Comedian John Oliver turned his attention Sunday to Ferguson, Mo. on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight.”
Oliver outlined how both police and elected officials had failed Ferguson, beginning with the city’s mayor, who tried to diminish the racial disparity between law enforcement and the community in cable news interviews.
“As a general rule, no one should ever be allowed to say ‘There is no history of racial tension here,'” Oliver said. “Because that sentence has never been true anywhere on Earth.”
Case in point: blacks constituted nearly 86 percent of police stops and 93 percent of arrests in Ferguson.
“If you are white in Ferguson, you’d need to be snorting cocaine directly off your dashboard to get stopped by the police,” Oliver quipped.
The comedian also slammed the local police force for wearing “f*cking camo” on duty, pointing out that they’re “northwest of St. Louis, not northwest of the Amazon.” But Oliver reserved some of his most biting criticism for Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D), who he said came off as a patronizing, “pissed-off vice principal” when he imposed a curfew to keep the peace.
“If even the governor can’t distinguish between the good and the bad elements of the community and has decided to punish everyone equally, then that should go both ways,” he said. “I know the police love their ridiculous, unnecessary military equipment, so here’s another patronizing test. Let’s take it all away from them and if they can make through a whole month without killing a single unarmed black man, then, and only then, can they get their f*cking toys back.”
Watch below:
The 1033 program has been expanded under Obama. The trajectory of the security and surveillance state has been consistent. Who is going to stop it? What politician wants to be seen as “soft on crime” and a “terrorist coddler”?
What I don’t like about the 1033 program is a lot of departments are getting useless big boy toys instead the money needed to ensure their officers have better training and day to day equipment.
This stuff is sort of like replacing mom’s SUV with a monster truck. You can drive a monster truck to the supermarket, but you look like an ass and spend way too much money on gasoline. You are always tempted to run over the Prius parked next to you.
With all this evidence, I’ve yet to hear any local official disavow the use of this equipment. They all say “you only use it appropriately”. The only time it would be appropriate is in the event we are invaded by a foreign force…which is pretty much never going to happen
And even if we were invaded by a foreign force, isn’t it the job of the National Guard to respond, not the local police?
Unless the National Guard is over in Afghanistan of course, or preventing looting in Ferguson…
Local police have no business with any of this stuff, and what kind of training for it have they received from the Pentagon? Is that free too?
If John Oliver sees a red light in his rearview, time to hit the gas.