John Oliver: US policing is 'a structure built on systemic racism'
On Sunday, John Oliver devoted the entire episode of Last Week Tonight to the nationwide protests against anti-black racism and police brutality sparked by the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and the fundamentally broken institution of law enforcement in the United States. “Look, if the 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,” said Oliver after several clips of police beating peaceful protesters with batons, wantonly spraying pepper spray or, in New York, driving a police cruiser into a barricaded crowd.
Oliver didn’t want to dwell on the president or cable news’s fixation on instances of looting, other than to say: “If you’ve said the name Macy’s more than you’ve said the name Breonna Taylor this week, you can very much fuck off.” Same goes for if “you’re asking why a spontaneous decentralized protest can’t control every one of its participants more than you are asking the same about a taxpayer-funded, heavily regimented workforce”.
“For any viewers sitting at home shocked by the scenes of police brutality, I get it – I’m white, too,” said Oliver. “But it’s worth remembering: that’s the tip of a very large iceberg. It didn’t start this week, or with this president, and it always disproportionately falls on black communities.”
As usual, Oliver took a deep dive into how we got here. Police have “long enjoyed an exalted role in America”, he explained, although the reality of policing has always been much different than the hero renegade cops of movies and TV. Law enforcement is “deeply entangled” with white supremacy, and though you might think “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”, said Oliver. “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 police units were actual slave patrols to catch people who had escaped slavery; after Emancipation, police units participated in or abetted lynchings and enforced Jim Crow, or brutalized black people who migrated north, where they faced restricted housing and economic opportunities. Oliver breezed through the non-improvements after the 60s – Nixon’s fealty to “law and order”, Reagan’s turbocharged war on drugs, and the “broken windows” or “zerotolerance” model of policing popularized in the 1990s, which saturated low-income communities of color with police and initiated the disproportionately applied random search policy known as “stop and frisk”.
Spending on police went at the expense of social services, health services and other programs, which also put undue responsibilities on law enforcement. Police now “have a massive array of complicated duties that in many cases they aren’t equipped to handle, making them very much the Jared Kushner of local officials – without, of course, the expression, complexion and general demeanor of a haunted baby”, said Oliver. “So while we should absolutely be angry at the police right now, let’s also be angry at the series of choices that left them as essentially the only public resource in some communities.”
On top of that, America has armed police “to the fucking teeth”, a subject Oliver and his team investigated six years ago. This has promoted a subindustry of training seminars to reinforce the idea of the police at war, such as the “killology” training, a haunting clip of which showed an officer telling fellow cops to think of themselves as “predators”. “You know, the problem with telling someone that they’re a predator is that it primes them to see the rest of the world as potential prey,” Oliver said. “And of course cops who went through this training would end up on edge. You wouldn’t train a barber by saying, ‘here are your scissors, snip like this, and oh yeah, this is how you puncture the carotid artery.’”
Minneapolis’s mayor banned the “killology” training after it was revealed the officer who killed Philando Castile five years ago had graduated from one. Which brought Oliver to one of the major obstacles for police reform in America: police unions, who make it incredibly difficult to discipline police for even egregious misconduct, and whose leader in Minneapolis flouted the mayor’s ban.
Additionally, civil suits against police are almost impossible to win because of cops’ “qualified immunity”, “which sounds like something you get from a horrifying cheat code in Grand Theft Auto”, said Oliver, but actually means public officials’ immunity from lawsuits unless their exact conduct has already been deemed unconstitutional in a previous case. And it has to be exact – Oliver cited a 2011 lawsuit against the Seattle police department in which a woman claimed excessive force after an officer tasered her three times during a traffic stop. The officer was given immunity because the law on stun gun use wasn’t clear, which is “is absolutely ridiculous – the method the officer used to assault that woman clearly shouldn’t matter”, said Oliver. “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 fucking appliance he used.”
There is a bill in Congress right now to abolish qualified immunity, but incremental reforms just aren’t going to cut it on their own, said Oliver, when “you’re contending with an entrenched police culture resistant to any effort to compel reform”.
Which is why many people are advocating to “defund the police”, a slogan now popular at rallies and a Republican scare tactic which actually means “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 housing, mental health services and community organizations”, explained Oliver.
Oliver also dismissed the “bad apple” theory of policing, where one just has to rid the force of serial offenders: “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.
“If you’re not directly impacted by it,” Oliver concluded, “it is tempting to look for a reason to feel better about the world, to look at pictures of 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 fucking shovel.”
Oliver gave the show’s last word to Kimberly Jones, a black activist and coauthor of I’m Not Dying with You Tonight: “The social contract is broken … you broke the contract, and for 400 years, we played your game and built your wealth … they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”