Here’s what John Oliver thinks everyone gets wrong about police accountability
The Last Week Tonight host thinks people need to stop saying police departments have just 'a few bad apples.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaD84DTGULo
John Oliver began Sunday’s Last Week Tonight deep dive on police accountability with a montage of cable news guests saying that people are too focused on a few “bad apples” when the vast majority of police are there to protect and serve. Then, he spent the next 15 minutes breaking down why he thinks they’re wrong.
“Snow White wasn’t afraid of apples before she took a bite out of that one really bad one,” Oliver said. “But I’m telling you, the next time an old lady comes at her with a piece of fruit, Snow is going to get the f*** out of there.”
Oliver stopped short of offering concrete policy ideas, and conceded that police “have a difficult, demanding job” and often deal with “humanity at its worst.” He did highlight the many ways in which “bad apples” aren’t reported, including the current lack of a tracking system of shootings by officers in the line of duty, internal investigations that aren’t always impartial, and officers who are shunned or labeled a “rat” by colleagues for reporting misconduct.
“The phrase isn’t ‘It’s just a few bad apples, don’t worry about it,’” Oliver said. “The phrase is, ‘A few bad apples spoil the barrel,’ and we currently have a system which is set up to ignore bad apples, destroy bad apples’ records, persecute good apples for speaking up, and shuffle dangerous, emotionally unstable apples around to the point that children have to attend f***ing apple classes.”
“You cannot look at our current system and claim that anybody likes them apples,” Oliver concluded.
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