-Hi, I'm Seth Meyers.
The crisis our country is going through
is at its heart about anger and frustration
in the black community
over years of mistreatment by law enforcement.
This week, as Americans came together to protest,
we opened each show with "Late Night" writer Amber Ruffin
telling her personal stories about her interactions
with the police.
They're profoundly powerful.
They're profoundly eye-opening.
We gathered all four here.
-Let me tell you a story.
So, once when I was a teenager, I was brand-new to driving,
and I dropped my friend off at work.
And I'm coming back home,
and I'm in morning rush-hour traffic,
and everybody is going over the speed limit.
I think it's like 40, and everyone is going 50.
And I hate it because I'm new to driving.
It's too scary.
When I slow down, it disrupts traffic, so I speed up to 45.
That's five miles over the speed limit.
That's as fast as I'm willing to go.
And I know I'm going too slow,
and I'm in an unfamiliar part of town
and people are whizzing by me.
So to make myself feel better, I turn on Busta Rhymes,
and I friggin' blast it so that, you know, I can calm down.
And blasting Busta Rhymes is something that I recommend
if you're a teenager who is unsure of themselves.
So, I get to a good pace, and I start feeling normal.
And just then, I encounter a speed trap.
And no one is slowing down.
We are all speeding, me least of all.
So, to my right, there is an old, white cop
standing on the side of the road.
And out of these tens of cars, he sees a young, black person
driving a purple car blasting rap music.
And he chooses me. And he's screaming at me.
He is shouting as if I have murdered someone.
Like, on a scale of 1 to 10, he is at a 27.
And he goes, "Pull the car over!
Pull the goddamn car over right now, mother [bleep]!"
That is what this cop is screaming at me,
and I think, "This is how I die. This man is going to kill me."
And I start crying.
I am bawling, because I am 100% sure
that this man is going to
drag me out of my car, beat me to death,
and, you know, tomorrow on the news, everyone will be like,
"She didn't seem angry, but who knows?"
So, I pull over, and I stop.
He goes, "Pull over the [bleep] car! [Bleep]!"
He's shouting. It does not stop.
So, he gets up to the car, and he puts his hand on the door.
And he goes to start yelling, and he sees me.
He sees a teenage girl whose face is wet with tears.
And I'm just braced,
trying to think of all the good things that have happened
in my life so that I get to heaven thankful,
instead of angry.
And he looks me in the eye.
And he drops it and goes, "Oh, okay, well, just --
It's okay. Just let me have your I.D."
And, you know, he's taken aback.
He goes from a 27 to a negative 2.
His whole demeanor changes, and it's as if
he wasn't the guy who was just screaming at me.
He's a totally different guy.
All of a sudden, he's nice.
So I give him my I.D.
He sends me on my way without a warning,
because once he saw a teenage girl...
shouting was no longer fun?
Look, I have a thousand stories like this.
The cops have pulled a gun on me.
The cops have followed me to my own home.
And every black person I know has a few stories like that.
Many have more than a few.
Black people leave the house every day
knowing that at any time,
we could get murdered by the police.
It's a lot.
And sometimes when you see news footage
like we have seen the past week
and you hear people chalking it up to a few bad apples
instead of how corrupt an entire system is,
it becomes too much.
And that's what I wanted to say.
And I wanted to end this with something hopeful
to, you know, provide some comfort,
but maybe it's time to get uncomfortable.
Last night, I told you a story
about an encounter I had with police.
Now let me tell you another story.
One time, a few years ago, I was living in Amsterdam.
And I flew to Chicago for the weekend
to visit some friends who live there.
When I got there, my friend Jeff and I hopped in his car
and headed out to pick up our friend Krasney,
who just so happened to live
next to the alley behind the police station.
So, Jeff parks his car
at the gas station at the end of the alley
so that I can run out, go pick up Krasney,
and take her back to the car.
I'm freaking thrilled. I hadn't seen her in years.
So, we were all going to go have dinner and catch up.
Now, I get out of the car and go down the alley.
And because Jeff is watching me, I skip down the alley
to her house to make him laugh, you know?
But little did I know
skipping down a police-station alley is a big no-no.
Because I end up skipping towards a cop car
that's driving at me down the alley.
The sirens go off.
A cop gets out, and his gun is drawn.
And he goes, "Put your hands on the hood of the car!
Put your hands on the hood!"
This man is furious.
I comply, and his partner pats me down.
Now, this man is livid.
It makes no sense.
His anger level towards me is insane.
I am a young, adorable, delight
literally skipping down the street,
and I've infuriated him.
So, this man asked me, "Where are you coming from?"
And I go, "Amsterdam."
Now, this answer enrages him.
And he goes, "No, where are you coming from right now?
Where are you coming from?"
And I go, "From the airport. From a flight. From Amsterdam."
And he goes, "Why in the world
are you running down this alley?!"
I go, "I'm not running. I'm skipping.
I'm happy to be back in town.
I'm going to pick up my friend Krasney
and take her back to Jeff's car,
and we're all going to go catch up over dinner."
And I remember, "Oh, thank God. Jeff is here."
I gesture back to Jeff.
Jeff is standing outside of his car just watching all of this.
And he goes -- So, the cop and I see Jeff.
And thank God Jeff didn't come running up to us,
because he could have gotten us both shot.
But the cop sees that Jeff, a white man, has seen all this,
and he changes his attitude with the quickness.
He's suddenly professional instead of antagonistic.
And he tells me that I was wrong for running.
And it takes everything in me not to tell him
that if I wanted to run down the alley,
that would be perfectly legal.
So, instead, I also gently remind him
that I was not running, I was skipping.
So, the cop gets in his car, and he leaves.
And I walk to Krasney's house.
I get her. We take her back to the car.
Jeff is really bothered by what happened, but I'm not.
[Bleep] That man could have shot me in a second.
People who know me would be running around talking about,
"Attacking an officer doesn't seem like
something Amber would do, but the officer said she did,
so that has to be what happened."
So...
The second I see Krasney, I feel a lot better.
And we go, and we have a lot of fun that night.
And if you think about it, it's kind of my duty to have fun
because at any time, I could get murdered by the police.
Now, every black person I know has stories like that.
[ Sighs ]
It's crazy that people don't run around telling everyone
these stories all the time.
But there's this unspoken rule
that black people are supposed to take it in stride.
Can you imagine having someone pull a gun on you
and being expected to take it in stride?
Now imagine a bunch of incidents like that over one lifetime,
multiply that by 43 million African-Americans,
and that is why things are like this right now.
That is why people are angry.
And if you're not angry... why not?
The last two days, I've told stories about
my run-ins with the cops.
Today I'm going to tell you a story about
a run-in with the cops.
Okay, I was living in Chicago, and my friend Anthony
had just left my house.
Now, he goes out the door, across the porch,
down the stairs, gets on his bike and rides away.
I shut the door, I go inside, I change into my pajamas.
And when I come out of my room,
I see that he has left his wallet.
So I call him. He comes back to get it.
I step out onto the porch with no shoes, in my pajamas.
And instead of walking to the end of the porch
and down the stairs, I just reach over the side of the porch
to give him his wallet back.
So, he rides up on his bicycle and just lets his bicycle fall
and then reaches up to get his wallet.
Now, at that moment, I'm reaching down
and he's reaching up, a cop car pulls up, flashes its lights.
The cop gets out, and she's like, "Hold it right there!
We gotcha!"
I'm like, "Okay."
Now, everything she says to us
she says with her hand on her gun.
Now, I'm terrified, because while I'm a black lady,
Anthony is a black man,
and this cop is a tiny, little white lady.
Now, I'm scared.
Anthony's scared.
I've had a lot of run-ins with the cops at this point.
And isn't it hilarious that
when people say "run-ins with the cops,"
they mean they got caught doing something?
But when I say it, I just mean being a person that they bother?
Okay, so, this cop says,
"Why were you guys running from the police?"
And we're like, "We're not.
I'm not running anywhere. I live here."
And she's like, "Okay."
Meanwhile, I'm like, bitch, I have no shoes on.
I don't say that.
I say, "I'm in my pajamas with no shoes on,"
and she goes, "Let me see both your I.D.'s."
I go, "Okay, but to get my I.D.,
I have to go in the house, okay?"
And she's like, "Fine."
So I go in the house, and the whole time I'm in the house,
she's asking Anthony a million questions.
So, I come up. I give her my I.D.
She says, "This address is from Nebraska."
And she's right.
I go, "Oh, yeah, I don't have a new Chicago I.D. yet."
And she goes, "Well, then I need proof you live here.
Go get some mail."
Now, this is where the story takes a turn,
and I can't describe it exactly except to say
now she has unsnapped that thing that holds your gun in place
and is holding on to her gun tighter.
So, I go inside and I'm freaking out
because she's going to shoot my friend Anthony
for just being bigger than her?
So I go in, and I tear up the house,
looking for a piece of mail with my name on it,
but I just moved there, so I don't really have any!
So, I go, I get the mail, I come out,
and for some reason, she has calmed down.
I give her the mail.
She looks at the mail, and she looks at us and she goes,
"Okay, from now on, when I tell you to stop, you stop."
Now, remember, she's never told us to stop anything.
And I look at Anthony like,
"Oh, my God, are you going to handle this cop lying on us?
And he looks at me and he looks at the cop and he goes, "Okay."
I look at him and I go, "Okay,"
and we live to get harassed another day!
Because that's the kind of thing you have to do
to stay alive when you're black.
You have to let the police lie to you at your own house.
That's it. That's my story.
We used to open this show with fun jokes,
but for the last three days,
we've opened this show with stories about me
getting mistreated by the cops.
And if you're tired of hearing these stories, do something!
For the past three days, we have opened "Late Night"
with me telling a story about run-ins with the cops.
And tonight, I'm out of stories.
Just kidding. I have more.
A few years ago, I'm in the car with my white friend.
He is a white man in a suit.
He's just gotten off of work.
Now, I'm in a head-to-toe velvet outfit because I'm great.
I think I was going to a party,
so it was like my favorite party outfit.
I still remember that thing. It was beautiful.
It was not that late at night.
So, we're at a truck stop,
seeing if my friend's dad, who is a truck driver, is there.
We're driving slowly along the semitrucks,
looking for his dad's license plate.
So I can see why we may have seemed suspicious.
And a cop comes up, and he taps on the window.
And I'm like, "Frick!"
I have been harassed for doing nothing.
I'm sure this guy is going to get us.
My friend rolls down the window, and the cop is super nice.
Now, I had never been stopped by a cop
while a white man was around.
And the respect this cop had
for this white man in this suit, man, I --
this cop wants to know what in the world we are doing,
and he asked politely.
And we tell him, and he is unsatisfied.
He goes, "I stopped you
because there's been a lot of prostitution."
[ Laughing ] And I go, "Oh, I'm not a prostitute."
And this cop has never believed anything less.
He looks at our I.D.s, and he asks us more questions.
And my white friend is getting annoyed at this cop.
And the cop can tell.
But I'm like,
"Oh, my gosh, please just calm down and be cool."
My friend says to the cop -- he goes,
"You have nothing. You have to let us go."
And I'm like, "You just got me killed!"
But the cop goes... [Sighs]
"Okay, but you have to leave."
[ Laughing ] Ok-- And then that was it.
My friend was like, "She's not a prostitute!"
And I was like, "Oh, shut up.
Hey, we're going. Thank you. Goodbye."
Y'all, the respect this cop
just automatically had for my friend --
I'll never forget seeing it.
So, that's it.
That's my story.
Alright.
So, for the past 10 days,
the George Floyd protests were worldwide.
Like, hundreds of thousands of people
all over the country, all over the world,
saw yet another video of a man being murdered in cold blood
and rose up.
People all over the world took to the streets
because they believe that
black people deserve better treatment
than we have been getting.
[ Breathes sharply ]
And, you know, I'm not like, "Oh, wow, everything's over.
Everything is fixed."
But...y'all, I am so shocked
that so many people showed up for black people.
We've been being discriminated against for fun for years,
and I didn't think people cared or saw
or they knew and were fine with it.
For whatever reason, everyone is fed up, thank God.
And last night, Obama held a town hall,
and he talked about a comprehensive plan
with real policies
that can start saving lives right now.
He talked about easy things
that every police force in America
can choose to do this second
and start saving lives this minute.
[ Breathes sharply ]
This change, if they enact it, would be great.
But please don't forget that it cost us
not only George Floyd's life,
but the lives of 11 people
who have been killed during these protests,
including David McAtee...
Dave Patrick Underwood...
Chris Beaty...
Dorian Murrell...
Italia Kelly...
Calvin Horton Jr...
Javar Harrell...
Victor Cazares...
Sean Monterrosa...
David Dorn...
and from my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska,
the brave James Scurlock.
Don't let it cost more lives.
Vote.
[Bleep]
I don't want to do it again.
Vote.
Call your representatives. Unfriend racists.
And most importantly,
when you see something, say something.
Do something. Get loud.
Don't let people get away with racist crap -- not anymore.
It's a new day.