Film

Do Not Resist

Name: Do Not Resist
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2017
Cast: Rand Paul, Dave Grossman

Do Not Resist follows the surplus of military hardware flowing from the War on Terror into local police departments, from armored trucks in small towns to SWAT raids over minor drug busts. Craig Atkinson keeps his camera close and quiet, letting body-cam footage, training seminars, and one chilling Dave Grossman speech speak for themselves. It's less an argument than an accumulation — clinical, unsettling, and hard to shake.

TMDb rating

6.3

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Made by a man whose father-in-law helped found the first SWAT team in the US, then died at the hands of one — it's the same subject as Do Not Resist told through a single devastating family story instead of a national survey.

But Its narrower, personal frame means you lose the wide-angle statistics and cross-country scope that made Do Not Resist so damning.

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Shot by activists on the ground in Ferguson rather than journalists parachuting in, it gives you the view from inside the tear gas that Do Not Resist only glimpses from outside.

But It's angrier and more polemical, with less interest in balance or restraint — some will find that clarifying, others exhausting.

13th2016

Ava DuVernay traces the line from slavery to mass incarceration with the same rigor Do Not Resist brings to militarization, and together they make a fuller picture of how American law enforcement got here.

But It's a much bigger historical canvas — if you wanted more ground-level Ferguson-style footage, this pulls back further than you might want.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Battle of Algiers1966

This is the film actually screened to train soldiers and police strategists in urban warfare — the ideological ancestor of the militarized playbook Do Not Resist documents being used on American streets.

A black-and-white dramatization of Algerians fighting French colonial rule, shot like real newsreel footage — it's been studied by military academies and the Pentagon as a manual for urban counterinsurgency.

But It's a 1966 foreign film with subtitles and no surface interest in American politics — the connection takes some work to see.

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Embedded with NYPD whistleblowers fighting illegal arrest quotas, it shows the bureaucratic machinery behind the tactics Do Not Resist films from outside — the paperwork behind the armored trucks.

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Built entirely from archival footage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, it's a startling reminder that everything Do Not Resist warns about has already happened once, in full view, on live television.

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Strong Island2017no page yet

A quieter, more personal film about a family failed by a justice system that treated a Black man's killer with more sympathy than the victim — it's the human cost Do Not Resist's statistics point toward.

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The Central Park Five2012

Ken Burns' account of five teenagers wrongly convicted shows what happens when law enforcement decides guilt before evidence — the same institutional certainty Do Not Resist finds terrifying in a SWAT briefing room.

But It's set decades before militarization took off, so the throughline to armored trucks and flashbangs is more thematic than direct.

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It's the mirror image of Do Not Resist: same militarized tactics, same handheld footage style, opposite conclusion — one calls it a warning, the other calls it Friday night TV.

The long-running reality show that turned ride-alongs into entertainment, presenting the exact same raids and tactical gear as thrilling television rather than a crisis — pure, uncut, unquestioning.

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