Eric Holder Quotes

Ferguson and St. Louis County are not the first places that we have become engaged to ensure fair and equitable policing, and they will not be the last. The Department of Justice will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that the Constitution has meaning for all communities.

I've thought from the start that a parallel federal investigation into the death of Michael Brown is important. I also believe that our state and local elected officials have been given a responsibility by the people who they work for to get to the bottom of this tragedy.

Clearly, a large number of African-Americans don't have faith that the laws are being executed fairly in Ferguson, and that's a problem... We need to ensure Africans-Americans feel confident in the rule of law.

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.

I think that the dialogue between police officers and the black community has to get better, but not better in a way where, 'Oh, let's talk about it when something horrible happens.' The dialogue has to be going on consistently, every day.

Excessive stop-and-frisk divides communities. That's why the New York City Police Department has moved away from it.

I get it, cops deal with a lot, but at the same time, we crave justice, and we do want to believe things are going to be all right.

Local prosecutors must use the power and discretion afforded them to carry out sweeping reforms that will protect the public - especially Black communities - from police violence. Our system's integrity depends on it.

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

There is nothing just or fair about what happened to Jordan Edwards. And his story is yet another in a long line of tragedies that now powerfully remind us of the long way we still have to go in creating a fair and just relationship between law enforcement, our criminal justice system, and the public our laws are supposed to protect.

At the end of the day, I think my story is, we need black officers because African-Americans need a fair shot at good jobs in this country, but we cannot expect them and should not expect them to change the nature of policing.

Being a woman, we talk about equal pay all the time. We're not talking about if you're black or if you are Latina. I would like to get back to that and improving the relationship between the police community and the community of color. I don't know exactly all the right things to say, but I want to engage in that conversation.

Every American expects and deserves the protection of law enforcement that is effective, responsive, respectful and, most importantly, constitutional.

It's about being fair. It's about Black Lives Matter. Yes, they matter. Everybody counts or nobody counts, and I think if more cops had the philosophy of Harry Bosch, we'd have less of these situations happening.

I feel like I've built big enough platform and still building my platform for us to get justice for Breonna Taylor.

I think it's important to realize that law enforcement does do a very good job oftentimes of trying to ensure the safety and security of their people. But oftentimes, where they fail is communities of color and in lower socioeconomic status communities where they discriminate against these people.

We cannot have different policing for different communities. It is inherently unfair.

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

With so much racial tension and issues between the police and black and minority ethnic groups, there needs to be more in-depth conversations if we're going to fix anything.

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.

Growing up where I'm from, some people are afraid of cops. They don't really like cops. And what a lot of people don't realize is, they're really not the bad guys. They're really on our side, they're really trying to help us out. And sometimes, we don't understand that.

Through Black Lives Matter and social media, we've been able to have a really challenging discussion with America about police and how much it is investing in policing.

Michael Brown - when he lost his life, there was more focus on what he had done sometimes than what was done to him.

Mike Brown wasn't about race relations, nor Trayvon Martin or even Hurricane Katrina for that matter. It's about trust.

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