Trevor Noah rips Phoenix police who threatened to shoot family

Late-night host Trevor Noah on Monday tore into Phoenix police after a video went viral showing officers threatening to shoot an African American family after their 4-year-old daughter took a doll from a Family Dollar. 

“Sweet Jesus,” Noah said on “The Daily Show” after watching the clip of the officers shouting at the family that was filmed by bystanders with their cellphones. 

{mosads}Officers surrounded the couple and their two daughters in a nearby apartment complex last month after one of their children accidentally walked out of a Family Dollar store with a Barbie doll.

With guns drawn, one of the officers can be heard screaming that he will “put a cap right in your f—ing head.”

“What happened to ‘protect and serve?’ ” Noah asked in disbelief. “I’m sorry, everything about that video is wrong. All right, not only is the cop screaming like the woman is the one pointing a gun at him, but he’s talking about ‘busting caps’ like he’s a lost member of NWA. There’s no excuse for this.”

The video was released by the Phoenix Police Department this week as part of a $10 million lawsuit from the couple, Dravon Ames and Iesha Harper.

Noah praised the onlookers who can be heard in the clip urging the officers with raised weapons to calm down. Another concerned woman is heard asking if she can take the children away from the escalating scene.

“This is ridiculous,” Noah commented. “How do civilians know how to better act like police than the police know how to act like police? How? Because this guy’s next to the car, holding his phone, but instead of panicking, he’s trying to calm things down. He’s even using the language cops are supposed to be thinking about: ‘Guys, let’s defuse the situation.’ ”

Noah pointed out that the city of Phoenix led the nation with 44 officer-involved shootings last year and said that he was glad there was video because the officers’ original reports of the events do not match the evidence.

“You would think cops cursing at civilians and pointing guns at a 4-year-old child would be as bad as the story could get,” the host said. “But what makes it even worse is that if we didn’t have these videos, those cops would have been able to paint a very different picture of how this all went down.”

The video shot by bystanders highlighted differences between the official report submitted by officers and what happened at the scene, according to a clip from ABC News.

One officer is seen pushing the handcuffed father against a car and kicking his legs apart, but he simply wrote “I made him spread his feet” in the police report.

“What’s troubling about this is it makes you wonder how many people have been arrested and put in jail because everyone assumes the police version of the events is always the truth,” Noah said.

“As harrowing as it was, this family is one of the lucky ones, because none of them were shot and calm bystanders recorded the entire thing to back them up, and now their lawyer is helping them sue that police department for $10 million, which won’t help erase what happened to them, but it will help that little girl buy a shitload of those dolls.”