Alex Haley Quotes

We need law and order in the inner cities, because the people that are most affected by what's happening are African-American and Hispanic people. And it's very unfair to them what our politicians are allowing to happen.

We've directed the creation of a task force for reducing violent crime in America, including the horrendous situation - take a look at Chicago and others - taking place right now in our inner cities.

We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African- Americans, Hispanics are living in he'll because it's so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

As a city, we have to face the reality that New York's minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime.

What will it profit this country if we... put our man on the Moon by 1970 and at the same time you can't walk down Woodward Avenue in this city without fear of some violence?

The tragedy is that the police and inner city communities should be allies. Who suffers most from violent crime in America? Inner city communities. Who has a personal and professional interest in lowering that violence? Cops.

We have to protect our inner cities, because African-American communities are being decimated by crime, decimated.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that if you stop or curtail stop-and-frisk, or if cops are reluctant to do it, violent crimes are going to go up.

We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular. There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. After all we have been through, just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.

Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.

In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

In America, we have cities that are far more dangerous than Afghanistan.

I live about four muggings from Central Park.

Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!

I think crime is a huge issue for people. If you were living in the poorest state, and you've got drug dealers at the end of the street, and your life's in misery, and you're afraid of your kids going out the door. I mean, the job of progressive politicians is to do something about that.

African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals. Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.

With sad, depressing predictability, the children of today's underclass become tomorrow's criminals and dropouts.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.

In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.

As far as inner cities, I was very strong on the inner cities during the campaign, I think it's probably got me much higher percentage of the African American vote than lot of people thought I was going to get. We did much higher than people thought I was going to get. I was honored by that.

If we're going to talk about mayors, that under the current mayor [of New York in 2016], crime has continued to drop, including murders.

One study conducted in Washington, D.C. indicated that 3 out of 4 black men, and nearly all those living in the poorest neighborhoods could expect to find themselves behind bars at some point in their life.

The message [of Donald Trump] is that that type of thing happening. Let's focus on what happened.What happened was the murder, the murder of this person pushing a stroller, it's unacceptable in an American city to continue to have this level of violence and the level of violence in Chicago is unacceptable.