Review: ‘Riotsville, USA’ Provides A Sobering Reminder of America's Ongoing Policing Problem
In the 1960s, as social upheaval was at all time highs for the country, the United States government constructed a fake city to train police in curbing protests. They called it Riotsville, and its mere existence showed the police’s intent for stamping out social unrest and maintaining the status quo. With out-of-uniform police playing the part of civilians, participants carried out drill exercises ranging from mass arrests to crowd dispersion. The tactics taught would eventually work their way into every department across America in the decades that followed. In our nation’s long-troubled history with policing, the events taking place at Riotsville, and under Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration at large, marked a new era of policing in America that was more funded than ever before.
Sierra Pettengill’s Riotsville, USA knows the allusions it’s drawing. Though these events take place in the 1960s, the connections to current day policing are unmistakable. The director makes no direct statement nor use of contemporary footage, just a notice that the film was made between 2015 and 2021, preceding the wave of nationwide protests in the summer of 2020. The timing of its production, in proximity to the timing of its release and subject, provide a pointed statement about the perennial state of policing in America.
So many documented images in Riotsville, USA parallel our times in uncanny ways. The fact that outside agitator arguments were used back in the 1960s would be comical if it weren’t so pervasive an argument in contemporary conservatism now. More so, seeing a group of old white women at a gun range practicing self-defense is admittedly funny if not absurd. At times, the film reminds me of Atomic Cafe, a documentary also comprised entirely of archival footage that shows the insanity of Cold War America. That film is truly funny because we can look in the rearview and laugh at American policy that we have since now written off as nonsense. But as satirically dystopian as a faux-American town called Riotsville is, the events taking place in the 1960s are still as real as ever, even worse, which makes Petengill’s documentary a sobering reminder of America’s ongoing policing problem.
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