Wyatt Cenac Quotes

It's an issue that we need to have a national discussion about, the militarization of local police forces, and then when they are used to quell peaceful demonstration. Then we have a problem, and especially around this entire case of the murder of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson police officer.

I don't support defunding the police.

We don't ever want to create an environment where people are afraid of their own local police officers.

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

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

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

There's a larger conversation we need to have about the role of police officers, their relationship to the people as enemy or executioner, when they're not supposed to be either.

When parents tell their children not to congregate on corners, especially in groups, out of fear for them encountering the police, what does that say? We have a trust problem.

The way police do what they do is under the microscope. You've got people on the one side saying, 'We need to be holding our police accountable.' And you've got a lot of people who support the police saying they're being 'unfairly vilified.'

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.

Twenty-first century policing reform will require increased investment in law enforcement, not defunding it.

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.

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

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.

I've, in fact, very specifically said I don't support defunding the police.

Never once has Republican world said hey, maybe we should look into how police officers are carrying out their solemn public responsibility to serve and protect. No - no right wing website in America is investigating or will ever investigate how well police officers do their jobs.

In Baltimore they can't do police work to save their lives. Now because of Freddie Gray they're not even getting out of the car and policing corners - they're on a job slowdown, basically. Right now if the police stopped being brutal, if we got police shooting under control, and the use of excessive force, if we have a meaningful societal response to all that stuff, and the racism that underlies it, the question still remains: what are they policing, and why?

My accident happened in what should have been one of the safest places to be: in a police station, at the hands of trained police officers. So more guns are not the answer.

As I said last week in the wake of the grand jury decision, I think Ferguson laid bare a problem that is not unique to St. Louis or that area, and is not unique to our time, and that is a simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.

It seems to me that before we give federal funds to police departments, we ought to mandate that they have body cams.

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.

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

Calling for police reform is not calling for police retribution.

We need the cops, especially in the black community.