Mark Fuhrman Quotes

I probably saved more black lives as mayor of New York City than any mayor in the history of this city. And I did it by having to use police officers in black areas where there was an astounding amount of crime. If that crime was in white areas, police officers would be in white areas.

I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century.

I know there are some good American police. But I grew up in a country where we were afraid of the police.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

Most citizens viewing the tape of Rodney G. King being beaten by police officers were stunned and uncomprehending. Most citizens, that is, but the urban poor.

Do I think police chiefs, many of which are African-American or Hispanic, wake up and say, 'Let's systemically oppress African-American communities?' No, I don't. Are there instances in which that happens? I'm sure there are.

The black police in Compton are worse than the white police.

Not all cops are bad, but this kind of harassment has been going on for years in the ghetto.

Our country has a painful history of mistrust between police departments and people of color. The overuse of stop-and-frisk has made those divisions much worse.

Race is something that's always haunted American policing.

The black community has always complained about abuse from cops. It's nothing new. But now, more people are seeing visual examples of what they've been complaining about. That's one thing that has changed over time.

Police departments, since the start of the history of this country, have been used to enforce unconstitutional laws that were designed to discriminate against communities of color and particularly African Americans.

I think police brutality has been going on since - I don't know - ever since I can remember and, you know, hearing about it in my childhood.

Being a woman of color, I can truthfully state that I don't feel safe around those who are sworn to honor and uphold the law.

The stuff that the cops do and the stuff that happens, what bothers us, the black community, is it's so blatant... It's so out in the open that if you can't see it, then you are part of the problem because it is very obvious.

Ultimately, policing in and of itself is problematic.

I can't think of an experience I've had with police that I felt was based on race, which is one difference between England and the U.S.

There is police brutality. People of color have been targeted by police.

We've actually seen Black man murders [in] many a major city in the United States - New York City, St. Louis, Missouri, from Cleveland to Baltimore. It was those sorts of incidents that were very much prevalent in the forefront of that jury's conscience that allowed them to believe that this man [O.J. Simpson] could have been set up.

The disturbing video taken by Keith Lamont Scott's wife showing the moment her husband was killed by police in Charlotte provides a sobering window into the high level of compliance that people of color feel they need to maintain in their interactions with police.

What I'm trying to tell people is that police brutality in the 'hood is nothing new. And the thing is that whether this guy, the cop killer in my song, is real or not, believe it, there are people at that point.

Unfortunately I feel like a lot of the issues that the show [OJ Simpson ] was dealing with are still very much in the forefront of the American consciousness and the world consciousness today. Police misconduct was at the heart of the defense and Johnny Cochran did a masterful job at putting that defense at the forefront of the jury's conscience as opposed to the double homicide of Ron [Goldman] and Nicole [Brown Simpson].

I think most people, in their lifetime, have seen somebody who has the ability to use force lord it over other individuals. I see a lot of those videos, and I am disturbed by people being yanked out of their cars, and it seems to be a disproportionate amount of young black men. I'm disturbed by it.

The share of Americans who say race relations are bad in this country is the highest it's been in decades, much of it amplified by shootings of African-Americans by police, as we've seen recently in Charlotte and Tulsa.

You're not going to have the police force representing the black and brown community, if they've spent the last 30 years busting every son and daughter and father and mother for every piddling drug offense that they've ever done, thus creating a mistrust in the community. But at the same time, you should be able to talk about abuses of power, and you should be able to talk about police brutality and what, in some cases, is as far as I'm concerned, outright murder and outright loss of justice without the police organization targeting you in the way that they have done me.