Netflix unveiled the official trailer for Power, a documentary exploring the history and evolution of policing and law enforcement in America over 200 years.

Release Date

Directed and narrated by Academy Award-nominated Strong Island director Yance Ford, Power world premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, and will open in limited release in theaters on May 10, 2024, then streaming on Netflix on May 17, 2024.

Synopsis

In the United States, police have been granted extraordinary power over our individual lives. The police determine who is suspicious and who ‘fits the description.’ They define the threats and decide how to respond. They demand obedience and carry the constant threat of violence. Thousands of these interactions play out in our cities and towns every day, according to real and perceived ideas of criminality and threats to social order—as decided by the police. Police make the abstract power of the state real.

Power traces the accumulation of money, the consolidation of political power, and the nearly unrestricted bipartisan support that has created the institution of policing as we know it. The film offers a visceral and immersive journey to demonstrate how we’ve arrived at this moment in history, from the slave patrols of the 1700’s and the first publicly funded police departments of the 1800’s to the uprisings of the 1960’s and 2020’s.

Part essay, part interview, and part archival collage, Power uses historical materials to illustrate our contemporary realities and examines urgent questions about a growing and largely unchecked authority—who is policed, who is protected, who gets to decide, and why.

Reviews

Guardian review gave the film 3 of 5 stars, and called it ‘visually elegant, if a little dry,’ wrote, “Power moves seamlessly through the past and present, connecting the formation of corrupt police departments and the colonialist origins of paramilitary tactics to the crackdowns, persecution and abject violence perpetrated by modern US police officers, often caught on cellphone or body cameras and blasted across media. Numerous subjects – among them the journalist Wesley Lowery, who has extensively covered the state of US policing amid the Black Lives Matter movement, and Redditt Hudson, a Black former police officer turned police reform activist – make the point that police are imbued with unchecked power. That they wield the power to end lives without accountability. That most of the harm caused by policing in the US is perfectly legal. That policing has always been more about maintaining social hierarchies than actual safety.”

Official Trailer

Watch the official trailer for Power