John Oliver is never afraid to share his thoughts on current events during his weekly show, Last Week Tonight. So, naturally, it was only fitting that the comedian took on the ongoing discussion about police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis Police Officers which sparked nationwide protests.
Using his platform on HBO, Oliver called for drastic police reform during his monologue.
“The police have not just been incidentally tainted by racism. For much of U.S. history, law enforcement meant enforcing laws that were explicitly designed to subjugate Black people,” Oliver said. “For a century after that, police in the South were responsible for enforcing segregation while allowing and sometimes participating in lynchings and anti-Black terrorism. Even those who moved to the North still faced brutality, along with limited housing and economic opportunities.
“The incremental reforms that we’ve tried like the wide 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 entrenched police culture resistant to any effort to compel reform. That is why many are advocating that we rethink police from the ground up.
“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 they best solution is not someone showing up with a gun — that’s the idea of defunding the police.
“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 it actually serves…Black communities have had to be perpetual activists while also routinely being disenfranchised and it is long past time for the rest of us to join and make sure their voices are heard and acted upon.”
Over the weekend, the Minneapolis City Council committed to dismantling the police department. What that will ultimately lead to remains to be seen and it will be interesting to see whether other cities follow Minneapolis’s lead as calls to defund the police continue.
You can watch the full segment below.
As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing and white supremacy are intertwined, the roadblocks to fixing things, and some potential paths forward.
