Riotsville, USA: the shocking story of fake army towns that militarised police [View all]

“Welcome to Riotsville,” says a raincoat-clad ABC news correspondent with a noisy, placard-waving crowd and row of what appear to be shops behind him. “This is a simulated riot in a simulated city. But as another summer approaches, it might be Anywhere, USA.”

The news clip resurfaces in Riotsville, USA, a documentary about the stagecraft of state coercion. It tells how the army built fake towns, or “riotsvilles”, on its bases and used soldiers as actors to stage huge theatrical re-enactments of civil unrest. The military response was filmed to help with the training of law enforcement.

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It sounds like a dark sequel to The Truman Show or the creepy, mannequin-filled mock towns used for nuclear tests in the 1950s. The riotsvilles were buried in obscurity for half a century until Sierra Pettengill, an archival researcher and film-maker, read about them in Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein’s book about the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s.

“I immediately looked to see what I could find, which was very little, and then eventually found a record in the National Archives that sounded about right and got that film transferred and sent over,” the director of Riotsville, USA recalls via Zoom from Brooklyn, New York.

“I then began a long process of trying to contextualise what this meant – literally within a historical context, but also where this fits in a metaphorical sense in how America treats race and equality, what choices it makes for allocation of resources, and the eternal loop we seem to be on.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/21/riotsville-usa-the-shocking-story-of-fake-army-towns-that-militarised-police

I really struggled with where to put this. It's an important story. Forgive me if it's in the wrong place.