Protesters in the United States and other regions of the world are calling for justice against the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd. The incident is not isolated and we have seen similar acts of police brutality because of the amount of power they hold over us.

Multiple protests have submitted their agendas, saying that police should be defunded gradually and ventures like rehabilitation and education should be financed more.

John Oliver decided to jump into the details and statistics of how police brutality has been harming the society since the beginning. This institution was not created to protect the people. It has only served the state and will continue to work against the locals unless the accountability factor is as high as it is for the civilians.

Oliver discussed the issues that have glorified the police system so much that individuals do not have a choice but to turn to it and think they are serving the society.

“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,” Oliver says.
 “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.” 

Oliver added that some police officers have to go through “warrior training” which should not be included in a system that is only supposed to serve the people. The unions in police are often curbed since the government and authorities always put job security over public security.

He then addressed the popular phrase “defund the police’‘. The counter-arguments we have seen on the internet suggest that people are not even aware of what the protesters want when they ask the state to stop heavily financing the police.

“Defunding the police absolutely does not mean that we eliminate all cops and just succumb to The Purge,” Oliver says. “It’s just about moving away from a narrow conception of public safety that relies on policing and punishment, and investing in a community’s actual safety net: things like stable housing, mental health services, and community organizations.”

“The concept is that the role of the police can then significantly shrink, because they are not responding to the homeless, or to mental health calls, or arresting children in schools, or really any other situation where the best solution is not someone showing up with a gun”, he added further.

You can blame all the uniformed officers but if you do not raise fingers at the system that is benefitting from police brutality, you can never reach the ultimate goal.

Oliver concluded by saying, “It’s about a structure built on systemic racism that this country created intentionally, and now needs to dismantle intentionally, and replace with one that takes into account the needs of the people that it actually serves.”