John Oliver on police gang databases: ‘Get rid of them’ | John Oliver

After an prolonged summer season vacation, John Oliver returned to his desk at Final Week Tonight to dissect US legislation enforcement’s overreliance on defective and unregulated gang databases. Such databases – as Oliver put it, “principally lists the police maintain of individuals they are saying are concerned in gangs” – have been used to justify quite a few deportations below the Trump administration, together with the deportation and detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian immigrant from Maryland whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) illegally deported as a consequence of what they later admitted was an “administrative error”.The deportation stemmed from a wrongful inclusion on a gang database – in 2019, officers apparently noticed Ábrego at a Residence Depot and filed a report that he belonged to a gang, based mostly on the truth that he wore a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with “rolls of cash protecting the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents” and that they “know such clothes to be indicative of the Hispanic gang tradition”.In response to the report, “carrying the Chicago Bulls hat represents [that] they’re in good standing with the MS-13”. “Which is already slightly bit bizarre, as a result of it implies that one way or the other, if you happen to’re not updated in your month-to-month MS-13 dues, your Bulls hat privileges get revoked,” Oliver joked.The officer who filed that report additionally cited an nameless tip that Ábrego was a member of MS-13; the officer was additionally suspended per week later for unrelated misconduct and finally fired. “However, that gang allegation meant that Ábrego García was denied bond and spent months locked up in Ice detention,” Oliver defined, an consequence that was “ridiculous. An individual’s clothes shouldn’t be standards for locking them up for eight months. As everyone knows, the worst consequence of trend decisions must be getting roasted by teenagers on TikTok.”Ábrego’s saga is one in all many tales that convey the federal government’s use of so-called “gang databases” into query. Across the nation, many native and state police departments maintain these databases, usually with out disclosing them, regardless of investigations discovering them to be “notoriously inconsistent and opaque”, “riddled with questionable entries and errors” and “rife with unreliable intelligence”, to cite a number of stories cited by Oliver.On the subject of what constitutes a “gang”, there’s “loads of variability right here”, mentioned Oliver. “Not all gang members could even be engaged in crime.” As one researcher put it: “Not all gang members are criminals, and never all criminals are gang members.”“Sadly, none of that nuance is on show in these databases,” mentioned Oliver, and none of those lists have oversight from some other department of presidency or different legislation enforcement. The factors for inclusion are police observations and “self-admissions”, which principally means, in accordance with Oliver, “We discovered one thing in your social media that we determined constitutes you admitting that you simply’re in a gang.”That would embody posts with the phrase “gang”, similar to a publish from a teen with the caption “completely happy birthday, gang”, added to a database on the grounds of self-admission. “And if the bar is that low, something is principally a confession,” mentioned Oliver. “A pic of you holding a diploma with the caption ‘killed it?’ Congratulations, grad, however now you’re needed for homicide.“And whereas up to now I’ve been saying anybody may be added to those lists, those that find yourself on them are closely folks of colour,” he continued. At one level, Washington DC’s database had just one white individual on its checklist. “Have you learnt how few lists there are with just one white man on them?” Oliver joked. “It’s principally this database and the forged of Hamilton. That’s it.”Additions may also be motivated by spite; in 2020, a cop in Phoenix registered 17 Black Lives Matter protesters as “ACAB gang members” in retaliation.Most states additionally don’t require states to inform folks in the event that they put them on a gang database. “And on the subject of immigrants, the designation of gang member may be really life-altering,” mentioned Oliver. “It may be the explanation that somebody is denied varied pathways to stay within the US, and it may make somebody a better precedence for deportation and the goal of a raid.”Oliver relayed the story of a Hispanic teen in Lengthy Island named Alex who was added to a gang database by a faculty useful resource officer after he was seen carrying brilliant blue sneakers, which college safety guards advised him was related to the gang MS-13. He had additionally doodled “504” on his backpack, which is the nation code for Honduras, his nation of origin. A couple of months later, Ice brokers arrested him, saying they heard he was a gang member, and finally deported him.When a police commissioner in Alex’s county was requested why he felt native legislation enforcement wanted to associate with Ice, he answered: “If we’ve intelligence that they’re a gang member, that’s not essentially against the law … The intel that we’ve could not point out a state crime. The intel could also be small on them, however nothing that’s going to maintain them in jail. So if we understand somebody as a public security risk, we make the most of all of our instruments, which once more consists of immigration instruments, so we’ll associate with the Division of Homeland Safety to focus on them for detention.”Oliver fumed in response: “If somebody is in your checklist of massive unhealthy criminals, and you’ll’t discover any massive unhealthy crime to arrest them for, that implies the difficulty is perhaps your fucking checklist.“It’s fairly clear that gang databases are method too simple to get on, method too onerous to get off, and may flip folks’s lives the other way up,” he added. “So what will we do? Properly, I’d argue we do away with them. And if you happen to suppose, ‘Properly, maintain on, how will police then cease gang violence?’ I’d say, with police work. They may and may do precise police work specializing in the place violence is concentrated, as a substitute of fixating on labels.“I’m not saying that violence related to gangs isn’t actual or isn’t an issue,” he concluded. “I’m simply saying the reply must transcend policing and method past these databases.”