In 2018, a police officer shot a man named Harith “Snoop” Augustus in the street of a Chicago neighborhood. “Incident,” a short film by producer and journalist Jamie Kalven and director Bill Morrison, is composed of body camera and surveillance footage depicting that fatal shooting and the ensuing demonstrations. Kalven and Morrison visited Colgate University to show their film and host a Q&A session on Thursday, Oct. 16.
Kalven and Morrison sought to reveal the events leading up to the interaction between Augustus and the police officers, as well as the reaction from the surrounding neighborhood. The shooting occurred at a time of heightened tensions between the police force and citizens of Chicago, resulting from the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald. After the 2014 shooting, the Chicago Police Department failed to release the dashboard footage until over a year later, inviting severe criticism from the community. Kalven and Morrison aimed to provide clarity about what happened to Augustus in a way that was absent in the McDonald case.
Kalven works only a few blocks away from where the incident occurred and was able to report on it for the magazine The Intercept.
“Less than 24 hours after the incident, the police department released a video that was heavily edited with the sole purpose of demonstrating that Mr. Augustus had a gun,” Kalven said. “The video became the official narrative of what happened. The reality is that as soon as the police released their video, all public interest died off. All media interest died off, and there were no further demonstrations. I reported on the case to impeach the official narrative of what happened.”
In the film, Augustus is shown walking down a sidewalk past several police officers. As he passes, one officer notices the outline of a gun under his shirt and alerts the others. Under Illinois law, concealed carry is legal with the correct permits. The officers stop him to ask if he is security personnel in an attempt to open up a conversation about the gun. As Augustus pulls his wallet out to show his permit, the officers attempt to grab his arms and pull them behind his back. He wrests himself free and, in a blur of motion, jumps between two cars and runs into the street, where he is shot.
Kalven recognized how difficult it is to tell what Augustus’ hands were doing as he attempted to free himself from uninstigated detention.
“He stumbles into the street, and there is this genuinely ambiguous moment where his hand comes in proximity to his gun,” Kalven said. “Is he steadying the gun as he tries to get away? Is he reaching for the gun? It’s ambiguous. It will always be ambiguous. But when he’s lying on the ground, and they come to put handcuffs on him, what’s in his hands is his wallet. He was trying to show his card.”
While the film portrays a community in Chicago from whose perspective the police are a bigoted and harmful force, Kalven also acknowledged the perspective of the officers.
“There is something conveyed about the absurd but also very human response of the two officers,” Kalven said. “They are also caught inside a paradigm that’s not working for anybody.”
When constructing the timeline of events following the shooting, Morrison had to choose clips from nearly 20 hours of raw footage, much of which included angry exclamations from the gathering crowd of citizens.
“We were really interested in how a narrative could be formed,” Morrison said. “What happened in [editing] is that we realized that the officers’ cameras were also picking up the [sound of the] community, and that became a much more interesting way to offset the lie that was being perpetrated. The community is sort of like a Greek chorus that’s speaking truth to power unabashedly.”
Sophomore Ethan Roth, who attended the film screening and Q&A, noted that the role of the community in the film offered a memorable takeaway beyond the brutality of the inciting event.
“The empathy of the neighborhood was highlighted. It is very clear how neighborhoods come together and see certain governmental institutions as the enemy or as antagonistic,” Roth said. “They don’t see the police force as aiming to help them.”
