The true crime genre has a new medium, or maybe even a whole new language and grammar: police body cam footage. Faces of victims, witnesses and possible perpetrators loom up to the cameras, sometimes in the harsh glare of headlights or flashlights as the officers approach, their faces and voices eloquent of wariness or panic or indignation or suspiciously contrived innocence. And we often incidentally glimpse the faces of the officers themselves, one standing by blankly while the other asks the questions with what sometimes seems like extraordinary diffidence – though perhaps this is because they know they are being recorded.
We have already had the Netflix true-crime documentary American Murder: Gabby Petito, about the slaying of an Instagram influencer by her boyfriend, whose main point of interest was body cam footage and in which, as in this film, the police seemed extraordinarily lax with the perpetrator. There is also Bill Morrison’s Oscar-nominated short Incident, composed entirely of body cam film. Now comes Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary about the grim case of Ajike Owens in Ocala, Florida, a woman of colour whose four young kids allegedly harassed and tormented her white neighbour, Susan Lorincz. In 2023, after an escalating series of neighbour-dispute incidents in which the police were repeatedly called, Lorincz shot Owens dead through her closed front door, when Owens went to Lorincz’s house to confront her about throwing objects at her children.
