Rahm Emanuel Quotes

Police are supposed to protect and serve, but sadly, they protect their self-interest first and foremost.

I still have admiration for the vast majority of police officers, but there is no denying that some are guilty of mistreating the people they are supposed to serve.

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.'

There's good cops and bad cops, and the good cops have to hold the bad cops accountable. We have to hold the bad cops accountable, too.

Do I acknowledge that there are some law enforcement officers that abuse their job? Yes.

I know that all cops are not sterling characters. But you have to have someone to root for. I balance it with rotten cops who will take a bribe, who will beat somebody up.

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

Criminal conduct by police officers, federal agents, and their confederates cannot be tolerated and will be met with the full force of the law.

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.

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.

Police have been given the very confusing and unpleasant task of being society's char cleaners ... so they lie and stick together.

American police departments, by and large, are less corrupt than any other police departments in the world.

Anyone who wears a badge has the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens

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

It is especially jarring when police officers are the killers because they are an entity of the state itself, so when the state shows a lack of sensitivity, community members feel it is an obvious example of abuse..

Calling for police reform is not calling for police retribution.

Some cops I don't like - the corrupt, the brutal.

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.

Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.

I've spent my life in the police profession, and I'm proud of that. But I am also very cognizant of the profession's limitations, its potential for abuse, and its potential negative impact.

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.

I am always looking for stories that have not been told too much, and one story that I think is really gripping and important is what police officers go through.

Being a cop is often seeing the worst of the human condition and behavior. With all of that said, there is no reason that Mike Brown and also Eric Garner are dead today - except bad policing, excessive force, and the hunt-and-capture-prey mentality many thrill-seeking cops have adapted.

I'll be honest with you: I think that it's really difficult, this framing around 'good cops' and 'bad cops.' Policing, as a system, is incredibly corrupt, period.

We need to statutize what is permissible and what is not permissible. If a law enforcement agent uses a clearly unapproved technique like the knee that was on the neck of George Floyd for over eight minutes, no law enforcement agent thinks that that's right and that officer should be held accountable.