John Abizaid Quotes

As the mayor of London, my highest priority is keeping Londoners and visitors to our city safe from harm.

You know, as attorney general, there's no issue more important than making sure you are safe, that your families are safe.

Security is a component of everyday life that one spending time in Washington, D.C., gets accustomed to. Metal detectors, police vehicle barriers and heavily-armed police officers become strangely commonplace after awhile.

An intelligence unit staffed with full-time personnel should be established to gather, evaluate, analyze, and disseminate information on potential as well as actual civil disorders...It should use undercover police personnel and informants.

Policing is an integral part of governance. It is a whole, but it is also a part of the larger whole. Just like a human organ like the head, it's got intelligence, stamina, strategy and surveillance. But it cannot function independently in the absence of other life-sustaining organs.

Anyone who's ever been around an emergency in Manhattan realizes that there are plainclothes officers on these streets walking past us more than we ever realize.

Police chiefs know a thing or two about public safety.

I see my role as police commissioner as providing strategic oversight, support and accountability for the bureau.

I do not think our security will ever be so effective that we can catch every bad person at the border, nor do I think we can expect our local law enforcement officers to anticipate and stop every violent crime or terrorist act.

Having a police presence on public transport is vital to ensuring customers are safe.

When it comes to public safety, I listen to police chiefs and cops, not to a cable-news station.

My job as Home Secretary is to keep families and communities across our country safe.

If you go into a bar or restaurant with a cop, the first thing he does is he'll stand in the entrance, and he'll look at every single face in that room because he doesn't want to spend an hour having a drink or lunch and didn't spot some villain they've been looking for, for two years.

Four years after 9/11 it is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis. It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on a terrorist watch list. It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork barrel spending, not risk.

To control violence [and other crime] requires a police system of professional investigations and good equipment. We don’t have it.

When violence strikes [riots], then those in public responsibility have an immediate ... job, not to analyze, but to end disorder.

Government's first responsibility is the safety of its citizens.

We are incapable of maintaining peace and order and to enforce the law with the resources we have.

Fighting crime is not cheap, because it requires boots on the ground.

We are much safer in the United States, but not yet safe.

The city of Peking [Beijing] is a novel site for a European. He will not weary of admiring the manner in which the nearly 3 million people gathered within its vast enclosure are ruled by the police as schoolchildren by their masters. People coming and going fill streets wider than the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The crowd is beyond belief, yet peace reigns everywhere.

The core functions of government are negative—putting out fires, arresting criminals, settling disputes—and much more of what government does is the unromantic work of preventing bad situations from getting worse.

A cop by themselves on every corner is not going to make that much difference.

There's a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime: the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, 'What are you doing here?'

All of us who work in law enforcement want to keep people safe. That is the heart of our jobs; it is what drives us every day.