This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Jacob’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
The Early Militarization of The Police Force in the United States
“Riotsville”, a place for police yet funded with military assistance. 2 completely fictional towns located on a military bases in Virginia and Georgia in the mid 1960s meant to discover and learn about the reasons of civil unrest and other motives behind riots in the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who encouraged Riotsville, wanted to figure out how to stop the riots and conflict before they occurred. 1 side of soldiers would be the “aggressors/protesters” while the police were to try more tactical methods on quieting them and stopping their protesting before it turns into a massive rebellion. What LBJ didn’t realize was that America and its own police force was, and still is to this day, heavily racist and prejudice against people of color, so most of these trials in Riotsville were one-sided.
The documentary used only the archived footage taken during these artificial protests. The most striking thing of these tapes were the equipment used during these 1-sided engagements, the police were using state of the art military equipment on unarmed civilians, and they thought that this was okay at the time and still think this in the year of 2023. The creators of Riotsville gave the police an ever-bigger ego boost now with this modern-day military appliances. This documentary and the and what happened at Riotsville gives more evidence now than ever to the movement of “Defund the police”. We live in a time now where your local police force can have a military combat tank that will never be needed or used yet still was purchased with money the police should not be acquiring. What’s even more terrifying is that the Federal Allocation of funds for the police went from 0 dollars in 64, to 10 million dollars in 65, and then by the 1970s it skyrocketed to above 300 million dollars.
In conclusion I myself was always against the heavy funding of the police force. But now with the more clear evidence of what happened at Riotsville it has shown me why they were funded to begin with and why they still are today in 2023.