Join us for a very special screening of Serginho Roosblad’s (’18) film “Documenting Police Use of Force” and conversation between Roosblad, Associated Press Vice President Ron Nixon and Investigative Reporting Program Director and Professor David Barstow.

For more than a year, filmmaker Roosblad, of the AP’s Global Investigations team followed a group of journalists from The Associated Press as they set out to document how many people in the U.S. die after police officers use restraint tactics not meant to kill — as what happened to George Floyd in 2020, sparking a national reckoning over policing.

Roosblad, in his directorial debut “Documenting Police Use of Force,” captures the reporters’ unprecedented findings, drawn from tens of thousands of documents, including autopsies, police incident reports and never-before-published footage from body-worn cameras and bystander cell phones. Marian Carrasquero (’19) is the film’s associate producer.

 Barstow will talk about the Investigative Reporting Program’s state-funded police misconduct database project.

Read our interview with Roosblad here.

About Serginho Roosblad

Roosblad is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and in FRONTLINE’s inaugural cohort of filmmakers in the Investigative Journalist Equity Initiative (IJEI), an effort aimed at increasing diversity in the documentary filmmaking landscape. At the AP, he has worked on a variety of investigative short documentaries, including on police use of force on children, Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, and a contaminated former army base, which might have caused cancer in hundreds of veterans.

Prior to his work in documentary film, he spent much of his early career in journalism reporting on Africa, where he covered a wide range of topics such as drug addiction in Uganda, piracy in Somalia, and the musical heritage of Zanzibar. Roosblad is from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with roots in the (former) Dutch Caribbean. Prior to living in the U.S., he lived in Uganda, South Africa, and Denmark. He was awarded the prestigious Marlon T. Riggs Fellowship in Documentary Filmmaking while at the J-School. He has a Master of Philosophy degree in African studies from the University of Cape Town, where he studied visual trauma culture in post-apartheid South Africa.

Serginho Roosblad

About Ron Nixon

Ron Nixon

Ron Nixon leads global investigations at The Associated Press. Nixon, in his role at the AP, has overseen investigations that have won major journalism awards: News and Documentary Emmy, IRE, Worth Bingham, Selden Ring and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He also led an investigation that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2021, Nixon received the News Leader of the Year award from the News Leaders Association.

Nixon is also co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a news trade organization increasing the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of color, and serves on Berkeley Journalism’s Advisory Board. Nixon is a Marine Corps infantry veteran who saw combat in the 1990 Persian Gulf War and was part of the Marine Corps security forces battalion, the security and counterterrorism unit. He attended Alabama State University, majoring in music.

About David Barstow

Professor David Barstow

David Barstow is the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism at Berkeley Journalism and the first reporter in American history to win four Pulitzer Prizes. He earned these honors over a span of 20 years while working for the investigative unit at The New York Times.

Since joining the school in 2019 to train future generations of investigative reporters, Barstow’s students have been published more than 150 times, with student bylines appearing on major investigations in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, The New Yorker, Frontline, the Associated Press, Runner’s World, the Dallas Morning News, Reveal, KQED, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Inside Climate and CalMatters. Three of Barstow’s students in the Investigative Reporting Program shared a Polk Award in 2022 for their coverage of violent right wing militia groups.