Courts, Cops, and Bloods in Brick City

Jayda seems on the verge of going to prison on the four-year-old assault charge, and even though her tough-as-nails attorney tells her not to worry, how can she help it? It's hard to believe she'll get a fair shake, and we don't of course hear the story from the victim's point of view, so who knows? Seems terribly unfair, though, as Jayda, now pregnant, has come up from a childhood in which she was clearly a trouble-maker to a point where she is a true leader likely to have a positive effect on her community - if she can survive. Prison will do her no good. We'll see. This 4th episode of "Brick City" has considerably more information on Jayda and on her former crew, the Bloods, who lose one of their members to gunshot suicide. We also learn, through a lot of indirection, about a power struggle between the Director of Police McCarthy and the police chief, who has not been even a bit player in this documentary series to date. Though it's impossible to follow all the nuances of this struggle, the essence is that the chief gets kicked upstairs and Mayor Cory Booker comes down in support of his director, McCarthy. Valiantly, the filmmakers try to make a character of McCarthy, but he seems always very conscious of the camera and cautions about what he can truly reveal. Police rarely make for good documentary subjects, unfortunately, as they have learned on the job to watch everything they say and they rarely trust the media. So much great material in Brick City, but once again I wish the filmmakers had let it speak for itself instead of infusing the story with a background track and frenetic editing.