Hold Your Fire
A scene from the documentary Hold Your Fire. Photo: IFC Films.
"At a time when the nation is taking stock of the failures of our history of urban policing and looking for some new approaches, the lessons of Hold Your Fire are needed more urgently than ever," writes DUSP's Ezra Glenn in his review of the documentary Hold Your Fire for The Arts Fuse. "For cops and activists alone — working to build trust in diverse communities in particular, or in settings recovering from the pain and trauma of these racist policies — the film suggests a positive, yet realistic, model to emulate in public engagement, prioritizing the building of relationships over the rush for immediate actions."
Hold Your Fire, a film directed by Stefan Forbes, documents the tense interactions in 1973 between four young African-American men caught stealing guns for self-defense, twelve hostages, and the New York Police Department. The advisory board for the film includes: Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. (Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University), Andrew Delbanco (Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University), Stanley Richards (Deputy Commissioner of the NYC Department of Corrections), Sean Patrick Griffin, PhD (Department Head of Criminal Justice at The Citadel), and Third Settlements, a DEI consultancy founded by Dax-Devlon Ross, Rico Blancaflor, and Chirag Menon.