David Simon 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.

We need the cops, especially in the black community.

We need to work for a day when police shootings are rare and not the stuff of our daily news.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Cops should not be separate from the black community or any community. Their salaries are paid for by the communities they police. They should be working for the communities they police. But as we saw in Ferguson, Missouri, they are not always doing that.

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.

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

We're not anti-police... we're anti-police brutality.

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.

I have no hatred for cops. I have hatred for racists and brutal people, but not necessarily the cops. The cops are just doing what they're told to do.

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

Police reform is working, and crime is falling.

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.

There is no such thing as a bad cop, only disturbing and dominant cop thinking that will invariably lead to excessive force and tragic outcomes.

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.

We need to have law enforcement and the African-American community work together for the safety of everybody.

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.

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.