PITTSBURGH POLICE SHORTS
Dir. John Marshall, 1974
USA. 71 minutes.

FRIDAY, JUNE 5 – 7:30PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 19 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, JUNE 22 – 7:30PM

Manifold Controversy (3 min)
Vagrant Woman (8 Mins)
Youth and the Man of Property (7 mins)
After the Game (9 Mins)
Two Brothers (4 min)
A Forty Dollar Misunderstanding (8 min)
Henry is Drunk (7 Min); Wrong Kid (4 min)
Twenty-one Dollars or Twenty-one Days (8 Min)
You Wasn’t Loitering (6 Min)

John Marshall captures moments of contact between the people of Pittsburgh and their police, in this selection of ten observational vignettes filmed between 1969 and 1970. Cops interact with feuding families, irate customers, drunk drivers, vagrant divorcees and teenage glue-sniffers, bullying, negotiating, and mediating by turns.

Marshall was commissioned to make these films in part for police training purposes, and he gained a remarkable level of access to the Pittsburgh officers. A Cambridge, MA documentarian best known for his tender ethnographic/advocacy filmmaking with the !Kung people of the Kalahari, Marshall finds some humor and humanity in the daily police work grind – without losing sight of the abuses of power that happen in meetings between the cops and city residents. There’s not much point in asking to see a warrant in late 60s Pittsburgh, that’s for sure, and rounding up kids into a van for a trip to the station is a lawman’s staple of the time.

Some of the filmed scenarios feel obsolete, like when officers quietly hand over cab fare to a man who’s too drunk to drive in “Henry is Drunk.” Others seem depressingly contemporary; in “Twenty-one Dollars or Twenty-one Days” a black youth is sentenced to a fine or prison time on the basis of a vague accusation from a policeman. Made in an era before cameras became common tools for monitoring the police, (and long before TV’s Cops), the Pittsburgh Police shorts are revealing historical documents about a policing system that’s the not-too-distant ancestor of the one we live with today.