John Oliver, who has been doing an excellent job filling in for Jon Stewart on the Daily Show this summer, covered this week's big federal ruling that the NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk is unconstitutional. He compared it to catch and release fishing ("Except you get to feel the fish up and shout out at it before throwing it back. Also, almost all the fish are brown."), and nailed the divide between those who are actually affected by the policy and everyone else: "For years opinion has been divided on stop-and-frisk, with Black and Latino residents of this city saying it's an invasion of their liberty, and white residents saying, 'Oh I think I heard a thing about that on NPR. Is that still happening?'"
Following a brief detour making fun of camera-loving Carlos Danger, Oliver focused on Mayor Bloomberg and Ray Kelly's reactions to the decision. After playing clips of various people describing their experiences being stopped and frisked, Oliver had a eureka moment, and tried to couch it in terms white people could understand: "You know how we feel at the airport, when the TSA is patting us down, unnecessarily delaying us, looking for weapons we obviously don't have?" he asked. "And we're just trying to get to our gate? Well, just imagine your entire neighborhood is Terminal B at LaGuardia, and the TSA agents sometimes talk to you like this: 'Um, boarding pass please and what the f*** are you looking at?'"
Senior correspondent Jessica Williams didn't think that stop-and-frisk was going far enough—so she headed to one of NYC's most crime-ridden neighborhoods to profile white men in suits: Wall Street, also known as White Bronx and Business Harlem. "It is a hard fact that white collar crime is disproportionately committed by people who fit a certain profile," Williams said. "So if you're a, say, white, Upper East Side billionaire with ties to the financial industry like Michael Bloomberg, you've just got to accept being roughed up by the police every once in a while."
