Police shooting unarmed people, mostly people of color and the mentally disturbed, is not new. It’s been going on for years but with the advent of social media the world is now paying attention to America’s problem with its police. But it’s not as simple as a few bad apples. There are much deeper problems that have caused an inherent distrust of police especially in minority communities. HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” host john Oliver delves into the deeper problem pf the lack of accountability for police.
“As the police will tell you, they have a difficult, dangerous, challenging job. No reasonable person would disagree with that. But that’s all the more reason for insuring that it’s done to the highest standard.”
“Misconduct is often investigated internally by an officer’s colleagues, which does not inspire confidence. But police accountability doesn’t just suffer from an unwritten code of silence; that code can be enshrined within state laws or union contracts as well.”
“The phrase isn’t ‘It’s just a few bad apples, don’t worry about it.’ The phrase is, ‘A few bad apples spoil the barrel.’ And we currently have a system which is set up to ignore bad apples, destroy bad apples’ records, persecute good apples for speaking up and shuffle dangerous, emotionally unstable apples around to the point that children have to attend fucking apple classes! You cannot look at our current situation and claim that anybody likes them apples.”