Letitia James Quotes

Local prosecutors work alongside local police officers on a regular basis and are therefore conflicted when it comes to prosecuting those same officers. They are under extreme pressure from local police unions and from rank-and-file cops.

We should start with the basics: Police officers are unlikely to be held accountable if the prosecutors investigating and potentially prosecuting them feel indebted to them.

District attorneys are often some of the finest public servants. However, the system in which they operate to investigate cases of police misconduct leaves a huge window for unintended bias.

We've prosecuted police, dozens of them over the years.

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 absolutely no confidence in the Ferguson police, the county prosecutor.

... transfer clemency reviews out of the Justice Department and put them in the Department of Health and Human Services.... The department that prosecuted a case and advocated for a sentence is not the appropriate one to conduct a neutral clemency review.

There's no way you can depend on the Attorney General of the United States to investigate high government officials.

All lawyers are the natural enemies of the police.

Federal criminal prosecutions are a direct function of the number of U. S. Attorneys. The more prosecutors that are appointed, the more criminal prosecutions there will be.

Can I suggest that the sheriff and the district attorney, in the lunch break, go out and read the Constitution.

Prosecutors, unlike any other official in our system, … are not as accountable… to the public that they serve Police officers do what they do in a public space. Judges are in a courtroom... Prosecutors make their charging decisions and plea bargain decisions behind closed doors…. There is no transparency … There is a lot of unconscious and implicit bias.

I've been in several situations where police officers and district attorneys have had the cooperation of people in the news media without either endangering the reporter or compromising their sources.

I believe there's a huge conflict of interest when local prosecutors investigate cases of police violence within their own communities.

In the Justice Department, responsibility for overseeing and directing investigations is lodged in the department's prosecutors.

A large portion of American citizens, especially people of color, have lost confidence in our criminal justice system. Many have called for appointing special prosecutors when a police officer kills or injures a civilian. If you were elected president, would you publicly support special prosecutors in these cases and what is one other thing you would do to fix our broken justice system?

The criminal justice system in the United States is designed to do two things really well: to railroad black and brown bodies into prison, and to keep police officers out of it.

It sounds terribly cynical, but the real surprise in the Philando Castile case is not that the officer was acquitted but that he was charged at all. The prosecutors in the case deserve great credit for even trying. But no one should be shocked about how it turned out.

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

America is very fortunate to have Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.

It is time to go on the offense. Hold people accountable for the wrongdoings they do and commit against the American people, use the vestiges of the Constitution which gives us the outline of how we hold them accountable and make the Justice Department do their job.

Not only are police officers often taken for granted, many people are highly vocal about their dislike for cops.

I was a prosecutor for 20 years.

There's a lot of good police officers. There's thousands of perfect traffic stops. Lot of good men. Lot of good women. But those don't get the stories.

My top priority as Attorney General is to continue the fight against violent crime, and step it up wherever needed.