“Incident” shows how police officers react when a police murder is caught on tape

The beginning of Bill Morrison's short film “Incident” is silent. Surveillance footage shows a stretch of a Chicago street on a seemingly ordinary summer afternoon. A few people walk along the sidewalk, a seagull flies past the camera, a police car idles on the corner. Suddenly the view changes and the sound starts. The effect is jarring, and the new scene has become all too familiar: police officers have shot and killed a black civilian.

Harith (Snoop) Augustus had just left his job at the barbershop down the street when he was shot by a Chicago police officer. Morrison's documentary captures the final moments of his life, as well as the actions and reactions of the officers and neighbors who were there when it happened. He uses police bodycam footage to create a layered record of the shooting, and inserts simple on-screen text to place the shooting in its local political context. The film is a powerful document of one man's death and the ongoing crisis of police brutality.

The shooting in “Incident” is closely linked to an earlier, more famous police shooting in Chicago. In 2014, Officer Jason Van Dyke killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. A journalist sued to gain access to the bodycam footage, which refuted Van Dyke’s claim that he acted in self-defense. A striking, disturbing element of “Incident” is that the cops immediately begin describing the shooting to each other — in a narrative that contradicts what we see on the tape. For Bill Morrison, this is the crux of the film: “After the public has access to this footage, police behavior changes. The cops are all playing a role now. They know they’re being filmed and that the footage is being reviewed, and they make up a story to justify their actions.”

After the film was completed in December 2023, the City of Chicago entered into a new collective bargaining agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police. A provision of the agreement, ratified by the Chicago City Council, allows officers to turn off body cameras during post-incident conversations and delete recorded post-incident conversations.