Booked for Safekeeping

The half-hour institutional film Booked for Safekeeping is an excellent example of a regional educational production, in this case made to educate police officers about a specific community problem. The Louisiana Department of Health commissioned the film from George C. Stoney, who had directed the beautiful All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story (1953) and later produced the celebrated feature documentary The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time (1981). Using volunteer actors and the resources of the New Orleans Police department, Stoney's scenario is designed to raise the awareness of law officers about special problems when dealing with mentally impaired or disturbed people. The recreated situations observe a disoriented lady causing trouble in a store, the rescue of an attempted suicide, and an encounter with a deranged man threatening his wife with a knife. The non-actors lack professional polish and exhibit broad regional accents, but that only adds to the feeling of authenticity. A kindly attitude about race is conveyed when an officer visits an African-American home in a poor neighborhood, and listens to a mother describing the developmental problems of her son. The docu's main aim is to make officers aware that someone behaving erratically may not be a dangerous miscreant, but instead a disturbed person who has lost control. The presence of a policeman is all it takes to tame the 'uncontrollable' woman in the market, but the cops must also deal with the dangerous man with the knife. They subdue him using large pillows, a tactic not likely to be adopted. The docu also warns cops not to be complacent, as demonstrated when a man presumed unconscious suddenly leaps to his feet and makes a grab for a policeman's gun. Police training films like Booked for Safekeeping would proliferate as state and local funding for the care of marginalized and abandoned citizens dried up in the 1970s. Former residents of state mental homes were in some cases turned out to the streets, forcing policemen trained to handle violent criminals to serve as de facto social workers. Stoney's modest docu attests to the eroded condition of America's 'social infrastructure.'