CRIME & PARODY

(Check out Chris Reed’s Crime & Parody movie review. The film world premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival on Feb. 21^st.  Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)

We tell ourselves we live in a democracy, yet all too often find out the hard way that the rights ostensibly guaranteed to all citizens in the Constitution do not, in fact, exist. This surprising truth comes to you courtesy of the highest court in the land, thanks to a series of decisions that began in 1967 with Pierson v. Ray and continued into the 1980s with Harlow v. Fitzgerald and beyond. Have you heard of “qualified immunity”? It’s basically a carte blanche given to police to do whatever they want and then claim they thought they were acting in the best interests of the law. They can abuse you and there’s not much you can do about it.

In Crime & Parody, director Will Thwaites (making his feature debut) covers all this unfortunate history, though he starts us out with a laugh. On March 1, 2016, one Anthony Novak, a resident of Parma, Ohio, decided to create a parody Facebook page spoofing his city’s police department. Among the 6 posts he made before taking it all down after 24 hours was one inviting “minority applicants not to apply”; another offered free “experimental abortions” to teenage girls on Saturday from 12-4pm, with only a note from their parents required. A lifelong smartass, Novak was clearly telling jokes. 3 weeks later, he was arrested and criminally charged with a fourth-degree felony.

It would seem the Parma PD lacks the ability to laugh at themselves. It would also appear that they overreached, though that was small consolation to Novak, who spent Easter weekend in the Cuyahoga County Jail (not a fun place to be). This part of the story has a happy ending: though facing 18 months in prison for knowingly impairing police business using a computer (this is a real statute on the books), Novak was found not guilty. It was clear to the jury that the lead investigating officer was a humorless idiot.

Not surprisingly, Novak turned around and sued. In discovery, his lawyer, Subodh Chandra, clearly had lead detective Thomas Connor on the ropes. This was not going to go well for him or the police department. And then the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stepped and dismissed the case. Why? Because of qualified immunity.

As Mike Gillis, head writer at the satirical newspaper The Onion says in the film, “When comedy comes under attack, it’s the canary in the coal mine” of democracy. But that’s not even the worst of it. Thwaites takes us on a journey through people who have lost their lives, spending quite a bit of screen time on the tale of Omar Arrington-Bey, a bipolar Black man who died in police custody. Case Western Reserve University law professor Ayesha Bell Hardaway, who went to high school with Arrington-Bey, narrates this part of the film, explaining the legalese of how police can act with impunity and get away with it, and then tying it back to Novak’s case.

Eventually, we end up on the steps of the Supreme Court itself, to which the Institute for Justice’s Patrick Jaicomo has brought an amicus brief penned by The Onion’s Gillis to have the Justices reconsider the whole notion of qualified immunity. You can look up the results yourself or watch the film. Given who is on the Court, I’m sure you can guess how it ends.

Like so many important documentaries of our day, Crime & Parody should serve as a wakeup call to those still asleep. If the police can’t be held accountable then our freedoms do not exist. Get out of bed and demand to be heard.

Though the messaging here is vital, Thwaites could tighten the filmmaking in places. He returns to shots of cameras recording interviews a few too many times and recycles certain images and other footage as apparent filler. I also wasn’t the biggest fan of some of the on-the-fly material that takes a moment to focus or settle (yet sometimes I admit that it’s charming). Same goes for slo-mo walking. But other sections are beautifully photographed, and what counts the most is the searing narrative drive. Laugh and cry, but above all, push back.

– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)

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