AN INCIDENT AT THE CALLIOPE
Directed / Produced by Ashley Hunt
The Corrections Documentary Project
2005 / 8 Minutes
"That was the fastest they ever let anyone off the car!"
"Yeah, we ought to have everyone back here with cameras!"
In the spring of 2002, while shooting for CLOSE TALLULAH NOW! in New Orleans, we were brought over to the Calliope housing projects to interview some of its residents about the police presence there, especially about a controversial police force called “Safe Home,” who had a reputation in the community for harassment, racial profiling and brutality — often arresting them for “trespassing.”
As we wait for one of our interviewees to join us, two black unmarked cars pull up onto the lawn and grab him and another resident random searches. Once our presence and our camera was pointed out to the officers, they handed him back his wallet in what was apparently "the fastest they ever let anyone off the car!"
An accidental circumstance of counter-surveillance to keep state power in check, it is a brief glimpse of the flexing of state power in communities whose voice is more criminalized than listened to and respected, it predicts the power of wide spread counter-surveillance that begins with camera-equipped cellphones and social media in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
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