John Oliver is sick and tired of bad cops being dismissed as just a “few bad apples,” as police backers often claim after each questionable shooting.
“Snow White wasn’t afraid of apples before she took a bite out of that one really bad one,” Oliver said on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday. “But I’m telling you, the next time an old lady comes at her with a piece of fruit, Snow is going to get the fuck out of there.
”Oliver then systemically explored why police were rarely held accountable for “bad apple” actions and what that was doing to society.
In some schools, teens were even given lessons in how to interact with police in order to minimize their risk of being shot.
“That is so fucking depressing,” Oliver said. “Especially when you realize that that’s probably the only class where nobody will raise their hand and say ‘when are we ever going to use this?’”
And that, he said, is what makes it hard to dismiss the “few bad apples” argument.
“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.”
See the full report in the clip above.
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