“People are looking up to you. People need you to do great things,” students are told in a new trailer for Maisie Crow’s “At the Ready.” The Sundance doc spotlights Horizon High School, just outside of El Paso, Texas, the site of one of the largest law enforcement education programs in the region. Students, including the three Mexican-American teens at the doc’s center, are trained to become police officers and Border Patrol agents, learning skills such as how to handcuff and lift fingerprints.
The doc explores the opportunities that careers in the field present as well as their associated costs. “I have PTSD, and do I blame my job as a police officer? Yeah, I do,” one character reveals. Crow follows students as they “discover that the realities of their dream jobs may be at odds with the truths and people they hold most dear,” as she explained in an interview with us.
Asked what drew her to the story, Crow said, “The fact that I didn’t know there were law enforcement training programs in public high schools in Texas is what first grabbed my interest, but really, it was meeting the different students and learning more about their stories.”
“At the Ready” hits theaters and on demand October 22.
