(Grady Judd mentioned at 6:09 & 26:38 in the video.)
John Oliver’s recent Last Week Tonight segment on police stings brought national attention to something many of us in Florida already know too well: these operations are often more about spectacle than safety. In the March 23 episode, Oliver specifically called out Sheriff Grady Judd’s highly publicized sting operations, arguing that police departments have become “addicted to stings” that manufacture crime while doing little to address the actual conditions that make people vulnerable in the first place.
A few months ago, I wrote about Judd’s dangerous raids targeting mostly migrant women and the carceral saviorism surrounding them. In John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, he critiques and lays out how police departments are seldom addressing the violence in our communities, and instead are entraping people, manufacturing crime, and perpetuating carceralism, prison-pipelines, and violence against civilians.
The contradiction becomes even more horrifying in light of a lawsuit against Judd’s department highlighted in Oliver’s segment. At just 13 years old, after reporting years of sexual abuse by her adoptive father, Taylor Cadle was accused of lying by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and forced to write an apology letter to the very man who was abusing her. Rather than protecting a child survivor, the department criminalized her and sent her back into harm’s way, forcing her to gather the evidence that eventually led to her abuser’s 17-year prison sentence. A department that dedicates enormous resources to highly publicized sting operations and media spectacle failed a child survivor seeking help from sexual abuse in her own home.
What Oliver’s segment makes clear is that many of these operations are not about responding to existing harm. They are about creating opportunities for arrest. Whether through vice stings, drug stings, immigration raids, or undercover “rescue” operations, police departments often manufacture the conditions for criminal charges rather than investing in the material needs that actually reduce violence.
The United States continues to maintain one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with roughly 1.8 million people incarcerated in prisons and jails on any given day, a systemic harm that has devastated poor, Black, brown, disabled, immigrant, sex worker, and otherwise marginalized communities. On top of that, police kill around 1,000 to 1,300 people each year, making encounters with law enforcement especially deadly.
Study after study has shown that stable housing, economic support, healthcare access, and community-based violence interruption programs are more effective at reducing harm than punitive policing alone. Communities facing poverty, housing insecurity, and lack of access to care are more likely to experience interpersonal violence and state violence alike.
For many marginalized people, policing causes more harm than good, punishing survivors and communities instead of protecting them. Real safety comes from addressing the root causes of harm: supporting survivors, providing basic needs and protections, and investing in communities. Until that happens, policing will continue to punish the vulnerable while leaving many of the real dangers unchallenged…
