“Power”: Yance Ford on His New Documentary & Why “Violence Is Part and Parcel” of U.S. Policing

The new Netflix documentary Power examines the role of police in the United States. We speak to its Oscar-nominated director, Yance Ford, about how policing is used to suppress dissent and protect property in the U.S., its relationship to imperialism and occupation, and the significance of the film’s release ahead of the fourth anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man who was killed when police officers placed him in a deadly chokehold and who became a rallying point for protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality. “The thing that police want to do more than anything else is contain and control threats to order,” says Ford. What we still see in the U.S. and around the world today, from the Black Lives Matter movement to the campus Gaza solidarity movement, is “the use of police as small militaries whose job is to suppress dissent.”