hello there and welcome to the show and look we're gonna do something a little bit different tonight our whole show is actually gonna be about one thing and you probably know what and you probably know why because all week long protesters have continued to fill the streets in all 50 states in the wake of the horrific murder of George Floyd by the police and in response to those protests which have been a stirring pushback against institutional racism and brutality has been frankly sickening to see them met with this across the country peaceful protests have to often devolved into standoffs with heavily armed police using military style tactics flashbangs tear gas rubber bullets helicopters armored vehicles we're out here peacefully protesting but there are what they're going toward yeah they are and look if police are trying to convince the public they're not guilty of displaying excessive force it's probably not a good idea to repeatedly display excessive force on national television including in this city where Mayor DeBlasio praised them for their tremendous restraint and Governor Cuomo threatened to send in the National Guard and I'll say this having recently said that I couldn't wait to go back to hating Andrew Cuomo again I didn't think the opportunity would come quite this soon and these protesters have received a great deal of support with massive marches taking place all around the world and the protesters message has taken many forms from chance to signs to a man who called into an LA Police Commission meeting held over zoom now he'd been given 30 seconds which he used with maximum efficiency to deliver a message for police chief Michael Moore I find it disgusting that the LAPD slaughtering peaceful protesters on the street I had two friends go to the protest in Beverly Hills it a couple days ago and the protest was peaceful so the police showed up with their excessive violent force shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas is this what your figure protected in Surrey because I think it's you Michael Moore I refuse to call you an officer or chief because you don't deserve those titles you are a disgrace suck my dick and choke on it I yield my time you if the president is taking notes that is what a perfect call looks like my favorite part is that after he's finished unloading on that police chief he yields his time realizes he still has a couple of second left so unyielding and throws in a bonus you now as for the president himself he initially hit from the protesters in the bunker later claiming he wasn't hiding he was actually just inspecting it then his attorney general had please gas protesters outside the White House so that chunk could have an inexplicable photo op and a nearby church while holding up a Bible like it's the ticket for a sandwich order that was just called he also in announcing job numbers on Friday invoked George Floyd's name saying this was a great day for him which is utterly disgusting but were actually not going to focus on Trump tonight nor are we unlike some in cable news going to dwell on the incidents of looting that occurred except to say if you said the name Macy's more than you've said the name Brianna Taylor this week you can very much off likewise if you ask your wife spontaneous decentralized protests can't control every one of its participants more than you are asking the same about a taxpayer-funded heavily regimented paid workforce you can also in the words of this generation's Robert Frost sucked by dick and choke on it you instead tonight let's talk about the police because all week we've seen graphic videos which are going to be hard to watch of them driving directly into crowds beating people with sticks and sometimes assaulting the right to assemble with shocking speed and barbarity prematurely shoot people prematurely using excessive force no scary ass on somewhere it's genuinely impossible to overstate how enraging that is they're protesting excessive force by police and the police just stop pepper spraying them like it's sunscreen and that's just one of hundreds and hundreds of videos and we're taping this Saturday morning who knows what will have happened by Sunday night maybe they'll be using grenades even as the New York Times weighs in with an op-ed titled why we need to bring Hitler back to life as a robot right now they just think it's valuable that you read that point of view I mean they didn't but they think that you really should and look for any of us sitting at home shocked by the scenes of police brutality I get it I'm white too but it's worth remembering that's the tip of a very large iceberg it didn't start this week all with this president and it always disproportionately falls on black communities because here are some hard facts in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered police use force against black people at seven times the rate of whites black Americans are two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be killed by police and about one in every thousand black men can expect to be killed by police if you're black in America I can't even begin to imagine how scared angry and exhausted you must feel not only this week but constantly medical groups say police violence against black and brown Americans is just one of many physical and psychological factors that make racism a serious public health issue and look clearly the police are just one part of a much larger system of racial inequality but for tonight we're going to focus primarily on them and try to address three basic questions how the we got to this point what the obstacles to reform have been and what we can do going forward and let's start by just acknowledging that the police have long enjoyed an exalted role in American society in pop culture they're the heroes of beloved movies and TV shows like cranky gun grandpa and cocaine cops who and manic bigots and is one black friend America loves nothing more than a renegade cop who doesn't by the rules but of course the reality of policing is and has always been very different and it might be worth going through some of the history here because it's important to understand how deeply policing in this country is entangled with white supremacy and I know you might be thinking well join the club policing this is America the only institution not deeply entangled with the history of white supremacy is Olive Garden and that's only because it's always been a powerful symbol of white inferiority but the police have not just been incidentally tainted by racism for much of US history law enforcement meant enforcing laws that were explicitly designed to subjugate black people some of America's first law enforcement units were these slave patrols tasked with capturing and returning people who'd escaped from slavery and when slavery ended white people had no intention of letting that be the end of white power as one Alabama planter said in the wake of emancipation we have the power to pass stringent police laws to govern the Negroes this is a blessing for they must be controlled in some way all white people cannot live among them and I know that's uncomfortable to hear it's certainly uncomfortable for me to say but if we want to talk about how we got here it's important to remember that we got here on purpose now for a century after that police in the south are responsible for enforcing segregation while allowing and sometimes participating in lynchings and anti black terrorism and as black people migrated to the north by the millions they were met there yet again by brutality and all of this coupled with the continued denial of economic and housing opportunities not always particularly subtle by the way meant that by the summer of 1967 there were a series of high-profile uprisings against racial injustice across the United States or as white people actually describe that exact time the summer of 1967 it is known as the summer yeah it is known as that and that's a pretty big disconnect isn't it and it honestly makes me slightly worried that what's happening right now will be remembered one day by white historians as the summer of chromatic err and look things did not improve from the 60s on with Nixon pledged fealty to law and order and started the war on drugs which Reagan later turbocharged and by the time we got to the nineties a school of thought called broken windows or zero tolerance policing had started to take root which help it if minor crimes are left unattended it will lead to more serious crimes therefore please have better crackdown on those minor offenses that fueled the saturation of police in low-income communities of color and gave way to policies like stop and frisk which essentially allow police officers who searched people at random at that policies peak in 2011 of the nearly 700,000 stops recorded in New York the vast majority were of black and Latino people or to put that another way those policies too often basically mounted to this just under a different name and that's sort of aggressive policing was accompanied by constant calls to increase the number of police officers on the streets and let's be clear here Democrats were very much involved in that from big city mayors all the way on up to this guy an initiative to put 100,000 more police officers on the street more presence more prevention a hundred thousand more police 100,000 new police in communities of all sizes we need to finish the job of putting a hundred thousand more police on our streets last fall Congress supported my plan to hire in addition to the hundred thousand community police we've already funded fifty thousand more concentrated in high crime neighborhoods yeah thanks very much for that Congress 100,000 police officers isn't cool you know what's cool massively expanding a broken institution to score cheap political points and if you can do that while playing the saxophone well that just gets even cooler and all the while as we were continuing to boost funding for police and give them more authority we were simultaneously slashing spending on key social services that meant that in many communities the police were the only ones left to handle almost any issue that people had which is a real problem as this former Dallas police chief readily admits we're asking cops to do too much in his country we are we just asking us to do too much every Society of failure we put it off on the cops assault not enough mental health funding get the cop hammer not enough drug addiction fun let's give it to the cop here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem that's had a conversation with dogs you know what he's absolutely right we are asking police to do far too much they have a massive array of complicated duties that in many cases they just aren't equipped to handle making them very much the Jared Kushner's of local officials without of course the expression complexion and general demeanor of a haunted baby so while we should absolutely be angry at the police right now let's also be angry at this series of choices that left them as essentially the only public resource in some communities and on top of all of that we've made those bad choices even more dangerous in recent years by needlessly arming police to the teeth as we discussed six years ago now we've issued the police literal military-grade equipment some of which you've seen used to control and intimidate protesters this week and it's frankly not just a hardware that's a problem here because a whole sub industry of police training has also cropped up to reinforce the message that cops are at war and perhaps no one takes that idea further than this guy once you've made the decision to take a human life your transform creature your predator what does the predator do they kill only a killer can hunt a killer are you emotionally spiritually psychologically prepared to snuff out a human life in defense of innocent lives if you can't make that decision you need to find another job Wow you know the problem with telling someone that they're a predator is that it Prime's them to see the rest of the world as potential prey and of course cops who went through this training could wind up on edge you wouldn't train a barber by saying here is scissors snip like this and oh yeah this is how to puncture the carotid artery now you won't need to use this 99% of the time but if you don't think you can make that decision you need to find another job now that grouse man is actually called Dave Grossman and he calls himself an expert in kilala ji a term that he invented and defines as the scholarly study of the destructive act just as sexology is the scholarly study of the procreative Act which oh and also I'm pretty sure that the first lesson in sexology is never call sex the procreative Act if you want anyone to pro creatively act with you ever again and as batshit as Grossman is he is by no means a fringe figure in police culture he's on the road giving trainings 200 days a year the officer who shot falando Castille had taken a class based on Grossman's theories and went in the wake of that shooting the Minneapolis Mayor banned officers from participating in warrior style training the head of the police union there Bob thrall announced plans to defy that decision if they deem that this training is in violation and they're on their own time and they want to attend it I'm gonna encourage officers to do it I myself will be the first one to do it if I would be disciplined it would never be upheld I honestly don't know what's more alarming there his determination to train police officers to be predators his air of casual impunity or the fact they has a sign in his office that says let me drop everything and work on your problem which is always the office decor choice of a grade-a asshole but especially if it's someone who actual job is to work on other people's problems and that confidence that he's above punishment actually brings us to the second point that we want to look at tonight what the major obstacles to reform have been because one of the biggest issues is police unions even in cities where the mayor and police chief say all the right things it's important to know that the union can stop whatever they are proposing dead in its tracks and unions can make it incredibly difficult to discipline officers even for egregious misconduct take what happened in Minneapolis with two officers who belonged to our friend Bob's Union to Minneapolis police officers are on paid leave for allegedly decorating a Christmas tree at the 4th precinct with a bunch of items that are viewed as racist bags of hot tacky chips a cup from Popeye's fried chicken menthol cigarettes and cans of malt liquor among other things holy that is not just disgusting it's also arguably the most racist thing to happen to Christmas since people decided that this child's born in the Middle East was white and not only does that incident raise serious questions about those officers it also implicates the entire precinct because they presumably thought that none of their co-workers would have a problem with what they did and to his credit when that story broke the mayor of Minneapolis announcing the officers responsible would be fired by the end of the day only to have to almost immediately walk that statement back say that there was a process that they were required to go through by law we actually checked and despite the fact it's now been a year and a half since that happened one of those officers cases is still under arbitration and look I get union's fighting for their workers that is what they do but police unions take that to a dangerous extreme and negotiate language into contracts that makes removing a problem officer incredibly difficult a Washington Post analysis of some of the nation's largest police departments found that they fired at least eighteen hundred and eighty-one officers for misconduct but were forced to reinstate more than 450 of them that's almost 25 percent after appeals required by their union contract and police unions can also oppose even the most basic common-sense reform a few years back the Cleveland Police started be required to file a report every time they unholstered and pointed their gun at someone and their union head was absolutely furious I'm afraid that officers are going to be hesitant to pull their gun in an appropriate situation because they don't want to do the paperwork that's gonna be associated with having to pull your gun okay first the idea that the risk of paperwork is a greater deterrent to police officers drawing their gun than the risk of killing someone is legitimately terrifying and it's hard to take that glib dismissal from anyone let alone someone who looks like a Boyles mr. Potato Head or an angry egg with a moustache and I know those comparisons probably make him mad but what's he gonna do shoot me I don't think so think of the paperwork involved and that attitude is particularly hard to take considering that just six months previously Tamir rice had been killed by a Cleveland police officer and when faced with accountability that they don't like unions will often issue the ultimate threat to simply pull back and let crime rise for instance listen to help ahead of New York City's largest police union reacted where the judge recommended firing the officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric garner the criminal advocates have gotten what they want the police department is frozen the police department can't stop the killers they can't stop the criminals they can't effectively do their job I'm sorry to say that we have to tell our police officers take it a step slower take it a step slower he just basically threatened in action against the killers as a bargaining chip and besides that being morally reprehensible it is a tool that most labor unions simply don't have at their disposal when the unions representing TV writers fight for their members the worst thing that they can threaten the public with this few episodes of bull or the blacklist or this show and that's just not a compelling argument and that wasn't even an empty threat because following that statement policing did slow down in New York for a bit last year there was an 11 percent drop in felony arrests and 18 percent drop in misdemeanor arrests and a 32 percent drop in moving violations but the thing is if you lived in New York then you probably don't remember it as the time that the city devolved into chaos because it didn't people still went about their lives subways were still as delayed as they usually were and rats still dragged slices of pizza upstairs to feed their rats families after a hard day of rats work making you wonder whether all those arrests were really in the interest of Public Safety at all now one good way to attempt to get reforms passed a unions resistance is if the federal government steps in which actually can it has the power to investigate police departments for a pattern of civil rights violations and enter what is called a consent decree in which the police department agrees to make institutional changes that are then overseen by a federal court that can be a powerful tool to force change in fact that paperwork requirement in Cleveland that pissed off this egg that came from a consent decree the problem is how or even whether the government does that depends on who is running it and right now it's this wildly unsuccessful Bible salesman and he clearly has no interest in police reform in george w bush his first term his Justice Department launched twelve such investigations into police departments in a bombers first term it was 15 Trump's DOJ has launched just a single investigation and has entered zero consent decrees meanwhile Trump himself has made it pretty clear where he stands on the police use of force he not only rolled back Obama's restrictions on giving the police military equipment just listen to what he said to an audience filled with law enforcement please don't be too nice like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head you know the way you put their hand like don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody don't hit the head I said you can take the hand away okay Wow you know it's bad enough when it's just a bunch of random cheering on Trump's lawless rhetoric it's a lot more alarming when that applause is coming from the people whose main job is to see lawlessness and stop it so if the union's won't act and the federal government won't act what else can you do as a civilian to get accountability if the police violated your rights well you could try and Sue the city or the individual officer in question and in high-profile cases especially they can be incentivized to settle for astonishing amounts in fact over a period of five years the ten cities with the largest Police Department's paid out a billion dollars in settlements and court judgments and listen I'm no comptroller believe me I wish I were a hard-to-explain lethally boring elected accountant whose title inexplicably took a real word and then stuck and in the middle of it come on that's my dream jump but even I can tell you if you're spending a billion dollars on misconduct settlements you might want to seriously examine what conduct looks like and if a city doesn't feel that it has to settle with you you're in real trouble because civil suits against cops are nearly impossible to win just listen to a defense attorney explain one reason that it was gonna be difficult for Michael Brown's family to sue the Ferguson officer who killed him civilly sure they could go after him civilly the problem is he has qualified immunity he's gonna say that I was acting within a scope of my employment this is what I was doing yeah and he is right about that police officers are often protective in consequences due to something called qualified immunity which sounds like something you get from a horrifying cheatcode in Grand Theft Auto well guess what I turned on qualified immunity and now my car runs on prostitutes but it's actually worth taking a moment to talk about that term theory basically qualified immunity means that a public official is immune from lawsuits unless their exact conduct has already been ruled unconstitutional in a previous case and I do mean exact because small tiny variations can result in the case being thrown out this happens all the time for instance one case was thrown out because of the difference between unleashing a police dog to bite a motionless suspect in a bushy ravine and leasing a police dog to bite a compliant suspect in a canal in the woods which I totally get those are two completely different kinds of outdoor holes and then there was this case a federal appeals court has ruled Seattle police used excessive force when they tasered a pregnant woman during a traffic stop in 2004 she was shocked three times with a stun gun for refusing to sign a speeding ticket although the ruling was in Brookes favor the officer who fired the taser was given immunity because the law on stun gun use was not clear yet that is absolutely ridiculous the method the officer used to assault that woman clearly shouldn't matter it's like if Jeffrey Dahmer was declared innocent because he cooked his victims in an instant pot the crime is the killing not what appliance he used now the good news is there is a chance that the Supreme Court will soon decide to reconsider qualified immunity this there's actually a bill in Congress right now to abolish it although even if it passes it may have to wait for a new president to sign it and we may not get one of those anywhere from the next four years to never but while ending qualified immunity would be great that alone isn't going to be nearly enough and that brings us to our final point here what do we do now there are a lot of suggestions to look at unfortunately some prominent Democrats have been spitballing ideas that are embarrassingly small and perhaps normal ridiculous than this and the idea that instead of standing there and teaching a cop as an unarmed person neighbors are my shooting the lair instead of the heart there's a very different thing there's a lot of different things Wow that lack of imagination is not particularly inspiring but also not particularly surprising coming from Joe Biden who is truly the getting shot in the leg instead of the heart candidate right now well that's obviously absurd the instinct of the Biden just displayed there that the key question is not if an officer should shoot someone but where he's shared by many politicians in New York Bill de Blasio has balked at making it illegal for police to use choke holds despite the fact that a chokehold is precisely what led to the death of Eric garner but the fact is the incremental reforms that we've tried like the wider use of body cameras and implicit bias and use of force training are not on their own going to cut it I'm not saying that we shouldn't still try them but in many cases you're contending with an entrenched police culture resistant to any effort to compel reform that is why many are advocating that we rethink police from the ground up one small example of this is Camden New Jersey which 10 years ago was pleased by a deeply troubled corruption ridden force but in 2013 they dissolved their City Police Force entirely with officers having to reapply for their jobs and in doing that they've been able to meaningfully shift the culture while also instituting policy changes that relate to both a drop in excessive force complaints and some rebuilding of community trust and look I'm not saying that it's been easy perfect or even that it would work everywhere but it should expand our idea of what is possible one even broader idea that's gaining momentum right now is defunding the police now that's a phrase that on its face may sound alarming to some in fact just watch this professional alarmist be alarmed on his very bad face defund the police no more cops that's what they're fighting for that seems like a fringe position but in the Democratic Party it isn't anymore if you live in a gated community it might sound like a good idea you've got your own police force you have no plans to replace them with Rapid Response social workers you're set no matter what happens there are gonna be any rapes on your street but what about everyone else what's gonna happen to them okay first of all in all sincerity Tucker you seem nervous this is a difficult moment and I really hope that you're taking time for yourself and whether it's through meditation or yoga or just kidding you forever Tucker Cal said you sentient polo mallet second given the shockingly low number of rape cases that actually result in charges much less convictions I really wouldn't be holding that up as proof that our current system is working well and finally defunding the police absolutely does not mean that we eliminate all cops and just succumb to the purge instead it's about moving away from a narrow conception of Public Safety that relies on policing and punishment and investing in a community's actual safety net things like stable housing mental health services and community organizations the concept is that the role of the police can then significantly shrink because they are not responding to the homeless or to mental health calls or arresting children in schools or really any other situation where the best solution is not someone showing up with a gun that is the idea behind defund the police if you actually listen to it which suggests that Tucker Carlson has the exact level of understanding about the black lives matter movement that you would expect from a man who always looks like he just saw his first black Barbie and feels confused but mostly scared and look as we know many police will likely resist any redistribution hard police unions often paint themselves as essential and everything else as somehow frivolous in fact remember Bob Kroll but when Minneapolis offed his Union to accept a pay freeze due to Kovac 19 here is how he reacted the first thing we said was okay let's see the budget let's see the city budget and guys they're pissing away millions and millions of dollars to projects like you know they're given $15,000 a year to the transgender operator burn City all right so let's set aside the risks of violence against transgender people particularly trans women of color and instead consider that the budget for the Minneapolis Police Department is 193 million dollars meaning that 15,000 amounts to 0.008 percent of their annual budget and if that's pissing money away the city should really see a urologist but guys like bob rolling his eyes and anything transgender related is exactly why it is time for our conversation to go beyond how should the police do their jobs to what really do we want the role of the police to be and too many still seem to think that this is an issue of a few bad actors in fact just listen to one officer unsuccessfully try to make that argument to some protesters just this week yeah that protesters right what the does that mean because one hamburger should mean a health inspection a few bad hamburgers might mean that McDonald's getting shot down and bad hamburgers regularly killing people on the street would mean that we've maybe all consider going vegan but this clearly isn't about individual officers it's about a structure built on systemic racism that this country created intentionally and now needs to dismantle intentionally and replace with one that takes into account the needs of the people that it actually serves and this is gonna take sustained pressure and attention over a long period of time from all of us black communities have had to be perpetual activists while also routinely being disenfranchised and it is long past time that the rest of us joined to make sure that their voices are heard and acted upon because it's going to be far too easy for nothing to meaningfully change here that is what has always happened before after the unrest in the late 60s a commission was set up to investigate and issue advice many of its conclusions resemble ideas like a police demilitarization and broad reinvestment in marginalized communities that are still being pushed today that testify before that commission was the social scientist Kenneth Clark and he made this observation which remains depressingly true he said I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago and it's as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of 1935 the report of the investigating committee of the right of 1943 the report of the Macomb Commission of the Watts riot of 1965 I must again in candor say to you it is the kind of Alice in Wonderland with the same moving picture of rish own over and over again the same analysis the same recommendations and the same inaction we're in the same now that we're in back then and if you're not directly impacted by it it is tempting to look for a reason to feel better about the world to look at some cops kneeling and think oh well we just need more of that but we need so much more than that because ours is a firmly entrenched system in which the roots of white supremacy run deep and it is critical that we all grab a shovel to do anything less would be absolutely unforgivable and actually to that point there's one person I saw this week whose words have been echoing around my head and you've been listening to me talk for a while so now I'm gonna let her have the last word tonight so when they say why do you burn down the community why do you burn down your own neighborhood it's not ours we don't own anything we don't own anything there is Trevor NOLA said it so beautifully last night there's a social contract that we all have that if you feel or if I steal then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation but the person who fixes the situation is killing us so the social contract is broken and if the social contract is broken why the do I give a about burning the Football Hall of Fame about brother the target you broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and he give up you broke the contract room for 400 years we played your game and built your wealth you broke the contract when we built our wealth again on our own by our bootstraps ain't OSA and you dropped bombs on us when we built it in Rosewood and you came in and you slaughtered us you broke the contract so your target your Hall of Fame far as I'm concerned it could burn this bitch to the ground and it still wouldn't be enough and they are lucky that what black people are looking for is a quality and not revenge that's our show thanks for watching good night you
I think this is the moment that angered me the most. They had recommendations to address this in 1919. And then the same recommendations in 1935, 1943, and 1965. And yet, here we are in 2020 with the same exact issues (if not even worse).
We've had so many chances to fix this and have given the same fixes each time. Each time, those in power either didn't do anything, made token changes to placate the masses, or just made things worse. We honestly shouldn't have to face this in 2020. This is an issue that kids should read about in history books as having been solved decades ago. But since this wasn't fixed back then, we need to make sure that we're not placated by meaningless token reforms this time so that kids 20 years from now can read about police brutality in history books instead of experiencing it first hand.
Jesus the call into the LA Police Comission was perfect
Fuck those guys, what a great call
"YOU'RE A DISGRACE, SUCK MY DICK AND CHOKE ON IT. I YIELD MY TIME, FUCK YOU!"
"If you're asking why a spontaneous, decentralised protest can't control every one of its participants, more than you are asking the same about a tax payer-funded, heavily regimented, paid workforce... fuck you."
Bob Kroll is a racist piece of shit and should not be representing a MLM company let alone a police force.
Hopeful that Minneapolis policing will change? Meet the police union's chief ...
As an NJ resident, I want to correct something: Camden did not get rid of it’s police force. The city force was dissolved and replaced by a municipal force, in effect the city cops got put under county administration. This was done as a cost cutting measure by the former governor, as he deemed the city force too expensive to run for the results they were producing, and the union just refused to budge on anything.
There was a short spike in crime following the dissolution as the municipal force got established, growing pains if you will. This has since been followed by a significant drop in crime, due in no small part to the municipal force having more manpower than the city force did. But also probably owed to the municipal force engaging in outreach programs aimed at building trust between officers and residents. Trust being a key word, and a major component in the protests against the police taking place now.
Here's the whole interview that powerful clip at the end was from
Edit: Thanks but instead of gold, donate to a good cause like bail funds for protestors .
You can just hear the anger in his voice. Ever since John Stewart left The Daily Show, I always thought that the John Oliver show was a good replacement. Both funny, smart, but also extremely passionate about the wrong doings of the world.
"Joe Biden seems like the hit in the leg instead of hit in the heart candidate"
Ouch
If McDonald's served someone a bad burger, they would apologize and then replace it.