26/07/2025
The story of Eric Brandt - and the community of cop watchers who worked with him - seems at first fairly straightforward.
A group of down and out men, mostly, seek attention by filming police. Their antics lead to millions of YouTube views, and dubious notoriety. Eventually, Eric went too far, and law enforcement struck back with a lengthy prison sentence for him.
If you watch their assorted Youtube videos, that description isn’t far off.
Standing on the 16th Street Mall in Denver singing“Happy F**k the Cops Day” at the top of your lungs seems not so much like activism but pathological attention seeking.
But if you take the time to explore their lives off camera, and why they decided to pick up a cell phone to film law enforcement in the first place, you start to understand how their work fits into something bigger than their inidivuall foibles: the mosaic of inequality in this country.
Of course, the sometimes outlandish, and Eric’s case, often extreme behavior seems entirely unrelated to the politics of inequality. . Yes they film cops. And yes they profess and extol skepticism of police. But their colorful antics while playing so-called “verbal judo” with a law enforcement over a sidewalk hardly seems like an ulterior commentary on a society striated by excessive apex wealth.
To most, cop watchers are simply the inevitable tide of the disgruntled. Misfits who cannot cope with generational economic change, and instead of working to join it, have simply decided to dissent without an apparent objective.
But dig deeper and a different narrative emerges.
First, all of the cop watchers we interview in this film have led complex, and compelling lives. Some are veterans - Munkay83 served in Iraq and Eric on nuclear submarines. Some were entertainers - like Liberty Freak who hosted televised shopping shows in the 90s. Brian Loma - Cut The Plastic - is a celebrated environmental activist whose award winning work to save the planet has won him renown throughout the state of Colorado.
All, though, have experienced firsthand the cruelty of our current form of capitalism. A world built upon the philosophy of profit, that offers little support, or solace when life goes awry.
So by confronting the most visible form of government power, Cop Watchers are offering a direct rebuttal of the institutions that have failed them. Standing on, and defending the right to film from a sidewalk, they illuminate how the most basic of our constitutional rights are on perilous grounds. The fact that hundreds if not thousands of activists do so on a daily basis, is not an expression of nihilism, but actually affirmative. By picking up a cell phone to actively participate in our democracy, while not always pretty, they seek to contribute to it in a unique and creative way.
And that is why we spent five years creating the documentary I Am But The Mirror: The Story of American Copwatchin. We wanted to give this veritable folk movement the attention it deserved.
Hopefully we did so.
You can watch it for free here: https://fawesome.tv/movies/10695125/i-am-but-the-mirror-the-story-of-american-cop-watching?fbclid=IwY2xjawLx3eBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHuxlmaTlFBBhNdizprgS3aA1tsY67H0GzGH9hv8xPeLxKFJpkYmbHXQMUniI_aem_cJ2jyQKsWLvTs5-NOHDVYw
Over the past decade, hundreds of YouTube channels have emerged solely devoted to the practice of filming police: digital activism driven by outsized personalities. But one cop watcher stepped over the line and paid a heavy price. This is his story.
