Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show” said policing in the United States doesn’t just consist of “bad apples” but is a “rotten tree” designed to exploit poor people.
After watching the footage of multiple police encounters when a “human being is being treated like trash,” Noah said he’s not convinced there are “good apples” willing to stand up to the law enforcement officers who use “chokeholds,” “excessive force,” and “violence in their words and their actions to the people they’re meant to be protecting and serving.”
“If we’re meant to believe that the police system in America, the system of policing itself, is not fundamentally broken, then we would need to see good apples,” Noah said. “And by the way, I’m not saying that there are no good policemen, don’t get me wrong. I’m asking where the good apples are, and what I mean by that is where are the cops who are stopping the cop from putting their knee on George Floyd’s neck?”
“We’re not dealing with bad apples, we’re dealing with a rotten tree.”
Trevor addresses Daunte Wright, Caron Nazario, and the system that protects bad cops. pic.twitter.com/4nBk7QYWEg
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 14, 2021
Noah bypassed the fact that corporate media tends to report on the bad cop narrative far more than highlighting good officers to instead complain that police don’t seem to have the same reaction to killings that black communities do.
“It’s funny how we live in a society where people who will defend these cops at all costs will say, ‘Oh, black on black crime’ and ‘You see these people in their communities, they don’t care,’ but go to any disenfranchised community in America and you will find people marching against that same crime,” Noah said, noting that many of them will call 911. “But I don’t seem to see that with the cops. We don’t see a mass uprising of police say, ‘Let’s root out these people.’ We don’t see videos of police officers stopping the other cop from pushing an old man at a Black Lives Matter protest or from beating up a kid in the street with a baton. We don’t see that.”
This lack of reaction, Noah believes, isn’t because there aren’t “good people in the police force,” but because it goes against what he says is the design of their jobs: to suppress poor people.
“The system in policing is doing exactly what it’s meant to do in America, and that is to keep poor people in their place. Who happens to be the most poor people in America? Black people,” Noah said.
This system, Noah said, monetizes black people by imprisoning them. The “tree that was planted is bearing the fruit that it was intended to,” he continued.
“It’s a system, not broken. It’s working the way it’s designed to work,” Noah said. “And once you realize that, I feel like you get to a place where you go, ‘Oh, we’re not dealing with bad apples. We’re dealing with a rotten tree that happens to grow good apples.’”
