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M ARTIN L UTHER K ING J R .
2015 special edition
January 14, 2015
Arresting Power Documentary
Portland
filmmakers
tackle police
violence
BY M IKE B IVINS
P ORTLAND O BSERVER
CONTRIBUTOR
For many folks, learning about
the racist history of Oregon comes
with a long talk and a city of Portland
timeline that shows how black
people have been discriminated
against since the state’s earliest days
and continue to face challenges due
to race.
However, now that the documen-
tary “Arresting Power” is out, I will
simply be able to tell people who do
not know this state’s sordid history
to watch the film, and they will be
able to become better educated
about racism and in particular police
brutality in Portland.
According to one of the filmmak-
ers, Julie Perini, the film intends to
“demonstrate a humanizing story”
of how the system of policing does
not work, and how we have a long
way to go. The movie accomplishes
this in a very artistic way.
Perini, along with her co-produc-
The co-producers and filmmakers of the Portland documentary ‘Arresting Power,’ (pictured from
left) Erin Yanke, Julie Perini and Jodi Darby. The film, which premiers on Thursday, Jan. 15 at the
Northwest Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium at 7 p.m. speaks to the history of police violence in
our society and the history of Portland’s exclusion laws, racial profiling, red-lining and gentrification
practices.
ers and filmmakers Jodi Darby and
Erin Yanke do a great job mixing
history with art. They start with a
too often untold story that reached
a fever pitch in 1975 when four black
men were shot dead by the Portland
Police Bureau in a single year.
Despite the outcry from the com-
munity then, the problem of police
brutality, especially as it pertains to
people of color and the mentally ill,
is still a conversation that takes
place today due to more recent of-
ficer involved deaths.
One such example is the death of
Keaton Otis, a young black male
who died a few years back when he
was hit with 23 of the 32 bullets fired
by police after a traffic stop. There’s
also a general mistrust of the Port-
land Police Bureau by the black
community.
When speaking with Perini about
Arresting Power, and the history of
the Portland Police Bureau, she tells
me while there has been some
change in law enforcement prac-
tices, but there has been little change
for the better.
Police have become more milita-
rized, Perini says, lamenting an even
“stronger police presence” over the
years, and with more police, come
more arrests.
She also speaks briefly on how
the police are the first line of the
prison industrial complex and the
pipeline to prison, and how racial
profiling has made black residents
disproportionately affected by po-
lice violence.
Arresting Power documents the
1985 death of Tony Stevenson, a
black resident who came to the aid
of a 7-11 store clerk during a rob-
bery. When the police arrived, they
immediately profiled Stevenson and
assumed because he was a big
strong black man that he must be the
culprit.