Clark Neily

If you haven’t seen the Netflix blockbuster Rebel Ridge, you should. Billed as a Rambo-meets-Jack-Reacher police procedural whose protagonist is triggered by a costly encounter with civil forfeiture that quickly snowballs into brutal conflict with a corrupt rural police department, the film delivers that dopamine-laced punch of catharsis you’re craving.

An added bonus is the vexing authenticity of the initial setup, which features a cascading series of entirely plausible civil-rights violations, threats, prevarications, and broken promises by money-grubbing cops who view citizens as little more than walking ATMs. And when former Marine martial-arts instructor Terry Richmond (played by Aaron Pierre) finally dishes out the full can of Devil Dog whoopass, the action is fast-paced and well-choreographed. You can’t ask for more than that.

Or can you?

Enjoyable and well-executed as this movie was, it felt like a missed opportunity to tell a more authentic—and perhaps more sinister—story about America’s criminal justice system.

The corrupt cops’ ringleader in Rebel Ridge, Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), exudes a miasma of smug menace and latent racism that effectively arouses the audience’s ire and their desire for righteous vengeance. Those feelings are turbocharged when Burnne’s perfidy leads to an avoidable tragedy and the protagonists discover that he has orchestrated a sprawling conspiracy to destroy evidence and deny counsel to detainees in furtherance of his forfeiture-fueled policing-for-profit scheme.

On one level, this is textbook storytelling. The (literally) black-and-white confrontation between good and evil engages the audience emotionally and provides the satisfaction of knowing (with one notable exception) who are the good guys and who are the bad guys—as well as the confidence that everyone on both sides will ultimately get what they deserve.

On another level, however, the over-the-top malignity of Chief Burnne and his minions provides false comfort about the true state of American criminal justice—namely, that you’ll be OK so long as you don’t have the misfortune of encountering a criminally corrupt outfit like the Shelby Springs Police Department. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality, America’s criminal justice system is often rotten to the core. Contrary to the scenario in Rebel Ridge, cops and other system actors need not be staring down the barrel of a fiscal crisis to deploy civil forfeiture in a manner scarcely distinguishable from outright theft. Instead, the combination of perverse incentives, lax procedures, and near-zero accountability practically ensures abuse. Those who object will discover that the so-called “blue wall of silence” is very real and far more effective at protecting perpetrators of serial police misconduct than the ragtag conspiracy of country bumpkins portrayed in Rebel Ridge.

And in our system there’s no need to sandbag defendants by flatly denying access to counsel when you can accomplish the same functional result by persistently underfunding and overworking public defenders to the point where it becomes impossible for them to provide a truly zealous defense to all—or even most of—their clients.

Finally, the rampant overcriminalization and coercive plea bargaining that pervade our system ensure that nearly anyone can be charged with something. They can then be threatened with some combination of pretrial detention, charge-stacking, and a savage trial penalty will nearly always produce a guilty plea—with the added bonus of the defendant “voluntarily” waiving their right to obtain potentially exculpatory discovery from the prosecution and challenge the admissibility of unlawfully obtained evidence. In short, it is no exaggeration to say that our vaunted criminal justice system, which—on paper at least—bristles with myriad procedural protections and advantages for the accused, has become little more than a conviction machine.

Again, Rebel Ridge is a fun, satisfying movie that tells a compelling story about the abuse of official power and the importance of standing up to it. But there was no need to slather on layers of conspiracy, corruption, and venality. Our real system of criminal “justice” is plenty bad enough without cinematic embellishment.