🔗 Share this article

The true crime category has an innovative format, or perhaps even a completely fresh vocabulary and structure: police body cam footage. Faces of victims, witnesses and potential offenders loom up to the cameras, at times in the intense brightness of vehicle beams or flashlights as the officers approach, their expressions and tones expressing wariness or fear or anger or dubiously feigned naivety. And we often incidentally glimpse the faces of the law enforcement personnel, one waiting impassively while the other conducts the inquiry with what sometimes seems like remarkable hesitation – though maybe this is because they know they are being recorded.

An Emerging Pattern in Non-Fiction Cinema

We have previously seen the streaming service true-crime documentary American Murder: Gabby Petito, about the killing of an Instagram influencer by her boyfriend, whose primary focus was officer recordings 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 body cam film. Now comes a new film by Geeta Gandbhir about the grim case of a Florida mother in Ocala, Florida, a African American woman whose four young kids allegedly harassed and antagonized her white neighbour, Susan Lorincz. In 2023, after an increasing number of neighbour-dispute incidents in which the authorities were repeatedly called, the accused fatally shot Owens through her closed front door, when Owens went to Lorincz’s house to confront her about throwing objects at her children.

The Police Inquiry and State Laws

The arresting officers found proof that the suspect had done internet searches into Florida’s “stand your ground” laws, which permit residents and others to use firearms if there is a reasonable belief of danger. The documentary constructs its narrative with the body cam footage captured during the repeated police visits to the scene before the killing, and then at the horrific and chaotic crime scene itself – prefaced by emergency call recordings of the caller contacting authorities in a melodramatically shaky voice. There is also police cell footage of Lorincz which has a chilly, queasy fascination.

Depiction of the Suspect

The film does not really imply anything too complicated about the neighbor, or any extenuating circumstance. She is clearly unstable, although the kids are heard calling her a derogatory term, an ugly jibe. The film is showcased as an illustration of how “stand your ground” laws lead to senseless and tragic violence. But the reality of gun ownership and the constitutional right (that longstanding U.S. legal right 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 officer questioning segments here and feel astonished at how minimal concern the officers took in this point. At what time did she purchase the firearm? Did she receive any instruction on handling it? 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 authorities aren’t shown asking any of these surely relevant questions (though they may have done in recordings that didn’t make the edit). Or is gun ownership so commonplace it would be like asking about kitchen appliances or bread heaters?

Arrest and Aftermath

For what appeared to her local residents a very long time, the suspect was not even arrested and charged, only detained and even offered a hotel stay away from home for the night (another parallel, incidentally, with the a prior incident). And when she was finally formally arrested in the holding cell, there is an remarkable scene in which Lorincz simply declines to rise, refuses to put her wrists out for the cuffs, not aggressively, but with the courteously pathetic demeanor of someone whose psychological state means that she is unable to comply. Had the kid-gloves treatment up until that point encouraged her to think that this might actually work?

Conclusion and Verdict

It was not successful; and the panel's decision is revealed in the end titles. A very sombre picture of U.S. justice and consequences.