I Got A Monster

In March 2017 seven police officers in Baltimore were charged in a federal indictment. All of them belonged to a special unit called the Gun Trace Task Force, and the charge was racketeering. It was counted among the largest police corruption cases in the country. For the defence attorney Ivan Bates the news was no surprise; he had spent years listening to the people these crimes were done to and trying to bring down the sergeant who ran the unit. The documentary sets those two sides against each other, the lawyer and the unit. The account shows an arrangement in which the police were also the robbers. The case led to hundreds of convictions in Baltimore being reopened. The film rests on a true story. Kevin Abrams’s hundred and three minute American documentary was completed in 2023.