Eric Holder Quotes

Serious debates are taking place about how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force.

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

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.

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.

One of the crises that we have to deal with is a crisis of law enforcement officials that are not physically capable enough to handle without taking out the gun.

The full resources of the Department of Justice have been committed to the investigation into Michael Brown's death.

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.

Those of us in law enforcement must redouble our efforts to resist bias and prejudice. We must better understand the people we serve and protect - by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and encountering law enforcement. We must understand how that young man may see us.

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.

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.

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

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

We are safer when communities respect the police and the police respect the communities.

We can define the rules of police-citizen engagement, but everyday decisions will always be made by men and women in uniform, on the street, in the community, under extreme pressure, in a dangerous world where guns easily fall into the wrong hands.

At a policy level, we can support protecting and serving as opposed to militarization or disproportionate response. Step one is making sure we don't militarize and actually call for a review of military equipment in New York police forces.

We must transform the relationship between police and the communities they serve.

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.

The world for our law enforcement community has changed dramatically: everything from filling out paperwork to relationships with the community and how they think the narrative is in the media.

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

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.

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

It's been my desire to support efforts to aim at healing the relationship between law enforcement and the community.

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.

Not every officer is a bad police. I work with police officers. I know first responders.

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