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Jeff Ross BPD roast cooks the facts BY JAMARHL CRAWFORD @BLACKSTONIAN
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Earlier this month, Comedy Central aired a special called “Jeff Ross Roasts Cops,” hosted by the Roast Master General himself, Jeff Ross. Ross is a comedian extraordinaire who is known for lowbrow, crude, sarcastic, biting humor. He’s also known to be particularly brutal during his infamous roasts, as it should be in the tradition of the Friars Club, Don Rickles, and other showbiz legends. I like a joke as much as the next guy, and my own humor is often very crude. Among my favorites: Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Andrew Dice Clay, and George Carlin—trust me, I’m no puritanical prude. What’s not funny to me, however, is when a public institution—in this case, a city police department—essentially participates in a roast of the people it is supposed to serve. Are they laughing with you? Or at you? As advertised, the BPD roast was chock full of good ole boy knee-slappers. A sampling: African-American cop, that’s never an easy thing ... it’s like being a Mexican border patrol agent.
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I call my penis Rodney King because I beat it so much … And just like the LAPD… I always get off. Six cops starin’ at me … now I know what it feels like to be a black kid walking home from school. I have a theory why cops love donuts so much… because they look like they’ve been shot.
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At first glance these may seem like predictable bush league cop jokes. However, the underlying punchlines all accept and acknowledge oppression as par for the course. Cop-meets-donut joke? Donut hole shot in it? Chocolate donut? Hardy-Har-Har. This is particularly not funny in Boston, where the majority of people shot by the police are Black & Latino (unlike the national trends), combined with the fact that police are rarely, if ever found guilty of any wrongdoing or prosecuted. There is also the ever-present BPD-as-good-guys narrative. BPD Commissioner William Evans proudly proclaims: “We got the best department in the country and they get it and they understand it is so important to earn the trust and the respect of the people that we police … I don’t think anyone does it better than the BPD … we are the model … President Obama recognized us as one of the top in the country.” Adds Ross: “I put it out there that I wanted to roast a major city police force and they all said no. Except one. Boston. Because you got balls. And you’ve got a good reputation. There has not been an unarmed person shot here in 25 years.” Ross is correct. It does take major balls to promote such a blatant lie. I can’t blame him; after all, he’s only a comedian, not a criminologist. Rather, I blame the the City of Boston and its police department, one or both of which apparently colluded with producers from Comedy Central. Whatever the origin, the result was that misinformation was intentionally broadcast to a significantly large cable audience. In fact, excluding all controversial cases in question, there are at least four glaring cases in the past 25 years where the victims were innocent and unarmed and killed by Boston police. SPIN MASTERS continued on pg. 12