POLICE & POLITICS

Television is keeping pace with politics this year. Even as shows like House of Cards and The Good Fight continue blurring reality and fiction, Netflix’s Flint Town has taken the form and the medium further. Whereas the TV drama series always pushed the boundaries of what was possible to believe about our lives, Flint Town actually embeds itself into reality and dramatises it for the viewer.

A long-form documentary set in Flint, Michigan, the story focuses on the police department over the course of 13 months, crucially during the 2016 presidential elections. With Flint’s history of poverty, violence and lead-contaminated water, the town becomes the centre of a constant struggle between a grossly understaffed police department and a disenchanted citizenry. The story plants itself

in the lives of the police officers who are fighting a rising crime rate— including multiple homicides and a growing drug epidemic—amid a desperate budget crunch.

In the first episode, a new mayor takes office and replaces the police chief. While the nation celebrates Flint’s first woman mayor, uncertainty looms over law enforcement in the city. Flint is where the American dream disintegrates into drug dens, lead poisoning and a collapsed economy.

Racial tensions mount throughout the series, especially as the three presidential candidates make their way to the city amid a polarising debate over police shootings and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests.

The city’s black and white residents are starkly divided between

the liberal Hillary Clinton and the rightwing Donald Trump—who scorns Black Lives Matter as a dangerous attack on law and order.

Shot in Michael Moore’s hometown, Flint Town is a fitting follow-up to Roger and Me. Spread over eight episodes, it is not always entertaining but it is certainly a trenchant commentary on American politics at the margins.n