Police Enforcement Quotes & Sayings

Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman's hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes. — CrimethInc.

Police throughout the United States have been caught fabricating, planting, and manipulating evidence to obtain convictions where cases would otherwise be very weak. Some authorities regard police perjury as so rampant that it can be considered a "subcultural norm rather than an individual aberration" of police officers. Large-scale investigations of police units in almost every major American city have documented massive evidence of tampering, abuse of the arresting power, and discriminatory enforcement of laws. There also appears to be widespread police perjury in the preparation of reports because police know these reports will be used in plea bargaining. Officers often justify false and embellished reports on the grounds that it metes out a rough justice to defendants who are guilty of wrongdoing but may be exonerated on technicalities. [internal citations omitted] — Dale Carpenter

Ninety percent of our police are fighting terrorists, so we don't have enough oriented towards their key duty, which is enforcement of the law. But these are precisely the inheritance that we want to overcome. Particularly the mark for success for us would be that a woman can not only walk in the streets of every major city, but can go from one province to another without any hindrance. — Ashraf Ghani

The police are required to enforce the law in areas where they do not live, do not eat, do not go to the barbershop. They have no interaction with the people in that community except when they are called to resolve an issue. To bridge the gap we must establish relationships with the people and communities we serve. If we don't we will continue to have biases that grow and fester and create deadly situations. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Trying to find the proper care in a civilization where only a small part of the population will ever understand what you are going through is a burden many first responders are saddled with. PTSI, injuries, and politics weigh heavily on the officer, yet we continue to turn a blind eye to them. We have made officers into robotic super heroes that aren't allowed feelings, intellect, or human error. They have been ostracized by society and stripped of their basic human behaviors.

We also have yet to admit there are husbands, wives, children, and parents actively involved in these officers' lives hoping to help them cope with their trauma. Families who do more than make sure they get enough sleep, a hot meal and fresh uniforms in the closet. The faces of the families are yet to be seen. — Karen Rodwill Solomon

If you want to kill someone and get away with it, become a cop. — Steven Magee

One of my symptoms included my obsession with ghosts and law enforcement
I carry around a police badge with me, for example. I became obsessed by Hans Holzer, the greatest ghost hunter ever. That's when the idea of my film Ghostbusters was born. — Dan Aykroyd

At any rate, planning in this sense means all-around planning by the government and enforcement of these plans by the police power. Planning in this sense means full government control of business. It is the antithesis of free enterprise, private initiative, private ownership of the means of production, market economy, and the price system. Planning and capitalism are ut- terly incompatible. Within a system of planning production is conducted according to the government's orders, not according to the plans of capitalists and entrepreneurs eager to profit by best filling the wants of the consumers. — Ludwig Von Mises

You can truly grieve for every officer who's been lost in the line of duty in this country, and still be troubled by cases of police overreach, those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to high standards. — Jon Stewart

Beware of corporate government cops. — Steven Magee

everything in the area of law enforcement, including criminal law, has at one time or another been handled by the private sector quite adequately, and in some places it's occurring even today. The second reason is that in fact the law and law enforcement are not public goods. Public goods are supposed to be goods that everyone has equal access to and that the private sector will not provide. As I said, the private sector does provide these things, and furthermore the idea of equal access to justice is just not true. We have scarce resources being used in law enforcement and adjudication and prosecution and in punishment, and so the use of these resources for one thing means they are not being effectively used for something else. There are tradeoffs. The vast majority of crimes that are reported to police are never resolved. The vast majority of crimes committed are never reported to police. So the belief that law and law enforcement are public goods simply doesn't stand up to reality. — Anonymous

Society needs heroes, but most policemen, firemen, and soldiers don't want to become heroes; they want to be men and women doing their jobs. They want to be supported and understood.

Unfortunately, they find the most support and under-standing when death comes in the line of duty. With death comes the onset of the hero label. With the hero title bestowed, everyone seems to know Jason. They won't ask for permission to speak at his funeral. They will simply do it because they know the person in the coffin would not be there if it weren't for a position that required them to give their lives for others. People who didn't know him spoke as if they did, and, while society was claiming its newest hero, Stephanie wanted to grieve alone. More than that, though, she wanted Jason back. — Karen Rodwill Solomon

He had spent so long working with the police, everything was a conspiracy to him. — Kenneth Eade

I'm a lot of things, Spatchcock, but 'beloved-of-law-enforcement' is not one of them. They'll just say that it's my own damn fault again and send me on my way. Besides, the last time I was at a police station I was quite rude to them. I think I threw a lamp at the custody sergeant. Do you have a light? — Robert McKelvey

Sometimes a policeman must confront people about lying. No one likes to be called a liar. But it is what it is! A fact is a fact! If someone is a liar, put them on notice. You should not be punished for doing the right thing. It is the job of a good investigator to get the truth. — C. Snyder

Michael Brown's tragic death has revealed a deep distrust between some in the Ferguson community and its police force. It also developed a need to develop and widely disseminate law enforcement best practices for responding to public demonstrations. — Eric Holder

If you can see a cop in your rear view mirror - no matter how far back the cop is - TURN! The sooner you turn the better. Your goal while driving should be to never let a law enforcement officer into a position where he can pull you over. Don't even let them come close enough to read your tag. — Ian Tinny

The DOJ has employed these investigations in communities across our nation to reform serious patterns and practices of force, biased policing and other unconstitutional practices by law enforcement, i'm asking the Department of Justice to investigate if our police department has engaged in a pattern or practice of stops, searches or arrests that violate the fourth amendment. — Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

If you want to routinely break the law and get away with it, then a police officer would be a great career choice for you. — Steven Magee

Police and prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs - and some initially opposed it - but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if we're going to wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be taken prisoner? — Michelle Alexander

It is through experience that I have lost faith in USA law enforcement. — Steven Magee

...when one considers that there are more than 750,000 police officers in the United States and that these officers have tens of millions of interactions with citizens each year, it is clear that police shootings are extremely rare events and that few officers--less than one-half of 1 percent each year--ever shoot anyone. — David Klinger

No-knock police raids destroy Americans' right to privacy and safety. People's lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people's lives in order to control what others ingest. — James Bovard

At the heart of the American paradigm is the perception that law and its agents . . . police officers, correctional officers, attorneys and judges . . . are color-blind and thus justice is impartial, objective and seeks la verdad (the truth). But, la realidad (reality) differs. — Martin Guevara Urbina

Why are the police REALLY having trouble recruiting officers - especially Black officers? We have to bridge the gap between community and law enforcement. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

I think that one of the other lessons about what happened here is that open carry laws, even though many police, sheriff departments in Colorado support them, make it much harder for law enforcement to do their jobs. — Jonathan Michel Metzl

Racial profiling punishes innocent individuals for the past actions of those who look and sound like them. It misdirects crucial resources and undercuts the trust needed between law enforcement and the communities they serve. It has no place in our national discourse, and no place in our nation's police departments. — Benjamin Todd Jealous

The potential savings in the national budgets from the elimination of police, criminal courts, standing armies, pollution control agencies, drug enforcement, and many poverty programs is almost beyond calculation. — Pat Robertson

When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe. — Mary Frances Berry

This is not a Black problem. It is not a white problem. It is not a police problem. It is a WE problem. We the people, for the people. It is going to take all of us being transparent in order to transform. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury-national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture-we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands. — Rand Paul

Why, then, is it so crucial to have ethnographies of urban policing? The answer to this question certainly becomes clearer now. It is not simply that ethnography provides a sort of immersion in the world of law enforcement, allowing us to understand what happens when the police are in the field. It is perhaps more importantly that it produces a vision of a world that has been made either invisible or opaque to most of us. — Didier Fassin

I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that? — Timothy Leary

Rappers, as a class, are not engaged in anything criminal. They're musicians. Some rappers and friends of rappers commit crimes. Some bus drivers commit crimes. Some accountants commit crimes. But there aren't task forces devoted to bus drivers or accountants. Bus drivers don't have to work under the preemptive suspicion of law enforcement. The difference is obvious, of course: Rappers are young black men telling stories that the police, among others, don't want to hear. Rappers tend to come from places where police are accustomed to treating everybody like a suspect. The general style of rappers is offensive to a lot of people. But being offensive is not acrime, at least not one that's on the books. The fact that law enforcement treats rap like organized crime tells you a lot about just how deeply rap offends some people
they'd love for rap itself to be a crime, but until they get that law passed, they come after us however they can. — Jay-Z

Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system. John — Sarah Schulman

When the police willfully break the law on video and then deny the event in writing, you know that you are dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people. — Steven Magee

On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI's Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI's files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages over the next twenty-five years before they were destroyed. It took six decades, until 2011, before homosexuals could openly serve in the United States military. — Tim Weiner

Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention. — Milton Friedman

Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies - where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement. — Rand Paul

The atmosphere sets the tone for what is to take place in that space at that time. Your attitude impacts the atmosphere. How is your current attitude affecting the atmosphere and your desired outcome? — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement. — Barack Obama

The point is, our health-care system is a terrible mess. It's expensive, wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive, and infested with lawyers. Which is why there has been a big push, in some quarters, to place it under the management of...
The federal government.
This is like saying that if your local police department has a corruption problem, the solution is to turn law enforcement over to the Sopranos. — Dave Barry

Police internal affairs are in the business of protecting corrupt and incompetent police officers from prosecution due to the extensive range of laws that they have blatantly broken. — Steven Magee

Stop reacting to the stereotypes and start responding to the individual. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

It has always struck me that one of the readiest ways of estimating a country's regard for law is to notice what arms the officers of the law are carrying: in England it is little batons, in France swords, in many countries revolvers, and in Russia the police used to have artillery. — Lord Dunsany

A war on cops? Then the question becomes who are they warring with? Because if you look at the prison system you can tell who the Prisoners of War are. The Black Man. Words are powerful and we must stop these divisive words that tare our country further apart instead of bringing us together. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

I come from a law enforcement family. My grandfather, William J. Comey, was a police officer. Pop Comey is one of my heroes. I have a picture of him on my wall in my office at the FBI, reminding me of the legacy I've inherited and that I must honor. — James Comey

Is there a war on cops? Is there a war on the Black man? Who is going to call a cease fire? — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Every year, without fail, we outlaw more things, catch more people doing them, and put more of them in jail. The outlawed behavior never goes away, because, directly or indirectly, it's supported by the strong, invisible, unrelenting force called vision. This explains why police officers are much more likely to take up crime than criminals are to take up law enforcement. It's called 'going with the flow. — Daniel Quinn

It is the common peoples duty to police the police. — Steven Magee

[T]he guilty as well as the innocent are entitled to due process of law. They are entitled to a fair trial. They are entitled to counsel. They are entitled to fair treatment from the police. The law enforcement officer has the same duty as the citizen-indeed, he has a higher duty-to abide by the letter and spirit of our Constitution and laws. You yourselves must be careful to obey the letter of the law. You yourselves must be intellectually honest in the enforcement of the law. — Harry S. Truman

The fact that police are legally allowed to engage in a wholesale roundup of nonviolent drug offenders does not answer the question why they would choose to do so, particularly when most police departments have far more serious crimes to prevent and solve. Why would police prioritize drug-law enforcement? — Michelle Alexander

The killing of a police officer has a ripple effect across the nation, even the world. It's like the wave at a ballgame but you can't see it if you aren't at the game. Every law enforcement family in the world is at the game daily, each officer who falls represents one less person in the stadium. The stadium seems smaller each time. Spouses, children and parents breathe a heavy sigh, a sigh filled with grief for the profession and the fallen. A sigh hiding a smaller one that thinks "Thank God it wasn't mine this time. — Karen Rodwill Solomon

Law enforcement officers should use only the minimum force necessary in dealing with disorders when they arise. A human life-the life of a student, soldier, or police officer-is a precious thing, and the taking of a life can be justified only as a necessary and last resort. — Richard M. Nixon

The police state We now have well over 100,000 domestic federal law enforcement agents armed and ready to enforce the laws to "make everyone safe and secure." We also have our TSA "friends" at the airports protecting us with an army of over 50,000 bureaucrats. The Department of Homeland Security has more than 240,000 employees. The FBI has about 35,000 employees. Around 90,000 IRS employees enforce draconian tax laws that limit self-sufficiency, put people in fear, and are used as a political tool to help suppress dissenters to the empire. There are many thousands of others "making sure we're safe and secure from our foreign enemies" while our domestic enemies, including politicians, bureaucrats, and government profiteers, are ignored. — Ron Paul

The fraudulent electrical utility company in conjunction with the corrupt sheriff taught me that an Englishman's home is not his castle — Steven Magee

I mean that the function of the police is to solve problems that have law-enforcement consequences in a way that is based on a genuine partnership with the neighborhood in both the venting of the problem and the discussion of the solution. — James Q. Wilson

When placing an emergency call, it is important to remember that a corrupt or incompetent cop may be on their way to you. — Steven Magee

The organized domestic terrorism of the general public is why many people regard the police as corrupt. — Steven Magee

Western police officers are an arguably corrupt group of people that have rigged the system to make them almost untouchable. — Steven Magee

The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home ... What I think we know - separate and apart from this incident - is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that's just a fact. - President Obama on Gates' arrest. — Barack Obama

The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new management breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people. They believe the numbers say it all, and when the numbers don't say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending. — Don Winslow

There is insufficient support for the police and safety and law enforcement, in general, in the city council. — Steve Chabot

We need a strong police force - the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Chechnya. We have to get rid of the traitors who have managed to penetrate into the law-enforcement department. — Akhmad Kadyrov

I have no confidence in USA law enforcement. — Steven Magee

Everybody wants to cut off the limb to to deal with the problem. You can't just keep cutting off limbs and destroying fruit. We have to become committed enough to examine the root. The root of the problem in our community, in our country is a systematic problem. And until all who are a part of the problem admit their role in the problem, we will never have a holistic solution. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

It is estimated that up to one third of police officers who face a traumatic event will develop some level of post-traumatic stress (Dowling F.G., 2006). Despite this high number of psychological casualties, law enforcement agencies nationwide fail to support and train for a psychological injury that can last far longer than the physical injuries received in combat (Blum, 2001). — Karen Rodwill Solomon

As of this moment there's the police department way, the federal law enforcement way, the military way ... and my way. If you want me to function at my best then you're going to have to accept that I'm going to have to make up some of my own rules. I don't know enough about your playbook and, quite frankly, I don't like the way you operate. If I'm not a cop anymore then I'm something else, something new. Okay, then from here on out I'll decide what that is; and that includes building, shaping, and leading my team. My team, my rules. — Jonathan Maberry

There is no shortage of despicable law enforcement departments in the USA. — Steven Magee

We have become so politically correct in this society it is causing us to become more and more incorrect; this is costing us lives. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Enforcement priorities and arrest patterns must not lead to disparate treatment under the law, even if such treatment is unintended. And police forces should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. — Eric Holder

We all have inherent biases. All of us. The problem occurs when police officers or community members allow those biases to affect the choices they make as they do their job or have interactions with others. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent. In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn't have anticipated. — Radley Balko

A protect-yourself-first-and-foremost idea has subverted the mission of law-enforcement officers, just as it may have degraded the military's. — Ann Medlock

The objective for each individual when you are pulled over by an officer of the law is to - Survive the Stop! — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

It is my expectation that if I call 911 for the police that I will be blatantly harassed. — Steven Magee

First things first: studies show policing is hard. At a minimum, they prove many LEO's struggle to cope with what they are exposed to. For example, research indicates that while 8.2% of the general population suffers from an active alcohol or substance abuse addiction, up to 23% of public safety personnel, including law enforcement officers, are engaged in the same struggle. Furthermore, due to the constant exposure to violence, conflict, death, pain and suffering, coupled with the extremely stressful and draining nature of their work, police run a significant risk of experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Injuries (PTSI)/Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Lastly, research by Dr. John Violanti in 2004 indicates a combination of alcohol use and PTSD produces a tenfold increase in the risk of suicide. This small snapshot of research paints a grim picture on how policing can negatively impact those that take up its calling. — Karen Rodwill Solomon