Over the last few years the appetite for true-crime dramas seems insatiable. With the canvas for nefarious acts of all kinds—domestic violence, war crimes, white-collar crimes, political crimes—expanding by the minute, it is not surprising that true crime has literally come into the house as a form of entertainment. Usually the shape of the numerous films and TV series is predictable: investigations, interviews with detectives, and dramatic recreations to reach a conclusion of guilt or innocence. Justice perhaps is served.
If I sound weary of the genre, I am. But occasionally there is a documentary that is so unusual in form and powerful in content that there is no turning away no matter how disturbing it is to watch. “The Perfect Neighbor,” made up almost entirely of footage taken by police body cameras, is as unexpected as it is essential.
“The Perfect Neighbor” is a project that found veteran documentary director Geeta Gandbhir (“I am Evidence,” “Why We Hate”) and her producing partner Nikon Kwantu after the killing of a black woman by her white neighbor in Florida in 2023. The slain woman was a family friend and her attorney turned over a mountain of material he had acquired under the Freedom of Information Act to Gandbhir to see what she might be able to do with it. As she sorted out hours and hours of body cam footage, recordings of 911 calls, and police interrogation interviews, Gandbhir and her editor, Viridiana Lieberman, realized there was an important story here to be told. If nothing else, and it is much more, “Perfect Neighbor” is a triumph of editing that spotted the possibilities and allows an audience to get closer to the beating heart of racism than perhaps it ever has before.
The conflict plays out in a comfortable lower-middle class community in Ocala, Florida, in the north central part of the state. The close-knit largely black neighborhood that comes into focus (though the footage rarely does) is an almost idyllic block of well-kept one-story houses, mostly rented, where the adults like to think of the many the kids running around as their own.
A middle-aged white woman, Susan Lorincz, has frequently called the police complaining about noisy kids playing football and riding their bikes outside her house. It’s the kind of neighborhood dispute that probably happens, in one form or another, everyday in every community in the country. But this one becomes explosive when heated by the racial tensions just below the surface.
According to Susan, the kids had flung a no-trespassing sign at her, and left skates and other equipment in her yard, which was not really her yard but a vacant lot next door. She refers to herself as the perfect neighbor but randomly sets off her car alarm and sounds an air horn in front of her house to quiet the kids down. She seems to be constantly baiting the kids, as if she’s looking for a fight, calling them retards and worse. They call her “Karen.” It’s obvious even to the cops she does not belong in this neighborhood.
Ajike Owens, the mother of four, lives across the street and tries to stand up for the kids, including her 12-year-old son, Izzy. On June 2, 2023, after Susan supposedly threw their skates back at the kids and confiscated a tablet computer left behind, she calls the police again. On the 911 recording she says she’s afraid for her life. Ajike marches to her house and bangs on the front door. There is no footage of what happens next, but Susan shoots Ajike through a locked door. Later her body can be seen lying on the ground bleeding to death.
All hell breaks loose on the block: police cars race to the scene of the crime, sirens blaring, lights spinning. The other neighbors can’t believe what’s happened. The police ask young Izzy if he’s hurt and he says, “no, but my heart is broken.”
At the police station, Susan repeats over and over again the she felt like her life was in danger, perhaps setting up her defense for later—that she was merely standing her ground. Florida is one of 38 states with a stand your ground law, meaning if you are being attacked with what you think is lethal intent, you are free to blow away your neighbor first. A few years earlier in Florida the law allowed the killer of Trayvon Martin to go free on these grounds.
Susan is not arrested initially as the police investigate the law but is charged with manslaughter four days later. She is dumbfounded and refuses to cooperate. It has not been articulated but her actions have spoken for themselves; she can’t believe that she, a white woman, could be held accountable for defending herself against black invaders from across the street.
Now reverting to actual shot footage, the film ends with a too brief coda in the courtroom. The real shock is that Susan is actually convicted in the state of Florida and sentenced to 35 years in prison. In text over the credits, the real meaning and message of the film is conveyed. In the thirty-eight states that have some variation of a stand your ground defense, homicides have gone up by 700 cases a year. And in those cases, there is a huge racial disparity with the conviction rate much higher for black people who kill white people. If Susan were black and killed a white woman, one can imagine that there would have been no hesitation to figuratively string her up.
Obviously, how a film is put together in the editing room is a subjective process that reflects the views of the filmmakers. But in this case by using pre-existing material from body cams shot without human direction, the film is as close to objective as can be achieved. And what you get is as real and devastating a view of America that you are likely to see anywhere.
