Expanding the Overaggressive Cops Conversation in 'Traffic Stop'

For decades now, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning team of Kate Davis (Girltalk; Southern Comfort) and her producer and sometime co-director David Heilbroner (Stonewall Uprising) have been giving voice to marginalized communities by listening closely to individuals, allowing their characters to express their own complicated truths — and thereby correcting the easy stories too often assigned to them by the media at large.

And now with their latest Oscar-nominated short, Traffic Stop, the duo have turned their lens — and once again upended accepted narratives — on the hot topic of police brutality through the story of Breion King, an African-American schoolteacher in Austin, Texas, whose entire life changed after she was stopped for a routine traffic violation by a white officer. What should have been an innocuous local encounter resulted in a hard-to-watch arrest — all painfully captured on police dash cam and subsequently broadcast to the wider world.

Documentary reached out to director Davis to discuss a broad range of subjects, from accessing police footage, to the dangers of cultural miscommunication, to the dire need to expand our current bad-cops-caught-on-camera conversation.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.