Yance Ford understands how easy it is for the public to become numbed to images of violence that police commit against citizens. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that not a week passes without someone uploading images showing an officer employing excessive force against an unarmed person – especially right now, with protests against Israel’s war in Gaza taking place on college campuses throughout the nation.
Despite how difficult these scenes can be to watch the "Strong Island" director stressed the importance of citizens filming the police as a matter of public safety. “The cellphone camera has really disrupted the police’s ability to be the sole source of the narrative,” Ford told Salon in a recent interview conducted over Zoom. “More than anything else in a society that has yet to figure out how to regulate its police, the ability of citizens to generate narratives that reveal that police are engaged in a specific kind of calibrated storytelling is so important.”
