The Police Tapes mp4

A cinema-verite study of urban crime as seen from the cops point of view. For three months in 1976, producers Alan and Susan Raymond rode with officers of New York's 44th Precinct as they patrolled a 1.2-square-mile section of the South Bronx that reportedly had the highest incidence of crime in the city. Taped in black-and-white and first shown as a 90-minute public-television special, the report has now been cut to one hour and its profanity excised. What emerges, nonetheless, is a harrowing record of violence sometimes only threatened, other times carried out, and often by the victims' own relatives or neighbors. All of them, a police commander observes, are victims of "the whole miserable condition of poverty." Among the cases: a suspected car thief goes berserk while being booked; a crippled 69-year-old woman is accused of axing her daughter in the face; and an ex-mental patient holds his mother hostage in their apartment.