Original subtitles

Hi, there. Welcome to the show.

Still taking place in this blank void.

And if you're starting to enjoy this void at all, you'll frankly love its new

spin-off series, Young Void. It's coming exclusively to HBO Max.

Yes, HBO Max.

There's a new movie every month. This month, it's... Oh, fuck me.

Look, it's been a busy week from the horror show of CPAC to Joe Biden giving

MBS a pass over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to the post office unveiling

its new delivery truck, which looks like it's the star of a children's book who

thinks it can...

but can't. But we're actually gonna start right here at home with New York's

governor, Andrew Cuomo, a man whose face, build, and general demeanor always

seems to scream business Frankenstein.

Cuomo has been in some hot water lately.

This morning, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's administration is under federal

scrutiny for its handling of COVID-related fatality data at nursing

homes. The fallout comes after a 76-page report from New York's Attorney General

last month revealed the state had been under-reporting deaths in nursing homes

and long-term care facilities by as much as 50 percent.

Under-reporting nursing home deaths.

You'd expect that less from a transparent democracy and more from an

authoritarian regime like North Korea, which, to this day, has yet to report a

single case of coronavirus.

I assume their state media is simply claiming that the virus was repelled

from the country after Kim Jong-un breathed fire on it. Now, this scandal

stems from a directive Cuomo made last March telling nursing homes to accept

COVID-positive patients to free up hospital beds. Now, that would be bad

enough, but since then, his administration... and has tried to

downplay any consequences of that action, releasing a report last July

that laid the blame on nursing home staffers for infecting residents and, as

a Cuomo aide recently told lawmakers, actively concealing data on COVID deaths

out of fear it'd be used against them by federal prosecutors.

That revelation, understandably, set off a firestorm. And after a Democratic

legislator, Ron Kim, made a statement about it to the press, he said he got a

call from Cuomo that went about as well as you might expect.

The governor asked me to issue a statement that countered what I

heard in the meeting and essentially cover up the cover-up. He spent 10

minutes berating me, threatening me to end my career in front of my family, in

front of my kids.

Yeah, not great.

Now, I have to say, Cuomo has denied Kim's account of that call, but you

should also know many, many people who've dealt with Cuomo in the past have

said it sounds exactly like him. And that reputation alone goes a long way,

because be honest, if you saw a headline tomorrow that said, leaked memo shows

John Oliver asked staff if Bird he saw in Central Park had an OnlyFans page,

you'd believe it, even if I denied the account of that conversation.

Deep down, you'd know it happened, because it just sounds like something

I'd do.

And Cuomo... Cuomo is famously unpleasant.

He reportedly has a do not yell at list, which a former aide apparently admitted

is very small.

And just this week, a different former aide accused him of sexual harassment, a

claim that he denies, although on the same day that story broke, Cuomo was at

a vaccination site and couldn't help himself from joking about vaccinating

this state senator.

I'm gonna be doing the vaccination.

I get to select the part of the anatomy where I do the vaccine.

Uh, and, um, you'll be surprised, or maybe not, when you see the part of the

anatomy that I pick. Is it his penis, Andrew?

Are you gonna vaccinate him in the penis?

Because to be honest, I would actually be surprised if you wanted to vaccinate

him in the penis. The vein is hard to find.

Practitioners generally recommend the non-dominant arm. And also, what the

fuck is wrong with you?

Even before the current scandals, there was something gross about Cuomo's glee

in his public adulation last year, from his constant appearances with his

brother on CNN, to him co-signing on the term Cuomosexuals, the only sexual

orientation, by the way, it is completely acceptable to discriminate

against, to the book that he published last October about the lessons he'd

learned from handling the still ongoing pandemic, which were presumably, one, do

press conferences, two, the end.

And those press conferences where Cuomo loved to ins... to insist on the

importance of facts now play a little differently after everything we've

learned, especially moments like this.

Follow the facts, they will show you the way.

A.J. Parkinson, that's what we've been doing in, uh, New York, following the

facts.

Anyway, the thing is, it's hard to follow the facts if the people in charge

of those facts are actively withholding them from you. As far as advice goes,

it's basically as useful as a bully saying, stop hitting yourself.

In both cases, yeah, I'd actually really like to. The thing is, some asshole

won't let me.

And you may have noticed that he was quoting someone there named A.J.

Parkinson, and that is something that he likes to do a lot.

Remember, textbooks say politicians lead and the people follow.

No, it is often the people who lead and the politicians who follow.

A.J. Parkinson.

A.J. Parkinson.

Great quote.

I respect elected officials who aren't typical politicians.

Don't pass the buck without passing the bucks.

A.J. Parkinson.

A.J. Parkinson.

A.J. Parkinson. A.J. Parkinson. A.J. Parkinson. A.J. Parkinson said that.

Now, if you're currently thinking, oh no.

Am I supposed to know who A.J. Parkinson is? Don't worry, he's not a famous

historical figure that you learned about in school, like Plato, or Jane Austen,

or James Joyce. Although in fairness, you didn't learn much about them either,

considering you didn't realize that that's actually Socrates, that's Emily

Dickinson, and that's T.S. Eliot. But the point is, it's actually completely

fine not to be familiar with A.J. Parkinson because...

he doesn't exist.

He's a completely made-up person, apparently by Cuomo's dad, former

governor and Kevin Spacey cosplayer, Mario Cuomo.

Now, he used to invoke the name of A.J. Parkinson as a kind of inside joke with

the press. And while that may have been charming at the time, the current Cuomo

doing it during a pandemic when virtually no one gets that it's a joke

is a pretty weird move.

If you're trying to lighten the mood, there are so many other real quotes you

could have gone with. For example, Nicki Minaj's tweet,

Hey, boys, what's your ball size?

Sure, not appropriate for the occasion, but at least she's a real person.

Oh, and quickly, for the record, Nicky, the answer is surprisingly decent-sized.

I call them the Hemsworth brothers because they look great and everyone's

surprised there's a third one.

And look...

Circulating fake quotes.

It's obviously not the worst thing Cuomo's done. That is becoming

increasingly clear.

But it does feel like a pretty apt metaphor for an administration that has

aggressively managed facts to fit its chosen reality.

And it actually brings to mind another insightful saying.

Andrew Cuomo is a colossal asshole.

It's from an excellent writer named T.J. Pimpernickel. And I'll tell you exactly

two things about T.J. Pimpernickel. One, he's a person I totally made up. And

two, he's also completely right about Andrew Cuomo.

And now, this.

And now, did Fox Business' Liz Clayman mention that she likes Peloton?

You know, if you just looked at Peloton, for example, I have one.

I love it. Just so, you know, I have a Peloton.

I love it, and I use it a lot. And I want to give you an anecdote here. I do

have a Peloton. I have a Peloton. Lucky enough to have a Peloton.

Liz Klayman has a Peloton, by the way. Of course she has a Peloton.

Let's look at Peloton stock.

It is popping right now. I am part of that community.

I have a Peloton. I got it for my birthday a couple of years ago. There I

am. That was my birthday present. My husband gave me a Peloton for my

birthday two years ago. Didn't you get a Peloton bike for Christmas last year?

Two years ago for my birthday. The stock is up 7.25%. I personally attribute it

to my favorite instructor, Cody.

I had my son take a picture of me taking, of course, my favorite Cody

Rigsby's class. Maybe one day I can sit next to Cody and do a little class once

this whole thing is over.

Yeah, I'm a fan. I love me some Jen Sherman.

And Cody.

And Hannah. In five to ten years, those Peloton machines are going to be sitting

in a garage and won't sell very well at the garage sale.

Uh, yeah, I don't know. I'm a big Peloton fan.

Moving on. Our main story tonight concerns policing.

It's one of TV's favorite subjects, from Hill Street Blues through Law & Order

through this.

Do you think the cops have too much...

Now, you're probably just currently shouting, what?

Increasingly loudly. So let me quickly explain. That is a scene from Cop Rock.

a very real musical cop show that premiered on ABC in 1990 and lasted

exactly 11 episodes. Think of it like if Pitch Perfect crashed into the wire and

there were absolutely no survivors.

Now, I'd say that was the best worst thing that I've ever seen on TV, but the

thing is, I have seen more cop rock.

There's a subplot about child selling, and if you're wondering, does the child

seller sing?

Yep. I'm the baby merchant.

Cots are us, I give you...

That song is three minutes long and they never do anything else. That couple just

stands there while a man informs them that he's the baby merchant for three

human minutes.

That show was on television in America.

But as long as we've been questioning on TV whether policing has, and I apologize

for even attempting this, racial overtones, we've made very little

progress towards actually addressing that issue. As we've discussed on this

show before, the past and present of policing in America is very much tied up

with racism.

And we want to focus on one area of policing in particular tonight, police

raids. It's a practice that attracted a lot of attention last year in the wake

of the Breonna Taylor.

She was killed after officers broke down her door in the middle of the night and

fired 32 shots into her home. A year later, none of these officers have been

indicted for charges relating to her death. And if it is somehow nobody's

fault that an innocent woman was killed in the middle of the night in her own

home, there might be an issue with police raids.

Now, data on them is pretty scarce, so it is hard to say exactly how many take

place in America, but estimates put it in the tens of thousands per year.

And they can be carried out by almost anyone in law enforcement, from federal

agents to SWAT teams within police departments to detectives and patrol

officers. While these tactics were initially intended for life or death

scenarios, like active shooters or hostage situations, one analysis found

that only 7% of SWAT deployments met that criteria, while more than 60% of

the cases involved searches for drugs.

And that shift was the result of intentional policy choices.

Police raids were supercharged by the war on drugs, and the tactic became so

popular that Geraldo Rivera even produced a special where he showed you

raids happen in real time.

This is real life. The first in a series of raids we'll be showing you this

evening. In this one, members of the San Diego, California Police Department are

raiding a so-called crack house.

where pushers sell cocaine to people in this neighborhood.

For the past six months, we have covered the street cops whose job it is to rip

and tear and pound their way into the nation's crack houses and shooting

galleries. And we have gone undercover to expose the pushers who profit from

this dirty business.

Wow. They all seem to be having a lot of fun there, from the officer's mad dash,

like it's Black Friday and Walmart has a sale on marijuana, to Geraldo's

ridiculous disguise, which looks like the Pringles guy auditioning for Miami

Vice. Although I will say, that is still better than his current look, which

answers the question, what if every single Batman Joker were rolled into

one? And raids can obviously have dire consequences.

A Times investigation found that from 2010 to 2016, at least 81 civilians were

killed in them. And these tactics are rarely proportional to the alleged

crimes being targeted. In Louisville, Breonna Taylor's home, a year and a half

before the raid that killed her, this happened.

This police body camera video shows LMPD SWAT officers breaking into Doherty and

Burr's house on West Chestnut Street.

The couple and their three children, who were under the age of 16 at the time,

claimed they were held at gunpoint the morning of October 26, 2018.

17 SWAT officers burst in because a detective smelled marijuana coming from

the family's home.

He smelled marijuana?

Come on!

If you just smell marijuana, you don't show up with loaded assault rifles like

you're in Call of Duty.

You show up with settlers of Catan and $50 worth of cookies from Subway. Don't

be such fucking squares.

And the thing is, absurdly disproportionate and dangerous responses

are basically par for the course when it comes to police raids. So tonight, let's

talk about them. Why they are such a favored tool of police, why they really

shouldn't be, and what we should do about that. And let's start with what

you probably know already, which is that not all of us are at equal danger of

being raided.

When CBS 2 in Chicago did an investigation of several years' worth of

search warrants, they found that certain neighborhoods tended to be hit a lot

more often than others. Englewood had 872 search warrants.

Also in the top five neighborhoods are Austin with 668, North Lawndale, 455,

Garfield Park, 442, and Humboldt Park with 376.

Census data shows these neighborhoods are all nearly 90% or more Black and

Latino. We found only a small percentage happen in white neighborhoods, and none

listed for Edison Park, Printers Row, Wrigleyville, Museum Campus, and

Magnificent Mile. Yeah.

That's about as fucked as you'd expect.

Although I will say, you didn't actually have to tell me that those neighborhoods

are predominantly white because Edison Park, Museum Campus, and Magnificent

Mile are some of the whitest sounding place names I've ever heard. Right up

there with Alabaster Prim, SPF 50ville, and Vermont.

And that racial disparity has been found again and again.

In Louisville, an examination found search warrants disproportionately

targeted black residents. And a study of one year of warrants in Washington, D.C.

found they were almost exclusively executed in black communities.

And police have been given tools to carry out those warrants with increasing

force. Police departments have become heavily militarized after either

purchasing or just being handed military equipment.

And some don't even try to hide how much they enjoy using it. Just listen to...

So this officer introduced one of his toys in a career day livestream for

kids. We call this the Big Bad Wolf, because with enough force, I can take

this ram on the front of this vehicle, and I can put it against a brick house,

and I can go right through that brick, and I can come right in your house if I

need to.

Not your house, because all of you are good kids.

We only do it for the bad kids.

Oh, you do, do you?

Well, that's reassuring. We've certainly got no reason not to trust you to

determine who's a good kid and a bad kid. You're just a nice, talkative guy

who apparently roots for the wolf in the story of the three little pigs.

If only the wolf had possessed military-grade equipment, you say, as

you tuck your children in at night. Fortunately, your godlike father has no

such limitations on his powers.

Sleep tight, good kids.

Now, there are important questions over whether or not police officers really

need access to that kind of equipment, just as there are questions over what

messages they take away from some of the training they receive.

Take a look at one particularly extreme exercise for SWAT team members.

The cult leader realizes that they got an armored vehicle gonna start. He goes,

okay, let's pull the trigger, sends out the RPG, and then they start executing

people. Oh, my God.

It's really a mass suicide, but in fact, it's really a murder-suicide.

None of the scenarios we saw left much room for non-violent solutions.

And then back in here, the cult leader is basically systematically executing

babies. Show me your hands! Show me your hands! When the amount of hours you

spend at the shooting range outnumber the number of hours you spend learning

conflict resolution, and by, you know, 10 or 15 to 1, you're gonna be more

likely to use the tool that you've trained more with. Yeah!

No shit!

Because look, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be prepared for cult leader

baby murder, but how many cult leader baby murders do they think they're going

to be called to every year? I don't know what you're thinking here, but John, if

there is a baby murder cult, how are we going to replace all those babies? Well,

don't worry. I'm pretty sure I know a guy who can help.

I'm the baby merchant.

Cats are us.

Seriously. It's three minutes long. It's so weird. I'm not saying you should seek

it out. I'm just saying you do need to know that it exists.

Now, the obvious danger of fostering a militarized police culture that trains

and equips officers like they're the lead in an action movie is that it can

encourage them to then act that way.

Take a look at a raid that took place in Little Rock. Here, the police blow open

the door of the apartment belonging to a man named Roderick Talley because they

falsely believed he was selling cocaine. But despite not finding any, when they

realized he had a home security camera, they asked him, while he was still

cuffed to a chair, if they could rewatch the footage of their raid so they could

see how it looked.

That's awesome. I'm going to record that real quick.

That was

worth coming to work for. One more time?

We ain't laughing at you.

Don't worry.

We're not laughing at you. We're just high-fiving ourselves for how cool it

looked when we blew your door in. But you get it. You were there. By the way,

thanks for being such a good sport about this, even though we do all have guns,

so you kind of have to be. This job is fun.

And police might point to the fact that they don't just use guns, they also have

supposedly non-lethal tools at their disposal. But even then, there can be

issues. Take flashbang grenades.

In theory, they just stun and disorient people, but they can generate heat in

excess of 2,000 degrees.

So you'd hope officers would be really careful with them. Certainly, a lot more

careful than this.

We heard a loud...

a loud noise which was, um, busting through the door.

Then came a flash grenade right into the two-year-old's bed.

You can see by this picture how badly it was damaged.

And I kept begging the officer, you know, give me my son.

Just let me hold him. He's scared. He needs me.

The officer told me to shut up and go sit down. Police were looking for drugs

but found nothing. Yeah.

The police threw a flashbang grenade into a crib.

And look, I'm no policeman.

I haven't studied all the bylaws, I don't have a PhD in grenadeology, but

purely as a layperson, the police should not have thrown that fucking grenade

into a fucking crib. And if the police are truly incapable of knowing whether

they're throwing a grenade into a crib, maybe they shouldn't have fucking

grenades. Here's another quick rule that applies to both horseshoes and hand

grenades. If you throw either of them into a crib, even one time, guess what?

You don't get to play with them anymore.

Now, thankfully, that couple's baby survived.

But it is hard to believe the police didn't realize there were children in

the house, given that the family had lived at that address for two months,

and there was a minivan with four car seats in the driveway.

And when they did find the man that they were actually looking for at a different

house, he surrendered peacefully when officers knocked on his door. So in

hindsight, grenading a baby might not have been necessary.

And again, they were looking for drugs. And again, they didn't find what they

were looking for.

This happens all the time.

And troublingly, police don't have to work very hard to get a warrant to blow

someone's door open.

Judges have to sign off on warrants, and ideally, they would function as a check

here. But in practice...

they often don't spend much time scrutinizing police justification.

An investigation in Utah of more than 10,000 electronically submitted warrants

found that half the time, judges approved warrants in less than three

minutes, with hundreds signed off in less than 30 seconds.

That is absurd.

Even the cases on Chrissy's Court were longer than 30 seconds, and it was a

show on Quibi, a platform we all collectively fever dreamed.

And the bar... for getting a judge to sign off on a search warrant is pretty

low. All you need is probable cause, or a reasonable belief that evidence of a

crime will be found in the place you want to search. And that belief can come

from anywhere, whether it's the smell of marijuana, or very often, the word of a

confidential informant who might be trading tips for money or leniency. And

a lot of those tips turn out to be complete bullshit.

To get the search warrant that led to the raid on Roderick Talley's home,

police told a judge that a confidential informant had bought cocaine from him

and that they'd observed the interaction.

But luckily, Talley had a doorbell cam that showed the informant walking up to

the door alone, standing there, and then walking away. And look, normally, I'm

not a big fan of doorbell cams. All they do is record me giving myself a five

-minute pep talk before I enter any party.

But in this instance, I'm really glad he had one.

And police have sometimes been caught making informants up, giving misleading

information in their warrants application, or failing to do even the

most basic checking to see if their suspect is actually in the home they're

raiding or somewhere else that they probably should have known about.

Jolanda Blassingame says it was utterly terrifying, Chicago police allegedly

breaking her door down in North Lawndale, pointing rifles at her

children in what's being called a colossal police blunder.

They did not bother to perform the simplest, most routine verification. The

target of the warrant, Mr. Bell, was at that time serving a 20-year prison

sentence.

for a murder conviction 200 miles away in Hill Correctional Center in

Galesburg, Illinois.

That's pretty embarrassing.

But I guess it's kind of like when you turn your home upside down looking for

your keys, only to discover they were in your pocket the whole time. Only in this

case, the keys are a man, the home isn't yours, and your pocket is a medium

security prison in another zip code.

So when you have bad police work on the front end and minimal judicial oversight

on the back end, it becomes far too easy to get a search warrant. And once police

have one...

there really aren't a lot of limits on what they can do. Just about every

search warrant gives officers permission to break down a door to conduct a

search. And I know there's a lot of talk right now specifically about no-knock

raids, but it's worth noting that the line between knock and no-knock is very,

very thin thanks to a series of court rulings like this.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today police do not have to wait more than 20

seconds before breaking into a drug suspect's home.

The unanimous ruling said waiting any longer would let suspects flush evidence

down the toilet.

Yeah. The ruling there was giving you 20 seconds to answer your door is

reasonable because you might flush evidence down the toilet, which does

raise the obvious question here.

Why the fuck are we raiding people's homes for an amount of evidence that can

be flushed away in 20 seconds?

Unless someone is accused of trafficking Smurfs or stealing the world's most

valuable goldfish, maybe we should be finding a different way to do this.

And police really aren't incentivized to give you any seconds to answer your

door. Because in 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that even when they violate the

rules requiring them to knock, announce, and wait, the prosecution can still use

the evidence obtained during that search. So there is often no meaningful

consequences to busting right through your door. And decisions like that mean

the distinction between a no-knock raid and a knock-and-announce raid is barely

there. As a judge in Georgia put it, either the door comes in and people are

yelling sheriff's office, or people yell sheriff's office and the door comes in.

And that is fundamentally the same.

It's like comparing Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain. Are they

different? Nominally, sure, although not in any way that really means anything.

Now, if you do actually need to tell them apart, Bryce Dallas Howard is the

one who looks slightly more like Jessica Chastain.

And on top of all of this, there is just case after case of the police messing up

the execution of a raid that ranged from the horrific to the almost cartoonishly

idiotic. Like this video of them looking for a suspected drug dealer, but

instead, raiding the home of his neighbor, Henri Norris, a 78-year-old

with heart problems who thankfully survived despite the police making one

mistake after another.

How did deputies end up hitting a house with a different color, a separate

driveway, its own mailbox, and another address?

First,

the tactical team got lost following instructions from a GPS app on a phone.

Then, as soon as they got to the correct address, deputies were immediately

confused.

They walked right past the target house without clearing it and headed through

the tree line to the next house on the street.

Even then, deputies were unsure.

Looking back and forth at the two houses, it was too late. The

entry team was already forcing its way into Henri's home.

For fuck's sake.

It is humiliating to watch a trained tactical unit outfitted with military

hardware get so completely stumped by the mystery of more than one house.

And you might be thinking, oh, come on, I'm sure that's just a one-off. But the

thing is, mistakes like that happen all the time.

It was a total nightmare for this family when cops burst into their home, which

turned out to be the wrong address.

That is the wrong apartment, and that is the one that the SWAT team went inside.

Sean and his wife, who both work full time, live here. The people the police

were looking for?

The DEA is apologizing for bursting into the Rink family home with the Bradley

County SWAT team, only later finding out that it was the wrong home.

That's not a mistake to make. Like you have, I mean, hell, you could have

looked at the mailbox.

Yeah, exactly.

And the police hitting the wrong address is just completely unacceptable when the

stakes are so high.

Even Edible Arrangements manages to deliver to the correct address, and that

business is just pure chaotic evil.

Happy anniversary.

Please enjoy this flavorless crucified melon.

Now, amazingly, there often aren't consequences for cases like those.

Officers are rarely criminally charged and even more rarely convicted.

Botched raids usually aren't even investigated unless someone is killed,

the media gets involved, or there's a lawsuit.

And even when they happen, police officers are protected from civil

liability by the doctrine of qualified immunity.

As for their departments, they aren't even responsible for paying to repair a

broken front door or compensating residents for any other losses or

damages, even... even when they raid the wrong residence, which is just absurd.

Look, this is obviously incredibly dangerous, and not just for the people

whose homes are raided, for the police, too.

That same investigation that found 81 civilians have been killed in raids

found that 13 police officers had died as well, which really shouldn't be that

surprising. These raids are, by design, highly disorienting, and for the people

who are woken up in the middle of the night to the sounds of an armed

invasion, they have to make a split-second decision whether or not to

defend themselves.

That is something everyone can understand.

In Georgia, a Republican state senator got in trouble for saying if police

raided his home in a no-knock raid, he would shoot them dead.

And when he was pushed on that, he did not back down.

If somebody kicks down my door unannounced, they will meet with

resistance. I guarantee you.

But if it's law enforcement, they would be there. How am I supposed to know at 3

o'clock in the morning?

Somebody shows up in black outfits, they can say they're law enforcement, maybe

they're not, and they've got a gun pointed at me. What are you gonna do,

Dale? Yeah, Dale!

What are you gonna do?

Now, I know that guy looks like a bit of a belligerent asshole, but the thing is,

this country is full of belligerent assholes, and lots of them have guns.

And while it is easy for a white state senator to fantasize about himself, or

indeed, Dale... mounting a hypothetical armed resistance to a police raid for

those who actually do get raided. There are real consequences to those actions,

if not death, then serious criminal charges.

Just a few hours after Breonna Taylor was killed, her boyfriend, Kenneth

Walker, who believed the police were intruders, was charged with attempted

murder for firing his gun during the raid and allegedly injuring an officer

in the leg. Those charges were dropped, but only because he had national

attention and a good lawyer.

Meanwhile, 18-year-old Tyler Harrell was sentenced to 13 and a half years in

prison after he injured a police officer during a surprise drug raid at his home,

even though a jury found no proof that he knew he was shooting at police.

Lives are getting destroyed through police raids. And even if nobody gets

physically hurt, that does not mean that no damage is done.

Having your home violated is a traumatizing experience, often

exacerbated by how targets of raids are treated.

Take Anjanette Young, a social worker in Chicago whose home was raided and who

fought hard to get the body camera footage released to the public, even

though it's incredibly difficult to watch.

You see them running up to the apartment complex... with the battery ram in

their hand. It was so traumatic to hear the way...

The thing was hitting the door.

And it happened so fast, I didn't have time to put on clothes.

And she was right. They were in the wrong house.

We found they simply took the word of an informant who gave them Anjanette

Young's address.

The informant claimed a 23-year-old man who was a known felon had a gun and ammo

inside.

Yeah, it is. They broke into her home having done next to no due diligence and

handcuffed her completely naked before eventually throwing a blanket over her

while she was still handcuffed. And then they said, you don't have to shout.

Shouting is not the drastic measure.

being taken here, people shout for many reasons. Because they want peanuts,

because they don't want to get up, or just because the song told them to. When

you are handcuffed naked in your own home because the police screwed up a

search warrant, shouting should be in your fucking Miranda rights.

And when you treat people like that... It is clear you have no interest in

forging a healthy relationship with the community you're supposed to be serving.

Instead, the community has to live with the knowledge that no space is truly

secure from the threat of police violence.

That is a message that is received loud and clear from a very young age.

So, what do we do about this?

Well, I would argue that small changes just aren't gonna cut it here, because

yeah, it would be better.

if search warrants were harder to get and officers were required to verify

information from confidential informants and that we didn't give military grade

equipment to people who can't be trusted not to throw it into a fucking crib.

But that is just not nearly enough.

And even reforms that appear sweeping can be pretty limited. After Breonna

Taylor's death, no-knock warrants were banned in, among other places,

Louisville and Virginia, which initially sounds good. The thing is, as you've

seen tonight, the difference between no-knock and knock is basically no

difference at all.

And I'd argue that there's a big solution here that's actually staring us

right in the face, and that is stop doing drug raids.

Just stop it.

And if that sounds extreme... You might want to know, the former chairman of the

National Tactical Officers Association recommends that raids never be used to

serve narcotics warrants, saying, why would you run into a gunfight? You

definitely don't go in and risk your life for drugs.

And he's right.

Drug raids just have to stop.

And raids in general should only be used as a last resort to save lives that are

in immediate danger, because busting into someone's home is never gonna be

safe for anyone involved.

And right now, raids are being used far too widely and are destroying lives,

both for the individuals who are killed, injured, or traumatized, and all the

black and brown people who have no choice but to internalize the lessons of

that trauma.

They deserve the respect and consideration of a police force that's

supposed to protect them.

Not one that merely sees their lives as an opportunity for action movie cosplay,

a thrilling TV special, or the reenactment of a misremembered nursery

rhyme with a souped up fucking battering ram.

And maybe, just maybe, if we can do the right thing here and climb down from our

current wild overuse of raids, then, and only then, we'd have a police story

legitimately worth singing about.

That's our show. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next week. Good

night.

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