Bill Maher on policing

Bill Maher’s Message to Bernie Bros: Stop Being a ‘Fuckin’ Baby’ and Help Stop Trump

"I was just re-watching the movie Valkyrie and looking for a one-armed colonel to take out Donald Trump. So I’m thinking Bob Dole."

Not funny.

Not something to joke about, especially not in this crazy election year.

But this about policing makes a lot of sense.

[Still, this makes sense, too.

In a nutshell, the problem we can be sure of is not police racism, it is police violence.]

Maher: 

Well, this idea that the police are now allowed to use C-4 and robots—a weapon of war—and if there’s a dangerous situation, just send it in and blow the whole fuckin’ thing up? 

The police chief said, “We had no other choice…our men would be put in danger.” 

Well I’m sorry, but when you’re a cop danger is part of the job! 

I feel like almost more than the racial situation, this is what’s wrong with the police these days: They seem to have forgotten that. 

They keep saying it’s a dangerous job, but their reaction is too often, “Well, if something scares me, I just get to empty my clip into it or send in the bomb.” 

That’s not what police work is supposed to be. 

We want to pat them on the back and say, “You’re brave and what you’re doing is a dangerous job,” but it’s hard to do it when every time there’s danger, they take that way out. 

I don’t agree with that method, and I don’t agree that it was the only option. 

They had the man shot, he was contained, so I don’t think the only option was to blow him up, and I think that’s a terrible precedent. 

Is that the future? 

Whenever there’s a problem with cops we send in a robot with a giant bomb?

Interviewer: 

It also speaks to the general hyper-militarization of police these days. 

Those videos out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are jaw-dropping. 

The cops look like look like heavily armored supersoldiers straight out of a Michael Bay movie.

Maher: 

Exactly. 

I’ve been talking about this for a long time on our show. 

Certainly after the Boston bombings in 2013, if you recall, one of the Tsarnaev brothers was still on the loose and hiding in a boat. 

I remember thinking when I saw the pictures in the paper and on television, “When did Boston get an army? Are they a regional power now? 

Because I think they could take on Canada if they wanted to.” 

The Tsarnaev kid was lying in the boat wounded, and they just all emptied their clips into the boat. 

And we didn’t know at the time whether there were more people! 

He should’ve been captured alive so that they could question him. 

The only reason he was is because they all missed! 

I saw this statistic the other day that said the German police only fired 85 bullets in a year. 

Eighty-five bullets! 

That’s any time the cops fire their weapons here. 

When you talk about militarization, I think cops have this idea in their heads from the U.S. military of “overwhelming force,” but overwhelming force is not what we should be using on the streets of America.

. . . .

What Giuliani said is disgusting, and it’s part of the idea of, “Whatever the cops do, they’re right.” 

It’s always, “We followed procedure.” 

Rodney King? “We followed procedure.” 

A lot of these shootings? “We did it by the book.” 

Well, you’re reading from the wrong book.