During a 33-minute long segment unpacking the state of policing in America, “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver went on a brief tangent about his favorite position in local government: the comptroller.
A little context: He arrived at this point after referring to a 2015 Wall Street Journal article on lawsuit settlements for police conduct cases. The 10 cities with the largest police departments paid out $1.02 billion over a five-year period, the Journal reported then. (Baltimore knows a little something about this.)
“Listen, I’m no comptroller,” Oliver started to say. And then he went off: “Believe me, I wish I were. A hard-to-explain, lethally boring elected accountant whose title inexplicably took a real word”–here, the word “controller” appeared on the screen–“and then stuck an ‘mp’ in the middle of it? Come on! That’s my dream ‘jompb.’”
Oliver then arrived at his point, which is that even he, a non-comptroller, could tell cities they should re-examine “what conduct looks like” if they have to shell out more than $1 billion to cover for the abuses of sworn officers.
Watch the video below, at roughly the 21-minute mark:
Fourth District Councilman Bill Henry, who recently won the Democratic nomination to be Baltimore’s comptroller over six-term incumbent Joan Pratt, apparently watched the June 8 report.
And earlier today, he posted on the Facebook page for “Last Week Tonight” to invite Oliver to participate in “Comptroller for a Day” some time next year after Henry likely takes office (there is no Republican challenger).
“Of course, I’d hope there’d be some reciprocity involved, since being both informative and entertaining on national television each week is kind of *my* dream job…” Henry said.
It’s worth noting that Henry campaigned on the idea that comptroller actually is an important position. He pledged to strengthen and modernize the office, and said he would do more to fulfill its roles of conducting audits and serving as a fiscal watchdog.
As for the stray “mp,” Oliver is right that there is such a thing as a controller and that person manages a company’s finances. The word comptroller is likely the result of a spelling error of controller, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
“Around the 15th century, Middle English speakers altered the spelling of ‘conterroller’ (meaning ‘controller,’ from the Middle French contrerolleur) under the influence of the Middle French word compte (‘account’),” the Merriam-Webster entry states.
