Doc Star of the Month: Sergeant Edwin Raymond, Stephen Maing's Crime + Punishment

Though heroic activists have been pushing for change in policing across the country in recent years, they've mostly sprung from those communities suffering disproportionately under unjust law enforcement policies—not from the institution tasked with enforcing those policies. Which is what makes the NYPD 12, a dozen of NYC's finest who are truly living up to the moniker, so unique. Comprised of minority officers fed up with carrying out racially discriminatory practices and meeting quotas (outlawed, but nevertheless expected), these whistleblowers spent years putting both career and life on the line covertly gathering evidence to bring their unbendingly bureaucratic employer to court. And for most of that time, intrepid director Stephen Maing (High Tech, Low Life) followed along with them—gaining unprecedented access to the secret recordings and blue wall of silence's piercing accounts that make up his latest tour de force (no pun intended), Crime + Punishment.

Needless to say, it was a privilege to speak with Sergeant Edwin Raymond via email about his life as both a prominent civil rights activist and a proud cop. Crime + Punishment premieres in theaters and online August 24, through Hulu.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #146: ANDREW SOLOMON

“How do we decide what to cure and what to celebrate?” asked Andrew Solomon, rhetorically, during the New Yorker Festival. The lecturer and author of Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity is referring to the transformation of the “illness” of homosexuality into the “identity” of gayness in a telling scene from Rachel Dretzin’s recent documentary adaptation.

Solomon, a once-closeted gay man who now happily lives with his husband, serves as both character in and producer on Dretzin’s film. His decade-long investigation into families with children born “far from the tree” — who are surviving and thriving with everything from autism to Down syndrome to dwarfism — is both a celebration of diversity under threat, and a call to society to reexamine our long-held assumptions of exactly who needs to be “fixed.”

I spoke with Solomon prior to the film’s theatrical release about serving as both a producer and a character, distinguishing what to cure from what to celebrate, and the difference between promoting books versus films.

To read my interview visit The Rumpus.