by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Cops don't usually do movie reviews, although maybe they should start because the usually trustable clerks at my rental place on Décarie and Sherbrooke have increasingly been tricking me into renting unwatchably wimpy flicks.

So when our constabulary loudly gave a "two guns down" to a recent documentary about the way they interact with ethnic minorities, I had to check it out.

Zéro Tolérance director Michka Saäl must be thrilled that the cops condemned his flick. Being boycotted by law enforcement must be the greatest marketing ploy since happy hour. If cops advised against attending Expos games, 40,000 would turn out at each one.

I excitedly popped the documentary into the VCR, feeling guilty about shooing my mother-in-law away from her favourite show, the Vancouver-shot Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, starring the very, very drunk David Carradine.

The documentary begins at Peel just above Ste-Catherine, where a cop arrests a young Filipino male due, one suspects, to the fashion crime of his clingy white sleeveless T. Later the kid confesses that he was defiantly refusing the cop's order to scram from a brewing street fight, although the film editing initially makes it look like a spontaneous and arbitrary bust.

Being a smartass with cops is apparently far more common here than I'd imagined, as the film repeatedly displays assorted vulgarians relentlessly taunting individual cops, who - to their credit - appear deaf to the abuse.

The film gives a lot of time to a boy who tells of being twice abused by the police, once while innocently fiddling with his car, and another time following a disagreement about his metro pass. If you've ever met anybody who was arrested - in his opinion unjustly - you will note the deep psychological scar it leaves. Within seconds police can make an otherwise normal civilian into a lifelong foe.

My view of cops has been neutral-to-positive since being held up at knifepoint a few years back. The cops sat me in the back of the cruiser as they tore through the streets in search of the assailant. Much high-fiving erupted when the little bastard was caught.

Nowadays I call 911 even for minor stuff, like when I can't find my toothbrush. Getting them to answer calls - even legitimate ones - is another story.

Zéro Tolérance hits an early peak by exploring the grievances of three well-spoken black cops; Florence Darius tells of how a boss pressured her to sign an "extension of probation"; Edouard Anglade talks of his fight with brass that arose after a hostile colleague forged his signature onto a transfer request; Robert Milord rebelled when he saw others using a photo of a black guy for target practice. He was later ostracized. "I had big ambitions," he says wistfully, in an unexpectedly moving moment.

Saäl also features brief clips from what were undoubtedly much longer police drive-alongs. One reasonable-sounding cop points out that the largely white Montreal North he grew up in has largely been "taken over" by ethnic minorities. Isolating this clumsy wording appears heavy-handed but elsewhere the complexities of ethnic nuance are more adequately displayed.

Another sequence shows a group of Spanish-speaking males walking around their St-Michel turf as one talented kid raps an exquisite rhyme about his life. Another, nicknamed Chiquita, is displayed at his heavy-lifting construction job. He later explains how he's frequently plagued by $112 loitering tickets for hanging around the park, the equivalent of two days' work. Build them a youth recreation centre, I say.

Saäl also features gay cop J.P. Auger, who tells of anti-homo bias on the force and also how relaxed, hatless cops mingle and turn a blind eye to public drinkers at the St-Jean Baptiste parade, whereas helmeted cops at the Carifête stand by the periphery and crack down on all alcohol consumption. Saäl displays scenes from both to prove the point. It's strange because for years I've brought my small children to Carifête - a hugely enjoyable parade - and I'd wager that the episode of Kung Fu I missed contained far more drunkenness and fighting than all the Carifêtes I've attended.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca