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The true crime category has an innovative format, or perhaps even a completely fresh vocabulary and structure: police body cam footage. Faces of victims, observers and potential offenders loom up to the cameras, sometimes in the harsh glare of headlights or flashlights as the officers approach, their faces and voices eloquent of wariness or panic or indignation or suspiciously contrived innocence. And we frequently catch sight of the faces of the law enforcement personnel, one standing by blankly while the other asks the questions with what occasionally seems like extraordinary diffidence – though maybe this is because they know they are being recorded.

A Growing Trend in Non-Fiction Cinema

We have already had the Netflix real-life crime film The Gabby Petito Case, about the killing of an social media personality by her partner, whose main point of interest was body cam footage and in which, as in this film, the law enforcement seemed surprisingly lenient with the suspect. There is also Bill Morrison’s Oscar-nominated short Incident, made exclusively of officer footage. Now comes Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary about the grim case of Ajike Owens in a city in Florida, a African American woman whose children allegedly harassed and antagonized her neighbor, Susan Lorincz. In 2023, after an escalating series of neighbour-dispute incidents in which the police were repeatedly called, the accused fatally shot Owens through her closed front door, when Owens went to the neighbor's residence to confront her about hurling items at her children.

The Police Inquiry and Legal Context

The arresting officers found evidence that Lorincz had done online research into Florida’s “stand your ground” laws, which permit householders and others to use firearms if there is a reasonable belief of threat. The documentary constructs its narrative with the body cam footage generated during the repeated police visits to the location before the killing, and then at the horrific and chaotic incident site itself – prefaced by emergency call recordings of Lorincz calling the police in a dramatically trembling voice. There is also police cell footage of Lorincz which has a disturbing, unsettling appeal.

Depiction of the Suspect

The film does not really imply anything too complicated about the neighbor, or any extenuating circumstance. She is obviously disturbed, although the children are heard calling her “the Karen”, an ugly jibe. The film is presented as an illustration of how self-defense regulations lead to unnecessary and heartbreaking bloodshed. But the fact of firearm possession and the constitutional right (that historic American constitutional privilege that a deceased pundit famously claimed made firearm fatalities a price worth paying) is not much emphasized.

Officer Questioning and Firearm Norms

It is possible to watch the police interrogation scenes here and feel surprised at how minimal concern the police took in this aspect. At what time did she purchase the firearm? Where (if anywhere) did she train in its use? Had she ever had occasion to fire it before? Where did she store it in the house? Could it have been easily accessible and prepared? The police aren’t shown asking any of these surely relevant questions (though they could have inquired in recordings that didn’t make the edit). Or is possessing a firearm so normal it would be like asking about kitchen appliances or bread heaters?

Arrest and Aftermath

For what seemed to her local residents a extended period, Lorincz was not even arrested and charged, only held and even offered a hotel stay away from home for the night (another point of comparison, by the way, with the Gabby Petito case). And when she was ultimately formally arrested in the detention area, there is an extraordinary sequence in which the individual simply refuses to stand, refuses to put her wrists out for the cuffs, not hostilely, but with the politely self-pitying air of someone whose mental health means that she is unable to comply. Had the kid-gloves treatment up until that point encouraged her to think that this could be effective?

Conclusion and Verdict

It didn’t; and the jury’s verdict is saved for the end titles. A deeply sobering picture of American crime and punishment.