Don Winslow Quotes

Political corruption is endemic all over this country, in some places worse than others, right? On crime, you have all the major American cities where the crime rates at different points in their histories, have spiked dramatically.

The investigators were repeatedly told not by sensation mongers but by observers of high position and ability, long experience and unquestioned disinterestedness that the courts know that some of the prosecutors are crooked and the prosecutors know that some of the courts are crooked, and both know that some of the police are crooked, and the police are equally well informed as to them. If a policeman or detective who has worked hard and effectively to land a bad criminal in jail sees him get off through improper influences, he will tend to be less zealous in the next prosecution. He will be inclined to take the easiest course and merely try to get a confession without a too nice regard for the means employed.

In Rio de Janeiro, every cop has to make a choice. He either turns dirty, keeps his mouth shut, or goes to war.

We need a strong police force - the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Chechnya. We have to get rid of the traitors who have managed to penetrate into the law-enforcement department.

Every link in the chain that runs from the corporation desiring political favors down to the policeman on the beat levying his toll on the prostitute or the apple-seller is too strong to have been broken yet.

[Milwaukee in 1912] was in the grasp of the sinister and slimy hand of special interests, dive-keepers, crooked contractors, petty racketeers, and political bosses. The city was then as graft-ridden as any other.

The three things a Tammany leader most dreaded were in the ascending order of repulsiveness, the penitentiary, honest industry, and biography

Crime is going down everywhere but in the New York City Police Department.

The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.

I'm Dan Gelber. As a federal prosecutor, I helped put away corporate criminals, corrupt politicians and violent gangs.

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.

Chicago is unique. It is the only completely corrupt city in America.

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.

Most men think graft a sporadic evil, breaking out here and there, with no connection between outbreaks. I shared the same opinion, but very soon I discovered that the graft in the cities always leads to the graft in the State.

There's an awful lot of corruption in Japanese business and politics, corruption of the sort that can make for great setting for a spy story.

New Orleans reminds me of Romania because New Orleans is very corrupt politically.

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

The hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead. An investigation kills and it and its supporters dead. Let this be had.

The period of Prohibition … brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police.

… a succession of generals who held the chief antidrug post in Mexico are now in prison for taking part in the very kind of crime they were supposed to prevent.

I know the way this city works. We have one of the most corrupt cities in the country. The reason it's so corrupt is because everybody thinks it's honest, and it's not. You know the truth when you go to Chicago. The difference here in Los Angeles is you believe it's honest - and that's dangerous.

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.

'Line of Duty' had originally been conceived as a returnable drama, with the premise being that the fictional anticorruption unit AC-12 would move on to a new case in each series, centred on a high-profile antagonist accused of corruption.

I cracked a child prostitution ring - I'd worked with three vice cops every day for months, out on the street, in the cold, trying to track down the pervs and the young girls being prostituted.We finally got the convictions.Six or seven months later, I was working, and I glanced up at the TV, and it was a report on a federal case.It was all three of them, in federal court, in handcuffs. Every time they busted a drug lord or a doper, they'd take all their money and their jewelry and flat screens before sending them to jail. They had been stealing from dopers for years!

Cops today are nothing but an armed tax collector