Theresa May Quotes

Who will protect the public when the police violate the law?

When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe.

You don't need any indictment in order to arrest someone; probable cause is sufficient to arrest civilians, so it must be enough to arrest police.

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

Either we need to redefine what probable cause means and say that police are not subject to it, or we arrest officers right away just as we would with any other person accused of committing a crime. Either we write new laws or enforce existing ones; we cannot have it both ways.

While we all respect the solemn responsibility of our law enforcement officers to protect the public, we must also safeguard the rights of Missourians to peaceably assemble and the rights of the press to report on matters of public concern.

There's nothing wrong with this country that we couldn't cure by turning it over to the police for a couple of weeks.

It is monstrous that courts should aid or abet the law-breaking police officer.

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

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 U.S. Supreme Court has eviscerated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, giving the police license to sweep communities, to conduct 'stop and frisk' operations.

People view the police not as allies, but as antagonists, and think of them not with respect or gratitude, but with suspicion and distrust.

In millions of encounters each year between the police and the public, it may be too much to expect that every officer will always get it right. But it is not too much to expect that we can put the right safeguards in place to hold officers accountable when they get it wrong.

Police officers see everything, and they experience everything, and they don't always act correctly.

Stop and search has a controversial history and has not always been carried out professionally by individual officers. Liberal-minded people are right to be wary about its overuse. However, it is also regarded by most people as a legitimate and necessary tactic.

Ultimately, we must either abandon our reliance on stop and search or abandon any hope for a criminal justice system grounded in equality, impartiality and fairness.

Police can't be successful if they're not viewed as legitimate by the community, and a community will not be safe if the police are not engaged in a respectful, constitutional partnership with the community.

When law enforcement violates departmental policies or operates outside of its certified training, it should not be insulated from liability to the victims of these breaches.

There is nothing just or fair about what happened to Jordan Edwards. And his story is yet another in a long line of tragedies that now powerfully remind us of the long way we still have to go in creating a fair and just relationship between law enforcement, our criminal justice system, and the public our laws are supposed to protect.

We should limit qualified immunity and change the standard for bringing cases against officers who violate victims' civil and Constitutional rights.

The police are paid by the public and carry a public trust, and they take an oath to protect us as citizens. The police have lost sight of that and must be reminded that we pay them to protect us, not to simply engage and cage us.

You can truly grieve for every officer who's been lost in the line of duty in this country, and still be troubled by cases of police overreach.

I do believe that supporting our First Amendment rights and supporting local law enforcement are not mutually exclusive.

Everybody has a stake in the story of policing.

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