Crime Reporting: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I'm very disappointed that the amount of free drugs I've been given in my life is far less than what I've been promised on the news.

I was struck from jury duty a few months ago because I was the only one in the room who said I was skeptical of police and that they don't always tell the truth. I didn't really want to be selected but it seems pretty ridiculous and blatantly biased that someone not blindly believing police is an automatic disqualifier for jurors.

"your kids' halloween candy is fentanol" is the new "your kids' halloween candy is full of razor blades". The more things change, the more they stay the same

As a fresh producer at a very local station, seeing these criticism on news makes me double check my work and sources and double back on criminal stories for updates

The Internet Historian did a couple of videos on the AMAZING story behind balloon boy. Basically, due to the police falsely accusing the father, he had to plead guilty, because they were threatening to deport his wife and losing his kids. At any rate, seek out those videos he did. He even interviewed the dad. It's a really sad story and makes you pissed at the police department in that town.

I paid a ticket once, and the department didn’t log that I paid it correctly, so they issued a warrant, arrested me, and booked me, only to release me nearly 3 hours later. Even though you could see online that my “charges were entered in error”, my picture was still in the JailBirds paper. 🙃
I will pay my tickets online in the future. I wish there was some recourse for this and the public embarrassment it caused me.

The house of a friend of mine was raided years ago. The local newspaper's headline read: "Hard hit to the narco in our city" and the article indicated that 20kg of marijuana had been seized. We were flabbergasted. I mean, we knew he smoked regularly but 20kg (44 lbs) is a huge amount even for the most enthusiastic pothead. Turns out the police had weighted the marijuana while still on the plant... flowerpot and soil included.

Just so y’all know Pat Collins is a legend in the DC area every news story he does no matter how serious is hilarious

If you report about someone being accused of a crime there should be a legal mandate to publish a follow-up/correction if found innocent or not even charged.

Respect 🙏 for that fantastic woman journalist who actually reported the truth of the horrific incident and schooled that that child "journalist "

My mother-in-law brought up drugs being in our kid's candy the other day, and both my husband and I were like, "drugs are too expensive to be giving them out to kids"

Thank you so much for covering this very important issue. You're all doing a great job, LWT-Team.
Would you please consider bringing back the official subtitles? It's a great help for people with hearing impairments and foreign speakers.
My country doesn't have HBO, so I rely on KRclip. But we do have a lot of similar problems and I'm so happy to be able to watch these segments. A lot of them are internationally relevant anyways.

There was an amber alert for a girl named Savannah Graziano that went out in my area of Los Angeles not too long ago; I remember being shocked and horrified about how close she would have been when she was kidnapped, so I tried to follow the story to see if she was safe.
Not even 24 hours later it came out that not only did the police shoot and kill the young girl when she was attempting to escape her kidnapper, they then proceeded to claim she was shooting at them and so they shot her multiple times in “self defense” (unsurprisingly, she didn’t have a weapon at all). They are so corrupt that they are actively trying to blame the child they were supposed to save for her own murder.
And when you search for news stories about the incident, almost all of them describe the false report the police put out. It’s fucking disgusting.

When I was in middle school I'd see the local news and it seemed like every story was about a black person committing a crime. I was terrified of our house being broken into all the time. I lived in a very small town where a lot of people didn't even lock their doors. News can absolutely fuel fear and racism. Too bad everything in this country is supposed to maximize profits instead of providing a honest public service.

I used to work in a coffee shop, and a cop used to ask one of the female baristas to write things like "sensitive bitch" on his cup. It was a really awkward and creepy situation. Eventually, she started hiding in the back whenever he came in. Thankfully, he stopped coming, but he held such power over her by virtue of being a policeman. She was afraid if she told him no, he could make her life absolutely miserable.

Pat Collins has been an absolute national treasure for The DMV. He pulls no punches and tells everything like it is!

I would love to see a companion series that just focused on the after effects of LWT’s stories. This show is making serious impacts.

Thank you John Oliver for continuing to be a voice (a very acerbic and funny one at that) for critical thinking, something that is becoming increasingly rare in our society.

I'm a retired attorney. When I first started 30 years ago I did criminal cases to gain trial experience. One of the cases I got was of an Asian man arrested for drunk driving.
The cop testified that he pulled over the defendant because he had swerved over the yellow line several times. When stopped, the defendant smelled alcohol on the defendant's breath so he gave him a field sobriety test. He also testified that defendant had stopped his car under a street light and that visibility was very good. He did a field sobriety test which defendant failed. Defendant had refused the breathalyzer test at the station. These things were all in his report, except for driving over the yellow line repeatedly (the reported stated only once). The cop went on to testify which wasn't in his report that defendant had slurred speech and fell down during the encounter. (Sounds pretty convincing.)
My turn. I introduce defendant's medical records that he was in a car accident the previous week and had a broken foot. He was physically unable to do the "walk a line" test, but cop never saw a cast on his foot. The police report said the car was brown, in reality it was green. Defendant's wife worked at the police department and he claimed he argued with the cop about going to the station because he knew that once taken there, even if he passed the breathalyzer, the police will not take you back to your car and he didn't want to be stranded miles away from home. He also believed he had passed the test, touching his nose, counting backwards, and thought he would be released so he refused the breathalyzer. He argued with the cop about this for several minutes he said and gave the reason of not being driven back to his car which he knew because his wife worked there. About details not in the report, I asked the cop what he did the day before / after arresting defendant. He couldn't remember if he even had worked. Asked how many people he had arrested since arresting my client, he said hundreds. Asked if defendant told him that his wife worked at the station doing prisoner intake, said he didn't know her. When she got up to testify she waved to the cop and called him by name, to which he responded back calling her name.
I thought I had provided enough evidence to show there was doubt about my client's guilt. It took the jury only 20 minutes to convict him. So remember this, once you are arrested you basically already guilty. No jury in the US will not believe a cop regardless of the evidence otherwise.

My hat is off to the thousands of journalists in this country who maintain journalistic integrity at the undeserved peril of losing their jobs for the sake of viewership and money. May you ascend to editorship and beyond. Yours is the reason we have a semblance of fair democracy left in this country. Godspeed!

This is so eye opening to me cuz in journalism school you really are taught to find crime stories through police press releases. I myself am complete distrustful of police but for some reason, never thought to question their press releases when quoting them for a story

John Oliver is great. I appreciate how after all the doom and gloom, he always gives ways to change things. Keep up the good work, Last Week Tonight! ❤

You can always tell how much news a person watches by how fearful they are. We haven’t had television since 1999 and only read newspapers. While newspaper reporting isn’t perfect, by any stretch, it is easier for me to keep a critical eye while reading than it is when watching. We have traveled extensively at times and have met many wonderful people but people doing nice things for each other doesn’t sell.

Also this is not perfect but in my country if someone is charged but hasn't been sentenced their name and face is censored. Sometimes it leads to funny situations like "Patric S. who is accused of killing his father Michael Smith has been arrested", but most of the time you won't guess the identity of the arrestee if you don't know them personally. Also quite unlikely that it will come up when your name is googled by a prospective employer. It genuinely baffles me when I read news stories with not only the face, name, but sometimes even street address of a suspect in UK media

I have lived in the Washington DC area for many years, and have had the pleasure of watching Pat Collins' unique style of reporting. He also handles reporting of more serious crimes, always with a touch of humanity. Thank you for introducing him to a national audience.

After graduating from college with a Mass Communications degree I was excited to get a job as a photographer at news station. After I had done the job for about 6 months I found myself in the newsroom one day waiting for an assignment and the News Director couldn't come up with any place to send me. He and the anchor were bemoaning a "slow news day" and the anchor said to, pretty much the whole newsroom: "What I wouldn't give for double homicide right now". After that I started to notice more comments like this and that ultimately led to me getting the hell out of there.

John Oliver is the only KRclip content that I don't watch at a higher speed. It's not just his rate of delivery... it's the paragon of brilliant, tightly written, expertly delivered, smartly edited content with great graphics work to boot.

I had a criminal charge thrown out of court against me because the cops broke into my mom's home. Their reasoning was that there was a medical emergency. There wasn't. They tried to get my brother and I for not opening the door for them.

Another way to convince them is to tell them this "This time it was someone else, what if the next time it's YOU who's falsely accused of a crime?"

For all the parents who may not know. I have a 6 year old daughter. I'm not worried about halloween. This is because literally no one is going to be giving their drugs away for free. I don't always think John give the whole story, but this is a solid piece of work.

In my country, those accused of or arrested for a craime cannot be shown or named in media - UNTIL they are convicted. It always baffles me how in the US, you can. It seems so common sense to not destroy any innocent lives!

I got in a (short) heated discussion with my coworkers once or twice about the fact that crime is statistically lower now and every time they angrily shut me down. I guess people believe what they want. Go ahead and keep your children huddled inside 24/7 because "there's a lot of sick people out there." It's important to be cautious but people take it WAY TOO FAR.

Thank you last week tonight team for showing that Subway in Layton UT - I lived about 3 minutes away from it when that story happened. They tried to charge a teenager who was saving up money for his LDS mission with drugging the officers and the teen worker settled with the city for thousands. The business owners tried to sue but failed because they lost a ton of business and other subways in the area had employees making comments about their location.

Absolutely vital issue. My parents watch daily news and I am constantly telling them to stop. They're terrified of me getting hit by crime in my perfectly safe apartment community.

I work in local news and it's ridiculous how excited some people in that news room are to report on crime.
Our city isn't even that bad, but if you work in news or watch our channel, you'll think it's all going down the toilet.
I will say though that I think a lot of stations know that their local police isn't telling the whole truth.
They also know that if they really push back they could lose them as a source, and since crime is the biggest thing in local news, that's a no go.
It's something I've struggled with being a videographer for the station and it's one of the things that's just confirmed for me that I need to get out of news for my own sake. 😆

Your videos are very good, and thank you for diminishing "bad words" in your show. I appreciate your intact sense of justice and righteousness. And you humour of course!

For fucks sake, how many decades have people been trying to scare parents into thinking evil people are putting shit in kids Halloween candy? When I was a kid they told us to check all of our candy for needles and razor blades... Drugs in candy is even dumber for all the reasons stated in the video.

Oh my God, that bit about football. 😂 I love it, I've been morally opposed to football for years after I learned about how common concussions and CTE are. People legit die for our entertainment or have their brains irreparably damaged. I know some do it for scholarships as well but there's got to be a better way...

I used to work for a tiny newspaper in rural Wisconsin and, shamefully, I succumbed to a lot of this. I blame the constant *need* for news in this country, because we always looked at it as "filling column inches"...because that's what our primary focus was. We needed to put out a news article *every week*, and so many things our publisher shot down as "not news." Police probable cause reports were some of the easiest stuff to write about. We just translated them from cop lingo to proper English, slapped them somewhere inside with a mugshot, and we could breathe for another week.

A young man in Colorado called police after his car got stuck, he said that Skinwalkers were after him. When police arrived he was locked in his car, frightened. Police tried to get him to exit the car, but he kept talking about Skinwalkers and telling the officers to be careful. He said he had a knife, and offered to throw it out the window, for some reason the officers told him not to do that. After a while they become impatient and started yelling, they broke out a window in the car. One stood one the hood with his gun pointing at the young man. Then they decided that he was a threat, while inside the closed car, armed with only a knife and opened fire. They feared for their lives, from a man who didn’t get out of the car. I don’t know where they had to be in such a hurry, why they couldn’t wait and maybe find another way. Perhaps tell him they were sending for an expert on Skinwalkers. The young man might be alive now, getting the help he needs, and his family would not be grieving. Too many police officers are so focused on power that they forget they are supposed to be helping.

That gal from Rising was an absolute QUEEN! We need more people in the news like her.

Cellphone cameras are the greatest invention ever.
Just imagine how many coverups cops have gotten away with over the ages.

My brother was arrested for pocession of a "quantity of marijuana" there was a broken bowl and some microscopic green material that might of been grass or weed at a friend's house when the cops illegally raided it without a search warrant. The charges were dismissed after the cop admitted on stand he lied. The lying, the illegal raid, the 10% bond I paid for him and never got back and the fact that they arrested him at work 6 months after the illegal raid, never made the news but his arrest did.

Working in journalism, this video is SO important.
There's something wrong with how we report news in the digital era. I highly advise all my friends to always check stories from outlets with different political affiliations and to read journals.
Journals are the only way of reading high quality and verified information today.

I've grown up in the DC area and Pat Collins is literally a treasure. He's so nice in person (I ran into him and fanboy'd multiple times in the Gaithersburg Costco) and such a great interviewer. Thank you for representing him!!

The news has literally turned into a 24 hour police report channel.

I think a very important point that is mentioned very early in the segment and shouldn't be overlooked: If you're watching and centered on the criminality around you, you begin to worry, fear, and think only about it. THis becomes even more impactful when you thnk about race in America and the coverage/%s mentioned in this segment. That being said, watching the news is more about ads than information and you'd be best served to think positively, impact your community, and love those you come into contact with.

I bust a gut laughing at the El Cheapo bust. These are kids who grew up playing cops and robbers and have waited their whole life to take a pic like that. Cop cosplayers. 🤣

An obvious way to remedy this situation is to remove the profit motive. Years ago the news was not considered a profit center and it was far more honest and informative. The only question is how to remove the profit motive and yet still have news. One way may be to prohibit ads during news programs while allowing tax write-offs for having news programs.

I once helped a patron find evidence that he was held and arrested by the county police. He needed proof to show their legal department because they were trying to gaslight him since the charges were dropped. They were outright saying he was never held and, by that logic, they didn't need to turn anything over. This was one of those times a mugshot in the newspaper was a good thing.
These were technically my coworkers gaslighting someone we are supposed to jointly serve in the community. That wasn't the first time I've helped a patron learn how to search for records and it wasn't the last time.

🔥🔥🔥This segment should be taught in broadcast journalism courses

My ex husband's name is Jim. It is not short for anything, but people always assume it is. Many important documents, even from government institutions, put him as "james" because an office worker must have taken it upon themselves to "correct" it on forms.
The Minneapolis reporter referred to the alleged crime as a "forgery", which is incorrect. It was a suspected counterfeit bill. Counterfeiting and forgery although similar, are two different things.

Hi John ! I would love if you could talk about the forced abduction from their family from "supposedly" mistreated children in the UK. In France, there have been a whole reporting on this matter for example.

Favourite "cop faking fast food hate crime" was the guy who's starbucks drink label said "PIG" and everyone quickly pointed out that the part of the label was specifically for the name you give yourself for an online order lmao

21:28 - he came *this* close. The bulk of that money wasn’t from fines, it was from civil asset forfeiture, literal highway robbery with a badge.

I was assaulted by a stranger outside of my building (New Orleans is just circling the drain.) A surveillance video from almost 200 yards away, and with a privacy fence in between, evidently didn’t match my story. “ I wasn’t running like I was almost raped.” Actually, they ran my name, saw my record ( just drug charges); all of a sudden I was trash. They kept me there for 14 hrs, lied to my mother and said I had left, and I was not given a drop of water or crumb to eat. Nothing like being attacked and then being cuffed.
I do not trust cops. Any of them, anywhere.

Love to see Pat Collins! He's a legend in DC and Maryland news. He was man about town and always cheeky in his stories and reporting about often overlooked injustices. Always looked at the human element to every situation.

Watching this as a brazilian person it's absolutely hilarious (in a very tragic way) how many blights in our society are imported straight from the US.

Never let the truth, people’s lives, or social harmony get in the way of a good story when you’ve got advertise a space to sell. And you’re not allowed to tell us to do better because it’s the free press.

Seeing that reporter shut down her ignorant cohost with stone cold logic was absolutely beautiful to see. What an absolute tool that guy was.

I’m so happy that everyone has phones and that body cams are being used by a lot of police departments. I’ve been beaten up by the police and was harassed by them for nearly four years until I moved. The main officer I had problems with was eventually fired for excessive use of force. But every time you tell friends or family they act like your crazy or say you must have done something to provoke being hit, what happened one time, and this was after the officer already knew where I lived. Someone new to the neighborhood saw me climbing through my window when I got locked out. I was going to be late for and didn’t want to call the landlord for fear they’d charge me to come open the door. Anyways they get a call of a possible breaking and entering. Officer asshole shows up and draw his gun on me, bear in mind he knew me, I’m not a violent person but I will argue with someone, anyways he’s knows where I live. He draws his gun with no reason to think I was actually breaking into my house, and I’ve never had an violent confrontation with any officer. So he commands me to place my hands ontop of my head turn around, I complied so I’m kneeled down hand on my head facing the other way. And I hear this fat fuck say to the other officer “cover me” he proceeds to run and tackle me from behind hurting my back and knocking the wind out of me. Luckily I didn’t have permanent injury I was 20 at the time but I was sore for weeks. I regret not filing a complaint but it was also 2008 and no one at that police department had body cams so he would have been able to explain it away.

That lady arguing in real time on air to push back the police story is a hero. That's so nerve-wracking to go off script on air like that. She knew it was more important than the teleprompter.

When I was on drugs it was 100$ a day minimum, I am just trying to imagine a kid trying to figure that hussle out in-between first grade.

Taking the police at their word after they are directly involved in the situation is a massive conflict of interest.

Someone give that women a raise and her own show!

I cannot believe these halloween drug scares are still going.
They should be required to hold a flashlight under their chin and use a spooky voice whenever they report that stuff.

Hey Chrissie, I also really enjoyed that joke. Keep up the good work! You're killin' it!

Holy shit… the only year people weren’t more scared of crime is the one year the news cycle was 100% dominated by stories about something unrelated to domestic crime

I like Jon Oliver's show a lot, but this one was really quite good. Great episode.

We need a national and state sentencing that routinely reviews police statements/ reports. Police lie and are rarely held accountable.

i work at a drug & alcohol rehab as a nurse. one day, four of our clients left treatment against medical advice (as a lot of times someone will leave and others who were considering it but hadn't made up their mind yet would decide to go with them so they can all get high together) and walked out on foot, stole two cars from a nearby store and went on a high-speed chase from police. the local news got the story solely from the police scanner radio they were listening to and wrote that they were patients at my facility without asking us or anyone else about it since the police had mentioned that we had called them on the radio. it made us look HORRIBLE and everyone in the comments were demanding to know why we would just let criminals leave, not understanding that we're not a lockdown facility and that we didn't purposely discharge them. what a mess!

Letting cops write their own press is like letting lobbyists write their own laws. No need to replace "police say" with "police claim." Save time by assuming they're making shit up from the gitgo.

Can you please do a story on what is currently happening in Iran? I love your show and I know my community would be super appreciative if we got some support and representation!

John Oliver has always given great insight into so many issues. The fact that he does this, even to this date is highly commendable. I shall always watch these videos!!

Pat Collins, Jim Vance, Doreen Gentzler, George Michael. Every news story I remember from whole childhood was narrated by one of them.

Investigative Journalism needs to make a comeback. Far too many times we see reporters parrot police statements as unquestionable fact, despite being proven that, a lot of times its bullshit.

What’s messed up is I’ve made this point many many years ago and no one believed me. And I knew Jon Oliver would eventually make an episode about it. And when I saw news reporting I knew this is what it would be about

This Vehicle Vandal reporter looks a lot like the reporter that wore the grape suit to defend the kid who dressed up as grapes and got suspended.
Edit: IT IS! Pat Collins. Real recognize real.

A lot of these "local news" channels belong to massive media conglomerates who's stakeholders are all too happy to not change their ways as long as they keep viewers engaged and riled up, but I do hope many conscious producers do try to make a change.

I actually agree with everything said here and love the way it was said. The media, in general, is too often used to "sway" public opinion rather than to simply inform it of actual facts. Too many times, the media was used against certain races, certain religions, certain governments or even public figures to showcase them under a specific light. The question that always comes to my mind is, who is truly responsible? Who gives these media and public news companies the directives and indications of what to talk about and how to talk about it. I've wondered this one thing so many times, but I don't think I'll ever find an answer.

It's so releaving to see that the media actually listened to John! The moment they realised that all their segments on #stopasinahate feature black assultants, media they suddently decided that posting mugshots serve no purpose and generally speaking crime reports are way too frequent segment :)
Big win fo us!

This reminds me of what happened to Richard Jule after he helped evacuate people after the bombing at the ‘96 Olympic in Atlanta. He was never arrested, the FBI had no evidence against him and were going solely off of their own assumptions and a newspaper printed as their big front page story that he was the main suspect. Even if he was the main focus of the FBI investigation at the time the journalist never reported the fact that law enforcement had literally zero grounds for an arrest and put this innocent man who was actually a selfless individual through the ringer and ruined his life.

Thank you for giving me additional material to show when I'm educating people in my community on truth vs myth of fentanyl!

As always a big round of applause for John Oliver‘s research department

know your constitutional rights, read your police dept's policies and be prepared to call out their policy infractions, request a supervisor as soon as you feel your rights might be violated, never answer questions, never perform field sobriety tests

I'm still amazed at the halloween stories. You guys getting drugs for free? In my city you don't even have to worry about getting your drink spiked in a club because no one willingly gives you their expensive drugs.

I love when the audience laughs 😂

Amen to all that. My biggest gripe is when news reporters not only repeat the narrative fed to them, but start using the jargon and letting it creep into all of their reporting. My favorite red flag is the use of the term "routine traffic stop". At that moment, I know the reporter has drunk the Kool-Aid.

I didn’t realize that drug dealers were so generous with just giving out their drugs! 😂

I use to work for a small town newspaper when one of our reporter's started doing a investigative story on the police department covering up a drunk driving accident involving a police officer. The police retaliated by making it as difficult as possible for the news paper to get the police blotter for that day. The reporter also was being followed by cops just to harass him

I remember hearing about the link between heavy TV viewing and fear of crime during Reagan's era.

This is all very true and definitely interesting to watch while reading "The New Jim Crow" but can we PLEASE talk about the Miss Piggy joke 🤣 I almost choked on my food 😭😭😭

I interned for this Juvenile Intensive Probation Program in college & it was sickening. The judge did whatever the arresting officer said to do & some of the POs joked about misbehaving kids being job security. 2006, I think.

Fantastic piece, John, absolutely fantastic. Thank you.

Give that woman at the end a trophy, and to be head of defending free press everywhere in this country.

Unfortunately a lot of this starts at journalism classes in college. I just graduated last year and I'm working as a journalist and I and other young journalists are so upset by the courses we had with exercises like "Take this police report and rewrite it into a news story, you have 5 minutes."

I laugh at how they try to always avoid saying "police killed so and so". How they often phrase it as neutral as possible like some magical gun happened to shoot without anybody holding it. I've even seen it phrased like "so and so died when struck by bullets during an arrest" like not even the gun itself was involved.

The number of people trying to get me hooked on drugs is significantly lower than I was led to believe by PSAs I saw when I was a kid. Of course, being a really, obviously nerdy kid probably helped. I doubt anybody ever looked at me and thought, "I bet that party girl is ready to get high!"

I've always loved the irrational belief that people give away expensive drugs for free

Excellent reporting John as usual!