October 14, 2015
Page 9
Mississippi
Alberta
North Portland
Vancouver
East County
Beaverton
William ‘Dub’ Lawrence, a former sheriff who established his state’s first SWAT team only to see that same unit kill his son-in-law in a controversial standoff 30 years later
examines evidence from his investigation. ‘Peace Officer,’ a documentary about the militarization of police as told through Lawrence’s story is now playing at Livingroom
Theaters in Portland.
Compelling Focus on Police Tactics
o PinionAted
J udge
by J udge
d arleen o rtega
‘Peace Officer’ documentary
screens in Portland theater
d arleen o rtega
The best film I saw at this year’s Full Frame Documen-
tary Film Festival, “Peace Officer,” is playing at the Liv-
ing Room Theater in Portland for what I suspect may be a
very limited run. Whether or not you think you are inter-
ested in the controversy of police violence and increased
by
militarization, it’s well worth making the time to see this
first-rate analysis of the topic while it’s in town, or at least
to watch for an online release.
I learned at Full Frame that the film’s co-directors, Brad
Barber and Scott Christopherson (making their first feature
film), weren’t originally attracted to the subject, but rather
to William “Dub” Lawrence, the relentless former Utah
sheriff who forms the backbone of the film. Lawrence then
led them on his own journey into police militarization, and
it would be hard to imagine a more compelling guide into
a topic about which focused attention and accountability
is hard to come by.
When Lawrence’s son-in-law Brian Wood was caught
in a police stand-off after assaulting Lawrence’s daughter,
Lawrence assured Wood’s parents that they could trust the
police to handle the tense and dangerous situation with
care. Then Lawrence watched in horror as Wood was
killed by a member of the same SWAT team that Lawrence
himself founded back in the 1970s.
For a time Lawrence held onto hope that the police
would make sense of what happened. When that didn’t
happen, he fought to obtain access to the evidence himself
and launched his own investigation into what appeared to
him to be a homicide. Drawing on decades of experience
as a police investigator, Lawrence’s painstaking and ob-
sessive inquiry into the incident caused a major shift in his
thinking about law enforcement, from trust to alarm.
The film takes us on that journey, as Lawrence helps
us sit with the question of how it makes sense for a small
army of heavily armed officers to provoke a stand-off with
a troubled man who is sitting in his parked truck outside
his own home and has threatened only himself with the
gun in his hands. Lawrence’s growing concern about the
increasingly violent responses of police in making arrests
and serving warrants using aggressive no-knock search
policies lead him to lend his particularly dogged inves-
C ontinued on p age 14