My former Channel 2 colleague, Chris Spotted Eagle, sends along a StarTrib
news feature (below) of a premiere for a locally produced film starring some
familiar theatre talents around here. "Justice" Premieres at the Riverview
tonight. Some thoughts:
Kristin Tillotson's article quotes a former cop as suggesting - again - that
depictions of white racist police officers are unfairly painting an entire
department (Minneapolis') with the same brush that should apply to only a
small, aberrant coterie of cops. This is the same siren song sung at the
funerals and trials of thousands of men (and women) of color who have been
beaten or died at the hands of uniformed thugs over 150 years of law
enforcement in Minneapolis. In other words, 150 years of sour notes, 150
years of good guys circling the wagons around the bad guys so many times
that the good guys become the bad guys.
Minneapolis is right up there in its history of police abuse with the likes
of NYCity, Detroit (where I spent 10 years in media and politics and
witnessed it), Los Angeles and other urban enclaves where keeping poor folks
and people of color (not always the same) afraid of law enforcement and
generally out of the way of white folks.
I realize that readers know me as a relentless critic of the way law
enforcement conducts itself in the United States, and, most especially, of a
culture that feeds on itself, on its deep resentment of the judicial system
they believe undermines their work, on a code - the Blue Code" - that
protects the "bad apples" of the barrel, rather than 'fessing up to the
spread of rot their silence creates. But if we don't get a real grip on this
renegade part of our legal system, we cannot hope to expect anything but
renegade behavior from the victims of law enforcement.
I think it's important to know this as well: the torturing (not just
"abuses") of Iraqi detainees - note that the word "detainee" only means that
one is being held in lieu of investigation or probable cause, none of them
convicted of a crime, if ever they will be - has come in large part at the
hands of activated army reserve and national guard military police units
assigned to guard prisoners as their assigned duty. This has been only
mentioned in passing, but I believe it a critical element in analyzing the
Abu Ghraib scandal.
Most reserve military police officers are also civilian police officers and
thousands of police officers in US cities came out of the ranks of the
military police. This is a world unto itself.
In any event, the same culture that feeds the insulated and alienated
culture of police throughout this nation was set upon the prisoners and
detainees of Iraq. The torture and humiliations there, we now know, have
been part and parcel of the US occupation since the invasion. Further, the
silence on military abuses of Iraqi citizens - rape, murder and racism - has
prevailed, despite their detailing in Red Cross and Red Crescent reports and
reports of some foreign journalists going back more than a year.
Only the silence of good men and good women have allowed this aberrant - if
actually aberrant, as in "outside the norm" - behavior to dominate their own
ethical sensibilities, perhaps out of fear, but more likely because the Code
of Silence shuts them up out of fear or from the denial that springs from a
false sense of loyalty.
These connections are the only ways to assess the real failure of the law
enforcement culture to learn from its "aberrations" and to start separating
the wheat from the chaff - to stop protecting the criminals in uniform that
continue to plague society by extending victims' hatred and distrust for the
very notion of Justice and who will never feel welcome in their hometowns.
So, yes, we will continue to see a disproportionate number of (mostly) men
of color in out jails and prisons - not just because that's where the
justice system focuses its wrath, but because generations of them have
walked in persistent fear, therefore despair, of both the culture of police
and the society that supports it.
Such alienation by and of both cultures cannot continue without
civilizations crumbling in time. It may be happening faster than we thought
possible.
Andy Driscoll
Saint Paul
From: Chris Spotted Eagle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
'Justice': A local film -- a universal theme
Kristin Tillotson Star Tribune Published May 12, 2004
"Justice," a locally made film premiering tonight at the Riverview Theater
in Minneapolis, is not an action movie. It's a call-to-action movie.
Written, directed and produced by a pair of civil rights attorneys who have
a lot more experience standing in front of judges than behind cameras, the
drama centers on a Minneapolis public defender named J.C. Carter who opens
his own law practice after becoming frustrated with flaws and racial bias he
sees in the criminal justice system.
First-time filmmakers John Shulman and Jeanne-Marie Almonor said their aim
is not an Oscar or a house in Hollywood. They intend to use their film to
broadcast a sociopolitical message to a wide audience.
"You can touch maybe thousands of people working as an attorney," Shulman
said. "With a movie, you have the potential to reach millions."
Shulman and Almonor are best known professionally for representing the NAACP
and others during a series of Twin Cities school-desegregation lawsuits.
They are married, with two young children and another on the way.
After quitting their jobs in the mid-1990s and a brief stint working as
executives for the Mexican media company Grupa Televisa, they set up a small
office in the Uptown area of Minneapolis. They began soliciting free and
low-cost help to make a movie from their script. And they got it -- from top
names in Twin Cities stage and film production. Jack Reuler, founder of
Mixed Blood Theater, rounded up a cast of faces familiar to Twin Cities
theatergoers-- Joe Minjares as a good-hearted but jaded public defender, T.
Mychael Rambo as a smarmy sellout lawyer in private practice and Allen
Hamilton as a judge more interested in moving on to the next case than in
seeing justice done.
Almonor declined to reveal the film's budget because they have not yet
talked to distributors, but she estimated that actual costs and donated
talent and resources "could be as much as $3 million."
The film's star, Roger Guenveur Smith, has made a successful career in
Hollywood and New York. He has acted in several of director Spike Lee's
projects, most memorably as the title character in "The Huey P. Newton
Story." Smith, who has spent time in the Twin Cities, including a
seven-month acting stint with the Guthrie Theater in 1986, said that he
agreed to work on the low-budget "Justice" because it was sufficiently
ambitious, and "it's important for people to get a provocative look at the
Midwest we don't usually see," he said.
Shulman grew up in Minneapolis' Kenwood neighborhood, entering Anwatin
Elementary in the 1960s as part of the first wave of desegregation, he said.
Though he thought about following in the footsteps of his grandfather,
writer Max Shulman ("The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"), he went on to Harvard
Law School, where he met his wife, a fellow student. Almonor was born in
Haiti and raised in working-class Brooklyn, N.Y., where "I lived all these
issues," she said. "It was so seductive, coming out of Harvard, to work for
a big fancy New York firm, and I tried it. But something was missing."
Shulman was a member of West High School's last graduating class, along with
Dave Pirner, frontman for the rock band Soul Asylum. Pirner composed what he
calls the "incidental music" for the film. The soundtrack also features
another Twin Cities music legend, the Sounds of Blackness.
"What excited me was that they weren't coming from a phony perspective,"
Pirner said. "They know what they're talking about, and it's their
experiences that make the movie so relevant."
Not everyone is likely to root for "Justice." It portrays the Minneapolis
Police Department in an unflattering light, especially a subplot about a
vengeful, corrupt cop. Roy Richardson, a former police officer who is now
program director for the human services program Pilot City, caught a preview
last week and said that corrupt white officers making racially biased
arrests in the film represent "the exception to the rule" in real life.
"It was somewhat unfair [to the cops], but those things do happen,"
Richardson said. "I wish they could have gone more in depth on how
frustrating it is for police officers to see people they arrest get off on
plea bargains."
Almonor said that she is aware the police characterization could be a flash
point, and she pointed out the inclusion in the story of an honest cop who
does the right thing. She and Shulman say incidents of bias in the film,
such as an innocent black man getting arrested while picking up his daughter
from school, are based on real occurrences from their careers.
"The film is really about showing young people why you don't want to get
involved in the criminal justice system and how it becomes a trap once
you're in it," Shulman said.
Judging from the attention paid by a group of high school students from the
Urban League Academy who were given a preview screening last week, the film
stands a chance of passing the smell test with teenage and young-adult black
audiences.
Sophomore Fred Gaines said "Justice" was worthwhile because "it lets you see
behind the scenes in the courtroom, plus the story was good."
Junior Robin E. Lee said she liked the film because "it comes on slow and
gentle at first and you don't think it's going to be that serious, but then
you really get into it. Even if you had to go to the bathroom, you wouldn't
want to leave. I wish more kids could see it because maybe they wouldn't be
so tempted to get in trouble."
The screenings of "Justice" will showcase a different organization each
night, and audience members will get handouts listing "10 Things You Can Do
to Make a Difference." Almonor and Shulman hope to get a distributor
eventually. In the meantime, they will offer use of the film to people such
as Susan Smoluchowski, marketing director at the Council on Crime and
Justice, who hopes to use it as an educational tool.
"So much of the work we've done was guided by our elders on the front lines
of the civil rights struggle," Shulman said. "These younger people haven't
gotten the same sense, that you have to fight together if you want change.
And that it can be a great thing."
Kristin Tillotson is at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2004 Star
Tribune. All rights reserved.
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