One more if you please -- "...All of this sounds like an exaggeration, but as Riotsville, U.S.A. works poetically but damningly through the footage and the story, it makes its case keenly. Yet if this was a matter of such interest 60 years ago, why do so many of us not even know it happened?"
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So you got the footage of Riotsville, and you watched it, and it’s amazing. What’s the next step in turning it into a film that people in 2022 are going to watch?
Posted: Aug 25, 2022
"...As the staged combat at Riotsville plays out, audiences of fellow law enforcement and military looked on from the stands, observing their efforts and comparing notes. In the footage are tactics and weapons usually reserved for warfare, used against ordinary citizens on the streets. Riotsville, U.S.A. shows the same methods used to quash unrest that occurred, for instance, in the Miami neighborhood of Liberty City during the 1968 Republican National Convention. The film shows the birth of the militarization of police in America..."
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Riotsville, U.S.A. is a window onto the bizarre beginnings of police militarization
"In fuzzy, grainy footage, a crowd of protesters on Main Street clamors, shouting, signs in their hands. Toward them moves a group of police officers, armed and ready to put down an uprising. Men dressed in 1960s-style shirtsleeves and slacks run in and out of buildings with law enforcement in hot pursuit. It looks stilted and unreal, like they’re rehearsing a scene. Like something from a movie.
While it’s not a movie set, it’s not real life, either — or, well, not exactly. These are scenes from Riotsville, U.S.A., a new documentary made entirely from archival footage, much of it shot by the US government in the 1960s. It shows something extraordinary: As uprisings became more common across the country and the turbulent decade wore on, the government constructed “Riotsvilles” on two military bases. There, they staged protests and rebellions using soldiers from the US Army to play both protesters and police, then allowed police forces from across the country to learn from the military how to put them down.
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Riotsvilles became rehearsal stages for swatting down dissenters whom law enforcement deemed out of hand — striking, because the more than 150 riots across the country in the summer of 1967 mostly were in response to police brutality.. .
Did you find any hope in making the film?
Where I find the hope in the film, counterintuitively, is that the crises we’re in are not a failure of imagination. We’re watching the same conversation. Police abolition is on the lips of everybody in this film, in different words, but you’re seeing the same tone of people are already weary of explaining this over and over again ... So it’s a political failure. We’re continuing to choose the wrong thing. The solutions are there, and they are well documented and well established. And I find some faith in that."
Riotsville, U.S.A. is playing in select theaters. See the film’s website for details.
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