Focusing on the Throw-Away Lines

John Oliver was on this fire this week, and mostly, he was lambasting the press, particularly the local press, over the deference shown by the press, particularly at the local level. 

This is something that needs to be said, but I want to focus on something that he used as supporting data which he tossed out as self evident, and universally accepted truth, specifically that police departments are habitual liars.

I have the quotes below, and the full video at the end, and it reflects a very real change to John Oliver's, and one would help the general public's view of police.

This is a good thing.

Money quotes:

8:40:	It is why if you watch the TV news for any length of time you will undoubtedly hear one particular phrase ……… Yeah, "Police say," it's a phrase that you constantly hear from the mouths of news reporters it's right up there with this just in or back to you or I apologize for the accent I did on Cinco de Mayo.
14:50:	And this speaks to one of the major problems of deferring to police ……… Police, and they lie a lot as you've seen on this show.  They've lied to get search warrants to conduct raids and to get confessions uring interrogations and they even lie under oath so often in fact here in New York it came to be known as testi-lying.  All of which should be more than enough for the word of the police to be treated with immense skepticism rather than repeated verbatim.
15:25:	Take the notorious press release the Minneapolis Police put out following the murder of George Floyd titled, "Man dies after medical incident during police interaction."  What you may not know is it was picked up almost word for word by local news the next morning. ……… Now obviously, that is a hugely self-serving statement from the police because by saying George Floyd died because of medical distress their role was completely erased.  His medical distress, and I'm using the biggest air quotes humanly possible here was the result of an officer pressing his knee into his neck for nine minutes. Repeating that claim by the police is an act of malpractice against a Walter Cronkite saying, "JFK died of a headache today.   Sure, it's not technically wrong but it's the understatement of the f%$#ing century.

If juries start to take a realistic view of the testimony of law enforcement, prosecutors would not be able to convict John Dillinger of robbing banks.

The solution here is very simple though:  Just start prosecuting testa-liars for perjury.

Once there is a realistic fear of consequences for lying, cops will stop lying.