Law enforcement

Is America Becoming a Police State? The Disturbing Questions of ‘Do Not Resist’

Documentary filmmaker Craig Atkinson wants everyone to know he doesn’t hate cops.

Far from it—he’s the loving son of a cop.

“My perception of law enforcement was always very favorable—and I still have a favorable opinion of police officers,” he told The Daily Beast. “I have great respect for my father. Growing up, I had a very biased view of my dad as an officer, and I knew he had a great deal of integrity as an individual. I assumed that all police officers operated in the same way he did.”

Yet Atkinson’s new movie, Do Not Resist—opening Friday at New York’s Film Forum and later nationwide—shows that actually they don’t. It depicts local police departments deploying military-grade equipment, in many cases armored vehicles gifted by the Homeland Security and Defense departments direct from Iraq and Afghanistan, while using brute force to control, and occasionally abuse, economically depressed minority communities.