Trevor Noah opened his first Daily Show of the week on Monday with a powerful rebuke of the latest police killing of an unarmed Black man to shake the country over the past 24 hours. And he began by noting that the supposedly “accidental” shooting happened in the same city where the Derek Chauvin murder trial (over the killing of George Floyd) is now entering its third week.
“It says just about all you need to know that even as the trial is going on,” the host said, “protests are raging once again in Minneapolis over the killing of another unarmed Black man, Daunte Wright.”
After laying out the details of the shooting, in which the officer reportedly thought she was pulling her taser but “accidentally” grabbed her gun, Noah shot back, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
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“Is that even supposed to be a legitimate excuse?” he asked. And while he was not saying that “tragic mistakes will never happen,” Noah argued that “maybe if the police weren’t so quick to draw any weapon, then maybe people wouldn’t die because of a mix-up from Officer Urkel over here.”
From there, he pointed out how “amazing” it is that “cops think everything is a gun, except for their own gun.” They claim to see guns in place of cell phones and wallets, but their own gun is “not a gun.”
Later, Noah drew attention to the other case of police brutality, in which officers in Virginia pepper-sprayed a uniformed Army lieutenant during a traffic stop for no apparent reason, telling him he “should be scared” and that he was “fixing to ride the lightning.”
“This is fucked up!” the host said, echoing Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario. “And please don’t forget, this is how the cops treated one of the troops while he was wearing his uniform. Not a hoodie, not baggy pants, so what’s the excuse this time?”
“If a Black man in military uniform can’t get humane treatment from the police, then what chance does every other Black person in America have?” he asked. “But if you’re surprised that a member of the military is having his rights abused, then you need to understand that the police don’t give a shit.”
The “reason they don’t care,” Noah explained, “is because they know they’re going to get away with it. And until that changes, they are just going to keep not caring.”
