Zephyr Teachout Quotes

As mayor, I would support law enforcement, not knock it down.

We have to have a national conversation about how police forces should interact with the African-American community, who happens to be paying their salary, who want to be served and protected, who these officers are take an oath to do so.

There are 18,000 different police forces in the United States and sometimes something wrong happens.

Certainly, we have to make sure our police forces do not have weapons of mass destruction with which they can terrorize our communities.

I don't support defunding the police.

I do not support the idea of defunding police departments. I believe that it does nothing to solve the root problems we must address and it makes our communities less safe.

Law enforcement officials have been candid in identifying ways officers could have handled the situation in Ferguson better, and I trust those recommendations will be helpful as we continue to count on them to protect us.

Society questions the police and their methods, and the police say, Do you want the criminals off the street or not?

Let's talk about policing and public safety. Let's debate what works and what does not. We must abandon practices that do not work, and do more of the things that actually do work to save lives.

What we need in our countries is a good police force with a civilian mentality and some cheap light arms, not an army that needs to maintain its power with sophisticated weapons

In order for us to respect law enforcement, it is necessary for law enforcement to respect us.

Police reform is working, and crime is falling.

We can define the rules of police-citizen engagement, but everyday decisions will always be made by men and women in uniform, on the street, in the community, under extreme pressure, in a dangerous world where guns easily fall into the wrong hands.

I don't understand it and haven't understood in this world of technology: where every building has a camera, every ATM has a camera, why don't we have cameras on police officers?

We can't pick out certain incidentals that don't go our way and act like the cops are all bad... Do you know how bad some of these neighborhoods would be if it wasn't for the cops?

In millions of encounters each year between the police and the public, it may be too much to expect that every officer will always get it right. But it is not too much to expect that we can put the right safeguards in place to hold officers accountable when they get it wrong.

I think the only thing that's really going to make a change in terms of how we feel as citizens in terms of safety and our relationship with the police is if we start seeing more federal indictments, arrests, and convictions of police officers.

Law enforcement must be guardians in our communities, not warriors against our own people.

We are demanding police transparency and accountability so we can build trust and work together to make our communities safer.

We need to restore the faith and trust between law enforcement and communities across the country.

There have to be consequences for police who take the law into their own hands. There has to be a shift in the use-of-force policies that are used in departments across the country.

For me, in trying to talk about something like policing, it's such a huge issue, and it's an issue that's very local and very personalized to communities, to cities, to legislators, and so, in that way, I think as we started looking into talking about policing, the thing that you realize is that you can't paint everything with the same brush.

I know there are those in the community who, rather than have us invest more in policing, even for community policing, instead want us to disinvest in the police department. We need a police department. We are going to have a police department.

Everybody has a stake in the story of policing.

There's more we can do as a community to try to change what policing looks like in our cities.