Deborah K. Ross Quotes

I'm dedicated to healing the wounds between police and minority communities so both sides feel safe again.

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.

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.

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

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

Our kids' lives depend upon keeping them safe. That has to be a fundamental duty and responsibility for me as mayor. That means we have to continue hard but necessary work of bridging the divide between police and communities they serve.

We have to restore trust between communities and the police.

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.

Building trust between law enforcement officers and the communities we serve is one of my highest priorities as attorney general.

With so much racial tension and issues between the police and black and minority ethnic groups, there needs to be more in-depth conversations if we're going to fix anything.

Our neighborhoods are safer when there is trust between communities and the police who are in charge of protecting them.

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.

I want to see Black Lives Matter be able to ultimately reduce law enforcement funding.

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

I do not support the idea of defunding police departments. I believe that it does nothing to solve the root problems we must address and it makes our communities less safe.

In Baltimore they can't do police work to save their lives. Now because of Freddie Gray they're not even getting out of the car and policing corners - they're on a job slowdown, basically. Right now if the police stopped being brutal, if we got police shooting under control, and the use of excessive force, if we have a meaningful societal response to all that stuff, and the racism that underlies it, the question still remains: what are they policing, and why?

You need better relationships between the communities and the police, because in some cases, it's not good.But you look at Dallas, where the relationships were really studied, the relationships were really a beautiful thing, and then five police officers were killed one night very violently.

There's no question that there's been a breach in the trust between urban - especially urban community, African-American and minority communities and the police in major American cities.

For an ordinary citizen, what is the common interaction you have with a police officer? When they pull you over for speeding, or when they write you a ticket for parking. The rest of the time is patrolling minority neighborhoods like an occupying army. It's suppression of blacks, and it's revenue enhancement. Surveillance is a Band-Aid. That's like saying, "Let's surveil the SS." No! Let's get rid of the SS!

We need to support our police officers and make sure that community policing becomes something that becomes the standard across the country.

The horrific cases in Ferguson, in Staten Island with the death of Eric Garner, and all across the country serve as stark reminders that we must have a say in who polices us, and how that policing is done. We must, we must, let our voices be heard on Election Day.

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.

Michael Brown's tragic death has revealed a deep distrust between some in the Ferguson community and its police force. It also developed a need to develop and widely disseminate law enforcement best practices for responding to public demonstrations.