\n<\/p>\n
J<\/span>ohn Oliver opened the latest episode of Last Week Tonight infuriated by the ongoing US government shutdown, now in its fifth week, that has imperiled the US food assistance program millions depend on. \u201cTrump is going to have to own the consequences here,\u201d he said, \u201cand even as he continues to blame Democrats for this shutdown, he somehow manages to make the optics even worse.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the weekend, Donald Trump insisted \u201cit\u2019s all their fault,\u201d despite Republicans having control of both the House and the Senate. In their coverage, CNN cut to footage of Trump\u2019s Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, which an anchor described as a book \u201cabout rich people partying\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cNot only is that pretty insulting,\u201d said Oliver, \u201cI\u2019m guessing it\u2019s also pretty infuriating to whatever exhausted high-school freshman just wrote a 4,000-word essay about The Great Gatsby as a grim meditation on the dissolution of the American dream, only for CNN to tell him: \u2018You know what? It\u2019s really just a book about rich people partying.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAnd for what it\u2019s worth, the actual theme of that event was apparently, and I quote: \u2018A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.\u2019 And I guess that is true,\u201d he continued. \u201cAlthough it is also true that as we are all finding out right now, a Grand Old Party is capable of killing a whole lot of people, and unfortunately, they don\u2019t seem to give a single marble- and gold-encased shit about that.\u201d<\/p>\n Oliver then pivoted in his main segment to the danger of police chases, which is coming firmly into view. A recent investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle found that over a six-year period, at least 3,336 people died in police pursuits in the US, an average of nearly two a day. The majority of those killed weren\u2019t the fleeing drivers, and more than 500 were innocent bystanders.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd while fleeing drivers are usually depicted in movies and TV shows as violent criminals, in real life, that is rarely the case,\u201d said Oliver. A 2023 report found that 90% of pursuits were initiated by traffic violations.<\/p>\n \u201cThis combination of high-stakes chases over low-stakes infractions\u201d has resulted in tragic deaths, such as that of William Johnson in Georgia, who was killed while stopped at a red light by a car fleeing a police officer for a seatbelt violation. \u201cThat is absurd,\u201d Oliver fumed. \u201cThe whole point of a seatbelt law was to keep people safe on the road, so it\u2019s more than a little counter-productive to then enforce it by turning the road into a fucking Nascar track.\u201d<\/p>\n Oliver looked into the history of police chases, turbocharged by the 1994 chase of OJ Simpson that attracted 95 million viewers, ushering in a new era of police chases as entertainment. People still love watching them; just two years ago, Pluto TV launched a 24-hour police chase channel, \u201cwhich sounds about right, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d Oliver laughed. \u201cThe sentence: \u2018Pluto TV launched a 24-hour police chase channel is the exact type of depressingly accurate nonsense sentence that permeates our world right now. You know, like \u2018the Hawk Tuah girl was in the pilot of Chad Powers on Hulu,\u2019 or \u2018Jimmy Fallon and Malala did Bees in the Trap on TikTok.\u2019 If you said those words to me 20 years ago, I would\u2019ve thought I was having a stroke.\u201d<\/p>\n Depending on where you live, the policies governing police chases can vary widely \u2013 there are no national standards, so the 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the US set their own chase policies. Some only allow their officers to pursue chases for serious crimes, such as aggravated robbery or homicide; others have no requirements at all.<\/p>\n \u201cThe dangers you can face from police chases depend heavily on where you are,\u201d Oliver said, \u201cbut they can also depend on who you are, because unsurprisingly, some are more at risk than others.\u201d Black Americans, who make up about an eighth of the US population, make up more than a third of police chase fatalities, and more than a quarter of bystanders killed.<\/p>\n One thing is clear: police chases do not improve public safety. Researchers looking at the pendulum effect of policies in different localities that have tightened and then loosen chase restrictions, found that when the number of pursuits increased, the number of injuries and deaths did as well. \u201cAnd of course they did!\u201d Oliver exclaimed. \u201cIf you have more of one, you\u2019re going to have more of the other. It\u2019s like when the number of Ryan Murphy shows increased, so did the number of Sarah Paulson wigs. It\u2019s basic cause and effect.\u201d<\/p>\n And there\u2019s little incentive for police to change \u2013 even when officers flout policy on chases, leading to needless injury or death, they often avoid criminal charges or internal discipline, \u201cbut that probably shouldn\u2019t be surprising, given all the barriers to police accountability\u201d, said Oliver.<\/p>\n What can be done? Oliver argued that there were some \u201csimple steps\u201d to be taken, including strict national standards for how and when police can initiate a chase. On top of that, cities and states could pass laws that let individuals sue government officials for chase-related crashes.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething has to be done here, because the police\u2019s commitment to public safety shouldn\u2019t effectively end once they turn their sirens and lights on,\u201d he concluded. Because \u201cdespite what too many cops say and what film and TV have conditioned us to believe, the idea that high-speed pursuits are the only way to ensure public safety\u201d was \u201cabsolute bullshit\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Oliver opened the latest episode of Last Week Tonight infuriated by the ongoing US government shutdown, now in its fifth week, that has imperiled the US food assistance program millions depend on. \u201cTrump is going to have to own the consequences here,\u201d he said, \u201cand even as he continues to blame Democrats for this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[4652,1950,262,1899,1551,12720],"class_list":{"0":"post-32100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-chases","9":"tag-dangers","10":"tag-john","11":"tag-oliver","12":"tag-police","13":"tag-ubiquity"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}