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Provoked by their own experiences being incriminated on the basis of their race, a team of students from high schools across New York City set forth on an investigation into the roots of racial profiling in the police force as a part of the Educational Video Center’s Youth Documentary Workshop.
By Amelia Moriarty
See the short Documentary Cops Are(n’t) Colorblind: Changing the NYPD from the Inside and Out as part of Documentary Day on Saturday September 25 @ 9:30 PM and Documentary Shorts Matinee on Tuesday September 28 @ 3:10 PM at Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street) as part of New York City’s 10th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!
Through interviews with city police, government leaders, and citizens, contextualized by historical research, and of course the personal experiences and insights of the team, the documentary Cops Are(n’t) Colorblind unpacks the racist origins of the modern-day police system, and in the process raises questions about racial identity and how to navigate a path towards change. The film was collectively directed, filmed, and edited by students in the Educational Video Center’s Youth Documentary Workshop. These students were Temis Anthony Cantos, Demitrius Doward, Nyla Cepeda, Laye (Dany) Diakite, Geordy (Geo) Eduardo Mejia, Niaja L. Nazario, Diana Pagan, Jhonatan St. Phard, Taliya Hughes, Mikey Rosa, Moesha Martinez, and Shaniya Fletcher. At the time of the making of the film, they attended high schools across New York City, including Cascades High School, Lower East Side Prep, City-As-School, Brownsville Academy, and Independence High School.
In presenting historical context, the film emphasizes the connection between contemporary issues of racism in the police force coming to public attention and the system’s racist roots. The story traces all the way back to the first form of policing: the slave patrol constituting men on horseback carrying whips, chains, and guns in order to enforce slaves as property and return escaped individuals to slavemasters. The documentary explains how this system of policing changed after the abolition of slavery into black codes, laws designed to limit the freedom of former slaves and restrict them as a cheap labor force.
The documentary turns back to the modern-day, drawing parallels between this clearly delineated history and more recent cases of police brutality targeting unarmed Black men, and disproportionately stopping Black and Hispanic teens and young adults with no excuse besides a black hoodie or “suspicious movements”.
Cops Are(n’t) Color Blind questions how white America’s most toxic notions of race affect the self-identity of POC youths. Living under constant surveillance, clothing and personal style become less about self-expression than a survival strategy to avoid a potentially deadly police encounter. One interview subject who had been stopped by police coming home from his 8th-grade graduation shares how these childhood experiences of racial profiling. “You carry them with you” even into adulthood.
The filmmakers further challenge the stagnation of change, how in the face of public outrage the police force has remained in denial of its own dysfunction.
Speaking with a representative from New York City’s CCRB (Citizen Complaint Review Board) the problem appears even foggier, with only 7 out of 175 reported cases of misconduct in a year being followed through by police. Attributing misconduct to racism remains “hard to determine” when cops claim to be colorblind, a dangerous ignorance as pointed out by Former NYPD captain Eric Adams. “It doesn’t make you a racist to see race,” says Adams, who shares how his own experiences being profiled as a young Black man inspired him to reform the police system from the inside.
Working from the inside is one strategy of change that the documentary investigates, speaking also with detective Felicia Adams on her experience working as a Black woman in a predominantly white office. Adam speaks on the reaction to the US Justice Department’s legislation to bring more women and minorities into the police force. “With increased diversity comes increased bullying,” she states, “but it’s hard to find evidence for that.” Even with sworn statements of superior officers directing their force to target black and Latino people, these few cases are often dismissed as “a few bad apples”. Despite diversity hires, discrimination remains evident at least by preference to white employees in promotions yet the police force develops all forms of racist excuses to explain these statistics. Ultimately, the viewer is left to question to what extent racism in the police force is a sign of dysfunction, or rather functioning exactly according to its origins of guarding a racist society.
This is the question the documentary poses in its final investigation into paths towards change, whether that means working towards reform from the inside or creating new alternatives altogether. The final moments of the film leave the viewer to reflect on their own relationship with the police in America and how much of that relationship is shaped by privilege and status in society. By drawing on both historical origins and contemporary debates, Cops Are(n’t) Color Blind crafts a powerful yet humanistic message for accountability both in individuals and society at large.
The Youth Documentary Workshop is the Educational Video Center’s award-winning signature program that has been preparing students for active community engagement, successful media careers and college since 1984. Through this rigorous afterschool program, 60 students from schools throughout New York City annually learn to produce a documentary on a subject of personal interest and community relevance. They devote 3 hours a day, 3-4 afternoons per week for 15 weeks during the semester, or 6 weeks during the summers, to the research, planning, shooting and editing of their social issue documentary.
Amelia Moriarty
Amelia Moriarty is a writer and artist based in the Pacific Northwest where she works as an editor for the Timberline Review and studies Russian literature at Reed College. Her fiction has been published in Seven Days, Affinity, and The Wellesley Review, and her paintings exhibited with the Waking Windows music festival.
About Winter Film Awards
New York City’s 10th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival runs September 23-October 2 2021. Check out a jam-packed lineup of 91 fantastic films in all genres from 28 countries, including shorts, features, Animation, Drama, Comedy, Thriller, Horror, Documentary and Music Video. Hollywood might ignore women and people of color, but Winter Film Awards celebrates everyone!
Winter Film Awards is an all volunteer, minority- and women-owned registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 2011 in New York City by a group of filmmakers and enthusiasts. The program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the NY State Council on the Arts.
