-John Oliver, thank you so much for being on the show.
I really appreciate it, and I appreciate what you do
and what you've been doing. -Pleasure.
-The protests have been going on
in our home state, in New York City,
but everywhere around the country
and actually around the globe, in England.
-Yeah. -How does that make you feel
when you see that?
What does it mean to you?
-Obviously, the underlying cause for it is enraging.
But the fact people have mobilized around the world
is genuinely moving.
Seeing young people but also people of all generations
taking to the streets at a time like this
just to say [bleep] this [bleep] is actually truly edifying.
At a point when your faith in humanity was low,
it's been good to see people fully outraged
by the current state of affairs everywhere.
And, of course, in Britain, there are problems as well.
And just this week in Bristol,
protesters found a statue of a slave trader, pulled it down
and threw it into the harbor, where it undeniably belongs.
-I saw that. -But it was great.
It's a good chance for countries and individuals
to reflect about their history and where they are.
And -- -Yeah.
-Britain has a history to reflect upon for sure.
-I watch your show all the time, last week --
well, it was last night, actually, you dedicated
a whole episode to police -- -Yeah, the whole thing.
-Because you couldn't -- the news just happened
before the show, the week before.
-Yeah, last weekend we didn't feel ready.
Because we have to tape our show a day early.
We just didn't feel ready to say anything of substance
about what was going on, so we said something very briefly
and then took the week to throw all our resources
at just one story because it felt like
the best thing that we could offer was context,
kind of deep context for everything that was happening,
and we had seen this incredible clip of Kimberly Jones
talking on the street,
and it felt like the best thing for us to do
was to basically give 33 minutes of context
for that 2-minute clip
and then just shut up.
-All the work you guys put into this stuff,
I don't know if anyone knows just by watching.
They go, "Oh, he's just funny."
You put months sometimes into your shows.
-Yeah.
-So I mean, it's a lot of work.
To do all that in a week was such a well-done job.
-Oh, thanks very much.
They all worked very hard, and we've been looking
at criminal justice stories for six years now.
We've probably talked about criminal justice issues
more than we've talked about anything else.
And this felt like a way to put a bunch of things
that we had been thinking about into one place,
especially to give some background to what
defund the police actually means beyond the very catching slogan.
-Yeah, what does it mean?
-Yeah, I'd first come across that movement.
Wyatt Cenac told me about it 'cause he did an episode of --
he was playing an episode of his show "Problem Areas,"
which is on YouTube now.
I think it's episode four.
And that was the first time
I started realizing what defunding the police
actually meant
and that wasn't a punitive thing to do.
It was reallocating resources.
And that would look different wherever you lived.
It was about serving whatever community
the police were in better
and trying to decouple safety from policing.
Even this week, in researching it more and more,
it started to make more and more sense,
and you realize that things are so bad,
you need solutions that are going to match it,
and the problem, of course, is if the police don't realize
the scale of the problem,
they're not going to accept the scale of the solution.
-Yeah, did you see -- obviously you saw,
but in Minnesota they just kind of --
-Yeah.
-They got rid of their police department.
-It's not like getting rid of it.
It's basically -- so it's starting again.
So it's not like there's no --
It's not like the purge is upon us.
That is the thing to understand about defund the police.
It is not about no police.
It's about what the police do.
-You said it earlier, but I --
you've been talking about these stories
since whenever, I guess whenever you began.
-Yeah.
-This feels different, though, doesn't it, to you?
-I hope so.
-I hope so, yeah.
-I'll say the key thing is for the outrage
to now be matched with action
because this machine has been very deliberately
built to resist change,
to kind of absorb outrage and not fundamentally change.
So it is going to take sustained significant efforts
to get the reforms that are going to be required here
for anything to meaningfully change because
we've just been here before.
We've been at points in American history
where things have "felt different this time" before.
You look at the Kerner Commission 60 years ago,
making proposals very similar to what's being talked about today.
The problem is things have not changed enough.
I really, really hope that this is the time
that people can manifest meaningful change.
I hope that's true.
Watching what happened in Minneapolis is incredible.
That's a massive step for them to take.
And hopefully it will inspire other people
that big changes are possible.
-Yeah. I just had my 5-year-old just ran in really quickly,
spied on me and left.
Where are your kids?
-They are just outside this door.
There's a nonzero chance that there is a 4-year-old
about to run in here dressed like a rabbit.
And if he does, I want to reassure you it's not
a Donny Darko situation. The rabbit is there.
-Yeah, it's kind of -- do they understand why you're home
and what you do for a living and what's happening or not?
-I don't think they understand any of those things.
I don't think they understand why I'm home.
They definitely don't understand what I do for a living.
If I even went half a sentence into explaining it to them,
I don't think they would appreciate it or respect it.
I'm not even saying they're wrong.
They don't seem to understand that on a weekend,
Dada needs to go to a room and swear to himself.
-Yeah. -I hope they're not overhearing
too much of what I say in this room once a week.
A lot of Dada screaming "What the [bleep]?!"
-[ Laughs ]
Can you stick around, can I do --
I have a couple more questions I want to ask you.
-Of course. -Alright, cool.
We'll be back with John Oliver, everybody.