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Wyatt Cenac’s observations on policing have never felt more timely or more powerful

The Dallas-raised comedian's HBO show 'Problem Areas' is now available for free.

Dallas-raised comedian Wyatt Cenac has spent his entire career blending droll humor with pointed social commentary. But his observations on the police have never felt more powerful.

In the spirit of timeliness, HBO has made the entire 10-episode first season of Cenac’s since-canceled Problem Areas (2018) available for free on YouTube. While the show covers lots of topics, each episode finds Cenac crisscrossing the country to interview cops and experts to find out what’s wrong with policing in America.

Problem Areas can be funny and satirical, yet Cenac digs deep into the policing topic just as a journalist would.

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There’s a lot to unpack about what’s wrong with policing and how to fix it. But “solutions aren’t going to come waiting for a president or Congress to do something,” he said on the show. “That’s what’s interesting to me, seeing how people are trying to figure it out.”

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Cenac, 44, moved to North Texas as a child after his father, a cab driver, was murdered during a robbery in New York City. A graduate of Jesuit College Preparatory School in Dallas, he never had any run-ins with police in Texas, although he was charged with inciting a riot in North Carolina after mouthing off to a cop while he was in college.

After working as a writer on King of the Hill, he gained fame in 2008 as a correspondent and writer on The Daily Show. We spoke with Cenac by phone from his home in New York.

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The interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.

Watching Problem Areas now, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and all that’s happened since then, it almost seems as if you had a crystal ball. How did you decide to focus on this topic?

I don’t know that I had a crystal ball. For so many Black and brown people in this country, these stories and this outrage has been longstanding, for generations. In the first and final episode, we talk about the sad inevitability that we know this will happen again.

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When I pitched the show, my thought was to spend a season talking about gun control, which seemed like a bigger thing in a national conversation. But I’ve got to give credit to HBO. As soon as I mentioned policing, they were like, “Do that.” I was excited to do it, but I was nervous. I thought it might be a herculean task, because police departments tend to be pretty skittish around camera crews, and we’re not, you know, 60 Minutes.

You show chilling footage of a police trainer who tells cops, “If you properly prepare yourself, killing is just not that big of a deal.” Later, an expert brings up the term “SWAT sexy” and the perception that assault rifles and military gear are cool. What does Problem Areas tell us about the violent side of policing?

It tells us that, in some ways, the police have always been incentivized to prioritize that “us versus them” warrior mentality. The cops have been beating up people since the very first police departments were formed in Boston. It’s built into the DNA.

[Pop culture] definitely plays a role. We took one season of the NBC show Chicago P.D. and counted cops shooting their guns over 100 times — not for the department, but just for the six main cops in this show.

It’s the idea that cops live in this hyper-violent world … and yet, when they kill somebody, we never see them deal with the consequences. We just go to a commercial.

That definitely plays a role in not only how society sees cops, but how cops see themselves.

How does mental illness figure into this story? You focus on the 2014 Dallas killing of Jason Harrison, who was experiencing a schizophrenic episode when his mom called 911 and specifically asked for officers with mental illness training. (Two officers demanded Harrison drop a small screwdriver he was holding, and when he didn’t, they shot him five times. Both were cleared in the killing.)

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Mental health intersects the issue in so many ways. There’s a high number of police officer interactions with people in mental health distress, but they’re not properly equipped to interact, so they use force as their tool. Other mental resources could be more helpful, but they aren’t funded as well as things like law enforcement are.

Also, police officers might need mental health counseling themselves, but they don’t seek it because they’ve been taught it’s a weakness and they should just tough it out. You hear people talk about Blue Lives Matter and how many police officers have been killed in a year. What they don’t say is how many officers actually took their own life.

(Editor’s note: In 2019, 228 current or former officers died by suicide, according to Blue H.E.L.P., an organization working to reduce stigma about mental health issues among police. By comparison, 89 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2019, according to FBI statistics).

The killing of George Floyd has touched off a global discussion on racism and policing that didn’t occur after previous police killings. Why do you think that is?

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I honestly don’t know. That’s a question to ask white people. But I hope this moment is a catalyst similar to the ’60s, where there was momentum to try to enact serious changes. Hopefully, this time, it goes further than what happened in the ’60s.

You lost your dad to gun violence. Is there any way of describing how that’s affected your life and career?

It’s huge. In many ways, it’s inescapable. I lost my father at 4, and I have just tiny pieces of memories. I share his name, and as such, I have always felt a certain responsibility to live not just for myself, but to carry on his name because he couldn’t. He was killed at 32.

Gun violence is a strange thing. I grew up in Texas, where there’s a huge gun culture that was tied with a certain idea of masculinity. It was always around me, whether I was watching cop shows or playing with water guns at friends’ houses.

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As a teenager, I remember a friend talking about he might be able to get guns. We didn’t do it, but we genuinely considered it. Thinking back to who I was as a teenager, if someone cut me off in traffic, I would have shot that thing, and I’d be in prison. As a teenager, you’re impulsive and irrational, and a gun is the perfect embodiment of irrationality.

The person who killed my dad was 16. It says something about our society that a 16-year-old could get access to a gun, but it also says something about the cracks within society that a 16-year-old would find themselves in this situation where they felt they needed to rob a cab driver.

Mixing humor with social commentary is one of the hardest things for a comedian to do. How do you pull it off?

To me, getting to make Problem Areas felt like trying to take this blueprint and carry on this tradition of using comedy to address social issues, whether it was Chris Rock or Wanda Sykes or Marsha Warfield or people before that, like Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory.

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It’s a challenge. But I have the benefit of having seen many talented comedians before me tackle these things.