Doc Corner: Crime and (in)Justice in America at DOC NYC

By Glenn Dunks

In our final report from this year’s virtual DOC NYC festival, we’re looking at films about crime and (in)justice. Make sure to check out our reviews of three festival titles that are also competing for Best International Feature as well as The Day After making of doc, Television Event, all of which are highly recommended.

A Cops and Robbers Story

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but themes of crime and (often in)justice have been popular in documentary lately. Maybe we can consider it an artform’s attempt to counteract the many, many years of not just racial discrimination by the police, the law, and American society more broadly, but the silence and misinformation that has come with it...

Among the many such films showing at DOC NYC, films about prison reform, violence against women, police brutality and more make for a powerful combination of titles that whip the audience between the cruel realities of our world and the brief moments of light therein.

My favourite of these films was Gilda Sheppard’s Since I Been Down, a film that finds reform and learning within the walls of a prison in Washington state. Heavily influenced with its own social bent, it’s clear that Sheppard wishes to tell a story far removed from the sensationalised headlines and dramatic filmed entertainments that portray jails as little more than dens of violence and corruption. Focusing on Kimonti Carter and the city of Tacoma, Sheppard’s camera manoeuvres its way into Black Prisoners’ Caucus meetings, education classes on everything from mathematics to Asian History, and the story of Carter's victim from a teenage gang shooting.

Since I Been Down isn’t a film that positions its subjects as victims of injustice in the sense of how they found their way to prison. They were guilty of their crimes, that’s true. But many of the men here are victims of injustice from a system that doesn’t acknowledge the rehabilitation many claim they should seek (Seattle is one of 14 states that doesn’t offer parole, a statistic that I found quite shocking), as well as the injustice of a disinvestment in black communities that leads to criminality in the first place. If you want, you could consider it a cousin to the incredible Time (now streaming on Amazon Prime; see Murtada’s interview about that film), although it probably more accurately parallels Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous’ The Work.

Watch Since I Been Down at DOC NYC

The lead figures of that film are somewhat reversed by Corey Pegues, the subject of Ilinca Calugareanu’s A Cops and Robbers Story. Pegues is a African American man who rose through the ranks of the NYPD to the position of Commander. Beloved by the community, but criticised by those in the his own organisation for little things like wearing a durag and listening to rap in the cop car (“He was too representative of his minority community”, says former cop), to more contentious issues around his outspokenness. What his fellow officers didn’t know what that he was once a drug dealer in Queens who had nearly shot a man dead on the street if it weren’t for a jammed gun.

His narrative of a second chance is compelling even if it takes its time to get to what I feel was the crux of its message. Heavy use of re-enactments in its opening passages have emotional reverence later on, but feel like a filler workaround to a lack of archival footage, but there were plenty of avenues for further digging by the production (Pegues’ own daughter is now a police officer, although sneeze and you won’t hear that). But when it gets there, what it ultimately has to say about the police force (emphasis on force) is timely and needs to be said loudly.

While she doesn’t focus too much on the specific abuse that Pegues received first to his speaking out and then to his admissions of a criminal past (a collage of comments from a private NYPD social network site says a lot in just a few seconds of screen-time), Calugareanu’s film does reveal more behind the institution’s lack of willingness to reform; an internal blue wall from behind which they stubbornly refuse to budge. Pegues’ story, I suppose, shows the limits of their protective coat of arms, and that’s an indictment all its own, as does that of Bob Leuci, a detective who turned informer, whose story was told in Blue Code of Silence. I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s an interesting story, but its greatest asset as a film is that at 80 minutes it is a full 87 minutes shorter than Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City about the same guy.

Watch A Cops and Robbers Story at DOC NYC
Watch Blue Code of Silence at DOC NYC

The tension for police reform is on full display in Deirdre Fishel’s Women in Blue. Focused around five female officers of the Minneapolis police, it begins and ends in tragedy on the city’s streets. Killings by officers litter the film, but so too do stories of women being thrown under the bureaucratic bus. Fishel’s most compelling element is the question of whether the deaths of so many could have been avoided by continuing to improve its gender representation—the film obviously errs on the side of yes, highlighted by one of its most sympathetic characters returning to the city's third district precinct after its officers killed George Floyd after she had left, fed up at being passed over for promotions—although I questioned the repeated featuring of black violence. Did these officers never once have a drunken white guy causing a public nuisance filmed on camera? It seemed strangely slanted in this direction and made a modestly interesting film leave something of a bad taste in my mouth.

Watch Women in Blue at DOC NYC

On a different path is Jiayan 'Jenny' Shi’s Finding Yingying, a modestly assembled true crime narrative that nevertheless finds deep wells of empathy within its story of a missing Chinese immigrant. Student Yingying Zhang went missing, ultimately the victim of a sadistic male stalker, and the film charts the investigation mostly from the outside through the eyes of her family and Shi herself who knew Yingying. Shi’s use of the missing girl’s personal writings reveals wealth of emotions and curiosities that she likely had no other outlet for. It’s this focus on the victim rather than the killer and his crimes that elevates Finding Yingying.

Watch Finding Yingying at DOC NYC

Lastly, A Crime in the Bayou is another film by Nancy Buirski that conjures up a real sense of intimacy like she did with The Loving Story and The Rape of Lecy Taylor. It’s a film that recounts the story of a black man, Gary Duncan, from a swampy outpost of New Orleans called Plaquemines Parish in 1966, who was arrested touching a white man in the process of breaking up a race-driven street fight. This is a quiet film built around soft-spoken recollections of memories that speaks to the very same systemic prejudices of the justice system that Since I Been Down did at the top.

Watch A Crime in the Bayou at DOC NYC