On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that the response to crimes in Los Angeles over the past week was “a little slow” and stated that the “blue wall of silence” needs to break and the officers “who watch and do crowd control for atrocities, they’re not good either.”
Maher began by praising police chiefs who have knelt and marched with protesters. He added, “I mean, forever, we’ve been talking about bad cops, bad apples, and then the vast majority of cops, [are] good cops, but the real new rule is, you can’t anymore get away with, this is a bad cop, and any cops who aren’t actually committing the crime are good. The ones who watch and do crowd control for atrocities, they’re not good either. That has to be the new standard.”
He further stated, “‘If you see something, say something’ has to apply to police, too. You can’t get away with crimes on account of being the people who are supposed to stop crimes. And speaking of stopping crimes, we were a little slow to get to that in LA this week. I mean, sometimes, I feel we’re getting the worst of both worlds, the abusive part of policing, but without the law and order part. I’ve said many times in discussing the police, civilization is a mile wide and an inch deep, so when people say, cops are all that stands between civilization and chaos, absolutely, I agree. Cops are the badasses who deal with the dregs in an ugly business, but if cops want us to give them a little extra room to be tough because they’ve got a bad, dangerous job, then they’ve got to do the bad, dangerous job. Which they have also done plenty of this week, to be fair. This is tough stuff now. But it was frustrating watching it on TV last Sunday. … It looked like Black Friday, but without cash registers.”
Maher also said that we need to do a better job vetting the people who become police officers.
Maher concluded, “Tough guys have to do tough things. Right now, it’s easy to spot the toughest police officers. They’re the ones telling their fellow cops, you’ve got to stop this shit. A crack has been made in the blue wall of silence, please, let it break down even further, altogether, or else we’re going to be in the streets again and again, all the time.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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