- The video discusses the ongoing protests in response to the murder of George Floyd and the excessive use of force by police.
- It criticizes the police for their militarized response to peaceful protests and highlights the global support for the protesters.
- The video criticizes President Trump for his actions and statements regarding the protests.
- It emphasizes that police brutality is a long-standing issue that disproportionately affects black communities.
- The video explores the history of policing in the United States and its entanglement with white supremacy.
- It discusses the policies and practices that have perpetuated racial inequality and aggressive policing, such as the war on drugs and stop and frisk.
- The video criticizes the increase in police funding while simultaneously cutting spending on social services.

- The police have been given more authority and funding while social services have been slashed, leaving the police as the only resource in many communities
- Police are being asked to handle a wide range of issues that they are not equipped to handle
- Police have been armed with military-grade equipment and trained to see themselves as predators
- Police unions make it difficult to discipline officers and oppose common sense reforms
- The federal government has the power to investigate police departments and force change, but the current administration is not interested in police reform.

- The Trump administration rolled back Obama's restrictions on giving police military equipment
- Trump made controversial remarks to law enforcement about not being too nice to suspects
- Civil suits against police officers are difficult to win due to qualified immunity
- Over a 5-year period, the 10 largest police departments paid out a billion dollars in settlements and court judgments
- There is a chance that the Supreme Court may reconsider qualified immunity
- Suggestions for police reform include rethinking policing from the ground up and defunding the police
- Defunding the police is about reallocating resources to community safety and investing in social services
- Police unions often resist redistribution efforts
- The conversation needs to shift from individual officers to the systemic racism within the police structure.

- Sustained pressure and attention is needed from all of us to bring about meaningful change for black communities.
- The unrest in the late 60s led to a commission that made recommendations similar to those being pushed today, such as police demilitarization and reinvestment in marginalized communities.
- The social scientist Kenneth Clark observed that the same issues and recommendations have been repeated over time without meaningful action.
- The deeply rooted system of white supremacy requires everyone to take action and not just rely on symbolic gestures.
- The social contract is broken when the authority meant to fix situations is killing black people.
- The speaker emphasizes the historical injustices and violence faced by black communities and expresses frustration with the broken social contract.
- The burning of buildings and institutions is seen as a response to the broken contract and a symbol of the anger and frustration felt by black people.
- The speaker concludes by stating that black people seek equality, not revenge.

The video discusses ongoing protests in response to the murder of George Floyd and police brutality. It criticizes the police and President Trump for their actions and statements regarding the protests. The video explores the history of policing in the United States and its entanglement with white supremacy. It criticizes policies and practices that perpetuate racial inequality and aggressive policing. The video suggests police reform, including defunding the police and reallocating resources to community safety and social services. It emphasizes the need for sustained pressure and attention to bring about meaningful change for black communities. The speaker expresses frustration with the broken social contract and emphasizes the desire for equality, not revenge.

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.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ 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 1 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, it's been frankly sickening to see them met with this.

Across the country, peaceful protests have too 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 they're armed like they're going to war.

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 de Blasio 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 chants, to signs, to a man who called into an L.A.

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 is slaughtering peaceful protesters on the street.

I had 2 friends go to the protest in Beverly Hills a couple of 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 you think of protecting and serving?

I refuse to call you an officer or a chief because you don't deserve those titles.

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 seconds left, so unyields it and throws in a bonus, fuck you.

Now, as for the president himself, he initially hid from the protesters in a bunker, later claiming he wasn't hiding, he was actually just inspecting it.

Then, his attorney general had police gas protesters outside the White House, so that Trump could have an inexplicable photo op at a nearby church, while holding up a Bible like it's the ticket for his 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 fucking disgusting.

But we're 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 Breonna Taylor this week, you can very much fuck off.

Likewise, if you're asking why a spontaneous, decentralized protest can't control every 1 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, suck my dick and choke on it, fuck 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.

It's genuinely impossible to overstate how enraging that is.

They're protesting excessive force by police, and the police just start pepper spraying them like it's fucking sunscreen.

And that's just 1 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 viewers 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, or with this president, and it always disproportionately falls on black communities.

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered, police used force against black people at 7 times the rate of whites.

Black Americans are 2 and a half times more likely than whites to be killed by police.

And about 1 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 1 of many physical and psychological factors that make racism a serious public health issue.

And look, clearly, the police are just 1 part of a much larger system of racial inequality.

But for tonight, we are gonna focus primarily on them.

How the fuck 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 Fuck and Manic Bigot and His 1 Black Friend.

America loves nothing more than a renegade cop who doesn't play 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.

History, law enforcement meant enforcing laws that were explicitly designed to subjugate black people.

Some of America's first law enforcement units were the 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 1 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, or 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 were 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 described that exact time.

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 1 day by white historians as the Summer of Chromatica.

And look, things did not improve from the 60s onward.

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 90s, a school of thought called broken windows, or 0 tolerance policing, had started to take root.

Which held that if minor crimes are left unattended, it will lead to more serious crimes.

Therefore, police had better crack down 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 to search people at random.

At that policy's 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 amounted to this fucking bullshit just under a different name.

And that 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.

We need to finish the job of putting 100,000 more police on our streets.

Last fall, Congress supported my plan to hire, in addition to the 100,000 community police we've already funded, 50,000 more concentrated in high crime neighborhoods.

Yeah, Thanks very much for that, Congress.

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 this country.

Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve.

Not enough mental health funding that the cop have.

Here in Dallas, we got a loose dog problem.

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 Kushners 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 the 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 fucking teeth.

As we discussed 6 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 the 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 1 takes that idea further than this guy.

Once you've made the decision to take a human life, You're a transformed creature, you're a predator.

Are you emotionally, spiritually, psychologically prepared to snuff out a human life in defense of innocent lives?

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.

And of course, cops who went through this training could wind up on edge.

You wouldn't train a barber by saying, here are your scissors, snip like this, and oh yeah, this is how to puncture the carotid artery.

Now, you won't need to use this 99 percent of the time, but if you don't think you can make that decision, you need to find another job.

Now, that gross man is actually called Dave Grossman, and he calls himself an expert in killology, 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...

And also, I'm pretty sure that the first lesson in sexology is never call sex the procreative act if you want anyone to procreatively act with you ever again.

And as batshit as Grossman is, he's by no means a fringe figure in police culture.

He's on the road giving trainings 200 days a year.

The officer who shot Philando Castile had taken a class based on Grossman's theories.

And when, 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 Kroll, 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.

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 that he 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 arsehole, but especially if it's someone whose 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 1 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 2 officers who belong to our friend Bob's union.

2 Minneapolis police officers are on paid leave for allegedly decorating a Christmas tree at the fourth precinct with a bunch of items that are viewed as racist.

Bags of hot taki chips, a cup from Popeye's fried chicken, menthol cigarettes and cans of malt liquor, among other things.

That is not just disgusting, It's also arguably the most racist thing to happen to Christmas, since people decided that this child 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 announced that the officer responsible would be fired by the end of the day.

Only to have to almost immediately walk that statement back, saying that there was a process that they were required to go through by law.

And we actually checked, and despite the fact it's now been a year and a half since that happened, 1 of those officers' cases is still under arbitration.

And look, I get unions fighting for their workers.

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'd fired at least 1,881 officers for misconduct, but were forced to reinstate more than 450 of them.

That's almost 25 percent after appeals required by their union contracts.

And police unions can also oppose even the most basic common sense reform.

A few years back, the Cleveland police started being 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 gonna be hesitant to pull their gun in an appropriate situation because they don't wanna do the paperwork that's gonna be associated with having to pull your gun.

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 boiled Mr.

Potato Head or an angry egg with a mustache.

And I know those comparisons probably make him mad, but what's he gonna do, shoot me?

And that attitude is particularly hard to take, considering that just 6 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 how the head of New York City's largest police union reacted when a 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 can't stop the killers.

I'm sorry to say that we have to tell our police officers,

He just basically threatened inaction 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 is fewer 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, an 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 rat families after a hard day of rat work.

Making you wonder whether all those arrests were really in the interest of public safety at all.

Now, 1 good way to attempt to get reforms past a union's resistance is if the federal government steps in, which it 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.

Bush's first term, his Justice Department launched 12 such investigations into police departments.

Trump's DOJ has launched just a single investigation and has entered 0 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.

Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know?

Like, Don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody, don't hit their head.

I said, you can take the hand away, okay?

You know, it's bad enough when it's just a bunch of random shitheads 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 unions 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 5 years, the 10 cities with the largest police departments paid out a billion dollars in settlements and court judgments.

And listen, I'm no comp-troller, believe me, I wish I were, a hard to explain, lethally boring elected accountant whose title inexplicably took a real word and then stuck an oomph in the middle of it, come on.

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 1 reason that it was gonna be difficult for Michael Brown's family to sue the Ferguson officer who killed him.

The problem is he has qualified immunity.

He's gonna say that I was acting within the scope of my employment, this is what I was doing.

Police officers are often protected from consequences due to something called qualified immunity, which sounds like something you get from a horrifying cheat code in Grand Theft Auto.

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.

Very 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.

For instance, 1 case was thrown out because of the difference between unleashing a police dog to bite a motionless suspect in a bushy ravine, and unleashing a police dog to bite a compliant suspect in a canal in the woods, which I totally get.

Those are 2 completely different kinds of outdoor holes.

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 3 times with a stun gun for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.

Although the ruling was in Brooks' favor, the officer who fired the taser was given immunity because the law on stun gun use was not clear yet.

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 fucking appliance he used.

Now, the good news is, there is a chance that the Supreme Court will soon decide to reconsider qualified immunity.

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 1 of those anywhere from the next 4 years to never.

But while ending qualified immunity would be great, That alone isn't gonna be nearly enough.

And that brings us to our final point here.

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