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The Oscar-nominated short documentary Incident begins with closed-circuit video shot from a utility pole along a Chicago street. The camera shows storefronts on one side of the road, and closer to the camera, two sets of train tracks. The scene looks placid, but within moments the camera will capture the last moments of a Black man named Harith “Snoop” Augustus, as he is shot dead by police.
The film, streaming on The New Yorker website, is made entirely from surveillance video and police body camera footage. The CCTV video seems detached, unmoved by the shocking scene it records. The body cam footage, however, jerks with panicked motions of the officers who accosted Augustus on the sidewalk, and their breathless attempts after the shooting to put their actions in the most favorable light.
“Augustus was portrayed as a perpetrator, which he wasn’t,” director Bill Morrison maintained at a Q&A held after an American Cinematheque screening of the documentary.
The “incident,” to borrow a term favored by police, took place on July 14, 2018. “Augustus left the barber shop where he worked and set off walking along a route he had traveled multiple times each day on 71st Street,” reported The Intercept in a piece co-written by Jamie Kalven, who produced the short documentary. “Beneath his shirt, he wore a holstered gun. A group of five officers on foot patrol observed, as the initial CPD statement put it, ‘a male suspect exhibiting characteristics of an armed person.’ It is not clear why they thought this alone was a sufficient reason for a stop in a state that permits concealed carry. In any case, Officer Quincy Jones, an older African American well-known in the neighborhood, called out to Augustus to stop. He did so, and they engaged in a calm, civil exchange.
“Augustus took out his wallet to show Jones his Firearm Owners Identification card. He does not appear to have had a concealed-carry permit, but if he had, he would never have had an opportunity to show it, for three white officers — all of them rookies and presumably unfamiliar with the neighborhood they were policing — surrounded him. Without any verbal warning and without probable cause to initiate an arrest, Officer Megan Fleming grabbed his arm from behind. Startled, he sought to break free and took several stumbling steps into the street. While doing so, his hand appeared to touch his holstered gun. [Office Dillan] Halley shot him five times. Augustus fell to the street, holding in his hand not on his gun, which remained holstered, but his FOID card.”
As Incident shows, police body cameras recorded Dillan Halley telling fellow officers, “He pulled a gun on me!” Another officer assured him, “I know he did.” But a frame by frame analysis shows Augustus never pulled his gun.
“It is clearly performative, that they were narrating how they justified their actions, how they could be justified in the future,” Morrison said at the Q&A. “The first thing we hear [Halley] say when the sergeant comes out and says, ‘What happened?’ and he said, ‘He pointed a gun at me.’ Then that becomes the official narrative, and that’s what that sergeant reports to his senior officers — those two women [senior officers] are like, ‘He did what?’ And they seem almost disbelieving, but we hear that get repeated over and over again. And as one of the guys in the crowd says, ‘You let ’em go off and get their fucking stories together.’”
Things were supposed to change in Chicago following the uproar over the police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. In that incident, officer Jason Van Dyke claimed McDonald had come at him with a knife and that he had shot the teenager in self-defense. Police stuck to that account and suppressed body cam-footage that told a different story: McDonald had been walking away when Van Dyke cut him down with 16 shots. When the footage was finally released, it caused a political tsunami in Chicago that cost the police superintendent his job and prompted then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel not to run for re-election.
The Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, formed in response to protests over the McDonald case, issued a report that said, in part, “A painful but necessary reckoning is upon us. That is what these times demand… People were and are demanding accountability and real and lasting change.”
Incident raises significant doubts about whether “lasting change” resulted from the McDonald shooting, or something more like the status quo ante. In the Augustus shooting, once again a Black man lay dead in the street, pumped full of bullets by police.
This, in fact, may be the most durable result of Augustus’s death: “After the film was completed, in December, 2023, the City of Chicago reached a new collective-bargaining agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police,” The New Yorker reported. “A provision of the contract, ratified by the Chicago City Council, allows officers to turn off body cameras during conversations that follow an incident, and to delete post-incident conversations that are recorded.”
Morrison said he didn’t want the Augustus case to be forgotten. Building a forensic investigation showing what truly happened on that Chicago street in 2018 offers accountability of a kind.
“No one knew Harith Augustus’s name. No one knew the story,” Morrison said. “It had just gotten swept under the rug. And so this archive was in fact the lost archive that no one was ever going to look at again.”
Incident won Best Documentary Short at the IDA Awards in 2023. On that occasion, producer Jamie Kelven shared, “When we screened the film in Chicago, the victim’s mother said that she hoped the film would tell the world what really happened to her son.”
