Chop Shop

ABOUT CHOP SHOP

Citizen Film collaborated with Young Community Developers (YCD) to produce Chop Shop: A Community and Law Enforcement Conversation. The documentary brings together African American young adults and African American law enforcement officers for frank facilitated conversations about policing and implicit bias. With the help of Citizen Film and YCD, local youth generated discussion prompts to film these challenging conversations in safe civic spaces: barber shops and beauty salons. The resulting documentary is designed to frame an ongoing series of discussions about community-police relations, and, ultimately, help recruit more people of color into the ranks of San Francisco law enforcement.

SFPD Chief William Scott is one of our on-camera participants, and SFPD now uses Chop Shop to train its officers to engage more sensitively with communities of color.

Chop Shop debuted in four public screening-conversation events in 2018 in the Western Addition and Bayview, to a combined audience of over 600 people. Panel discussions brought informal community leaders and law enforcement together onstage for wide-ranging, lively Q&A.

Citizen Film and YCD plan to build on this intra-community engagement process with another film that expands the conversation to include non-African-American police officers. We plan to work with Citizen Film’s national partners like the Atlantic Media Group’s Renewal Project to bring the film and its community conversation model to the attention of Cities facing similar challenges nationwide.