For his Oscar-nominated short documentary, director Bill Morrison shot no footage, added no music, and recorded no narration. Incident uses police body and dashboard cameras, plus security cameras, to show a split-screen replay of a Black barber, Harith “Snoop” Augustus, dying at the hands of Chicago law enforcement in July 2018. Several officers were stationed on the block because business owners had complained about drug dealing. Cops stopped Augustus, who was walking on the street, after one of them said it looked like he had a gun under his shirt. He did — along with a gun permit. Within seconds, Augustus lay dead. You can watch the full documentary here.
When Augustus walked by the officers once, and then again in the opposite direction, the police noticed the outline of a gun inside his waistband, Morrison explains. They radioed to a 12-year veteran officer further down the block, who asked Augustus, “Are you security?” Augustus pulled out his Firearm Owner's Identification (FOID) Card.
“Just as he's doing that, the other officers, who he passed earlier, rush him, and with guns drawn, try to grab him. And he spins out and passes between two parked cars to go out into the street. And the rookie officer, [Dillan] Halley shoots him five times and kills him,” Morrison says.
Morrison notes that it’s unclear why Halley thought Augustus was a threat. “He was complying with the officers’ request to stop, have a conversation; and was producing a card that would prove that he was a licensed gun owner. There was no credible reason to stop him. There was no crime that had happened nearby where he would be a likely suspect. And so what the officers did was sort of unconscionable. They moved to arrest him without cause. He panicked and … ran out into the street, which might have been ill-advised, but I think if you're a Black guy on the south side of Chicago, and police officers are surrounding you with guns drawn, it might already seem like a desperate situation had occurred.”
Halley’s body cam recorded him talking after Augustus died: “Police shot. Shots fired at the police.” Then he realized no officer was actually shot, and changed his account.
“He has a private moment with his partner … Megan Fleming, where he very quickly asked her, ‘Was it a gun?’ And she says, ‘Yes.’ And then he asked her, ‘Did you get the gun?’ And she says, ‘Yes.’ … He went very quickly from not knowing whether there was a gun, to confirming that the gun was now in police possession, to making the outrageous claim that Augustus had pulled a gun on him in the middle of the sidewalk,” Morrison says.
He doesn’t know whether Halley, who was in his first year of probationary service, was trying to establish an alibi or simply clear his guilty conscience. “But the thing is that he's making up a story, and we're watching him do that, and then have that story coalesce as the official narrative.”
After the shooting, Halley and Fleming got inside a police car and someone else drove them away. Their body cams recorded their conversation — they discussed what transpired, which led to some punishments afterwards.
Morrison points out that for an incident of this nature, an unprecedented amount of police footage was released — more than 20 hours. That was thanks to a law requiring all video footage of an incident be uploaded within 60 days and made available to the public. It was established after Chicago Officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. Van Dyke was charged with six counts of first-degree murder.
As for Morrison’s filmmaking style, why did he choose to omit interviews or narration, which are customary for a documentary? In fact, several minutes of pure silence is the start of Incident.
“The silence is because prior to Halley saying, ‘Police shot’ or ‘shots fired at police,’ we don't have any audio. He's the first person to push his button to turn his camera on. All the other cameras that are available are silent, and therefore it's really incumbent on him to start the audio, which informs us what's going on,” Morrison says.
He adds, “The first thing we hear is a lie, right? And then we eventually unpack and discover what in fact happened.”
Halley’s punishment ended up being a two-day suspension — for not turning on his camera in a timely way. The legal system deemed that he was justified in taking out his gun and shooting because he felt he was under credible threat.
“I guess the law shows great deference to officers who have to make a split-second decision, of course not taking into account the whole of the event, where a split-second decision had to be made,” Morrison says.
He recalls that at the first screening of Incident, Augustus’ mom, who previously avoided the press, voluntarily attended and afterward stood up and said, “Now the world can see what happened to my boy.”