally shot by the police at his apartment complex. The police were there to serve someone else with a warrant. Mr. Scott had parked his car in a visitor’s space, where he often waited for one of his children to return home on a bus. The video was captured by his wife on her cellphone.
Evan Grothjan/The New York TimesTerence Crutcher
Terence Crutcher, 40, was fatally shot by a Tulsa police officer who was responding to reports of an abandoned vehicle in the road. Footage from the dashboard camera of a police car shows Mr. Crutcher walking toward a car with his hands raised before being Tasered and then shot.
The New York TimesPaul O’Neal
Videos taken from police officers’ body and dashboard cameras show two officers firing their guns at a stolen car moments before the driver, Paul O’Neal, 18, crashed it into a police vehicle. Mr. O’Neal was shot and killed in the back as he fled the scene and ran behind a nearby house. Police officers could be seen gathering around Mr. O’Neal as he lay on the ground.
Chicago Police Dept.Joseph Mann
Dashboard camera audio suggests that police officers tried to hit Joseph Mann with their patrol car as he fled on foot. “I’m going to hit him,” one officer is heard saying. “Go for it,” another says. Officers then followed Mr. Mann on foot and fired 18 shots, 14 of which hit him.
Sacramento Police DepartmentPhilando Castile
Philando Castile, 32, was fatally shot during a traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb, the aftermath of which was captured in a grisly video recorded by the car’s front-seat passenger and streamed live as the man slumped against her. Her young daughter sat in the back seat. In June, a jury found the Minnesota police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, not guilty of all charges, including second-degree manslaughter. Dashboard camera video was released days later.
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Diamond ReynoldsAlton Sterling
A cellphone video shows a black man, Alton Sterling, 37, being tackled and then held to the ground by two white officers. Someone shouts, “He’s got a gun!” and one officer appears to hold a gun above Mr. Sterling’s chest. Multiple gunshots are heard while Mr. Sterling is pinned down. Mr. Sterling died at the scene.
Nola.comSouth Carolina High School Student
Videos, apparently shot by students in a high school classroom, show a white school police officer grabbing an African-American student by the neck, flipping her backward as she sat at her desk, then dragging and throwing her across the floor.
YouTube video uploaded by Reginald SeabrooksJames Blake
James Blake, a retired tennis star who is biracial, was standing outside a Manhattan hotel when Officer James Frascatore threw him to the ground, mistaking him for a thief. Investigators studying the surveillance video concluded that the officer had used excessive force.
New York City Police Dept.Christian Taylor
Surveillance cameras at a car dealership showed what occurred just before a white rookie police officer shot and killed Christian Taylor, 19, an unarmed black college student and football player. Officer Brad Miller was fired for using poor judgment.
Classic Buick GMCSamuel Dubose
The body camera for Officer Ray Tensing, of the University of Cincinnati police, captured the moment when he shot Samuel Dubose, 43, during a traffic stop involving a missing front license plate. Officer Tensing, who is white, faced a jury twice on charges relating to the death of Mr. Dubose. Both times ended in a mistrial.
Hamilton County ProsecutorSandra Bland
Dashboard camera video revealed that the white Texas State trooper who pulled over Sandra Bland, 28, threatened her with a stun gun as their encounter escalated, partly because of her apparent unwillingness to snuff out a cigarette. Ms. Bland, a black woman, was arrested and later found dead in a jail cell.
Texas Department of Public SafetyA Teenager and a Pool Party
Cellphone video showed a white police officer, David Eric Casebolt, pointing a gun at teenagers in bathing suits and shoving a black girl’s face into the ground.
YouTube video uploaded by Brandon BrooksFreddie Gray
Freddie Gray, 25, suffered a spinal injury while in police custody. He died a week later. The six officers involved in his arrest, a mix of black and white, were charged with crimes that included murder and manslaughter.
YouTube video uploaded by The Attorney DepotWalter L. Scott
A bystander recorded a white officer, Michael T. Slager, shooting an unarmed black man, Walter L. Scott, 50, in the back as he ran away. The video showed Mr. Slager firing eight times then casually walking over to Mr. Scott, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
Video made available to The New York TimesTamir Rice
Surveillance video showed Officer Timothy Loehmann, who is white, hopping out of a police cruiser and immediately firing two shots at Tamir Rice, 12, killing him at close range. Before the shooting, Tamir, who was black, had been using a fake gun that looked strikingly like the real thing.
Northeast Ohio Media GroupLaquan McDonald
A dashcam video shows Laquan McDonald, 17, running, then walking past police officers when he is struck by bullets. One of the officers, Jason Van Dyke, who is white, was charged with murder on Nov. 24, 2015. Mr. McDonald, who is black, was shot 16 times.
Chicago Police Dept.Michael Brown
A bystander’s video showed Michael Brown, 18, lying in the middle of the street after being shot and killed by a white officer named Darren Wilson. His body stayed in the street for hours. He was unarmed. Mr. Wilson was not indicted.
Ace Johnson via FacebookEric Garner
Eric Garner, 43, died after police officers tried to arrest him for the illegal sale of cigarettes. He was wrestled to the ground and placed in a chokehold. A cellphone camera held by a friend recorded the struggle as Mr. Garner told the police multiple times, “I can’t breathe.”
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The Troubling Fate of a 1973 Film About the First Black Man in the C.I.A.
Ivan Dixon’s “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” from 1973, displays the bedrock of racist attitudes and assumptions that renders racist policies both inescapable and irreparable.
Photograph from Everett
Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” which is playing at Metrograph from Friday through Sunday (it’s also on DVD and streaming), is a political fiction, based on a novel by Sam Greenlee, about the first black man in the C.I.A. After leaving the agency, the agent, Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook) moves to Chicago, and puts his training in guerrilla warfare to use: he organizes a group of black gang members and Vietnam War veterans into a fighting force and leads a violent uprising against the police, the National Guard, and the city government. The film’s radical premise was noticed outside of Hollywood: produced independently, the film was completed and released by United Artists, but it was pulled from theatres soon after its release. Its prints were destroyed; the negative was stored under another title; and Greenlee (who died in 2014) claimed that the F.B.I. was involved in its disappearance, citing visits from agents to theatre owners who were told to pull the movie from screens. (No official documentation of these demands has emerged.)
On these grounds alone, a viewing of “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” would be a matter of urgent curiosity. But the movie is also a distinctive and accomplished work of art, no mere artifact of the times but an enduring experience. A supreme aspect of the art of movies is tone—the sensory climate of a movie, which depends on the style and mood of performance as much as the plot and the dialogue, the visual compositions as well as the locations, costumes, and décor, the editing and the music (often a sticking point), all of which are aligned with—and sharpen and focus—the ideas that the movie embodies. Dixon—who starred in one of the greatest of all independent films, Michael Roemer’s “Nothing But a Man,” from 1964 (and then spent five years on “Hogan’s Heroes”)—begins with a tone bordering on sketch-like satire that soon crystallizes into a sharp edge of restrained precision. A senator (a white man, played by Joseph Mascolo) campaigning for reëlection finds that he needs the black vote and decides to criticize the C.I.A. for having no black agents. Even in his office, the senator speaks in a pompous, stentorian voice seemingly inflated to a constant podium bluster.
Dixon devotes careful attention to the recruitment and training process (Greenlee had himself been an employee of the U.S. Information Agency) that Freeman and the other black recruits who are his competitors endure—and to the behind-the-scenes chicanery of white officials who treat the process as a sham and hope not to integrate the agency at all. Dixon’s direction of the white actors’ performances exposes the dual meaning of the term “bad actors”: the officials’ fat-cat presumptions and facile attitudinizing are mocked in the characters’ exaggerated B-movie cadences. (The title of “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” plays on the racial slur as well as the slang for “spy,” and alludes to the conspicuous deployment of the agency’s one black officer to display its phony integration.)
By contrast, in the role of Dan Freeman, Cook is laser-focussed and controlled, keeping himself under high pressure to contain tremendous heat. When Dan leaves Washington, D.C., and returns to Chicago, he does so under the guise of joining a social-services group as a street-level teacher. But when he gets there, he returns to his earlier identity as Turk, a member of a gang called the Cobras, and he organizes and trains its members as part of his battalion—with lessons that he learned in C.I.A. training courses. The sequences of their training, their planning, and their launching of action—as well as of Dan’s relations with other black men and women there, including his former fiancée, Joy (Janet League); a prostitute whom he recruits as an infiltrator (Paula Kelly); and a police detective who’s his longtime friend (J.A. Preston)—deliver a frank yet delicate reckoning with the pain and the conflict of black American lives.
The power of what Dixon accomplishes is revealed as much in what’s not onscreen as in what is. “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” isn’t about the ideological or organizational development of a political party; it’s not about a public-relations war or an advocacy campaign. Rather, it’s about a cold, clear truth that infuses the movie with an existential ferocity: Dixon’s film doesn’t offer a litany of disparate grievances; it displays the bedrock of racist attitudes and assumptions that renders racist policies both inescapable and irreparable. In effect, the question that the film poses regarding the revolutionary action of black Americans—and that renders it so daring—isn’t “Why?” but “Why not?”
The longest scene in the movie, nearly at the center of it, features Dan in conversation with a fighter named Willie (David Lemieux), a college student and writer whom he recruits as “propagandist” and appoints Minister of Information. When Willie expresses contempt for his college education, Dan unleashes a calmly impassioned monologue about his illiterate grandmother learning to read when he did and telling him, “Get an education, because that’s the only thing the white man can’t take away from you.” In another extraordinary scene, as four of the guerrillas sit around chatting, two of them improvise an elaborately antic parody of a Hollywood plantation movie, complete with a servile and grateful former slave, to which Dan responds, “You have just played out the American dream, and now we’re going to turn it into a nightmare.”
Dixon, working with the cinematographer Michel Hugo (who also shot Jacques Demy’s “Model Shop”), composes the film with a severe, wide-eyed stillness that has the sense of a hard stare at unbearable realities and phantasmagorical practicalities alike. His stylized blankness seems to stare beyond the specifics of the drama toward vast imaginary possibilities. The power of his work was noticed by the severest critics of the era, who forced it out of theatres and nearly into oblivion. It was the second and last feature that Dixon directed—and a glance at the filmographies of its cast shows that few had significant feature-film roles afterward. As with so many independent films—sadly and unsurprisingly, particularly ones directed by women and people of color—the disappearance of this one also contributed to the erasure of careers, mentorship, influence, and power of another sort, which, judging by the fate of “The Spook Who Sat By the Door,” seems to have mattered desperately to law-enforcement officials: power in the world of movies itself.
READ MORE AT: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-troubling-fate-of-a-1973-film-about-the-first-black-man-in-the-cia
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