Talib Kweli Quotes

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn't mean I'm anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.

Stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional and, in part, because it was ineffective. It did not do what it needed to do.

Let me be clear about this. I don't have a drug problem. I have a police problem.

I understand that not everyone agrees with my perspective on Ray Kelly. But what you gotta look at here is somebody like Bill de Blasio talking out of both sides of his mouth and trying to have it both ways on a really critical issue like stop-and-frisk.

When parents tell their children not to congregate on corners, especially in groups, out of fear for them encountering the police, what does that say? We have a trust problem.

What we're dealing with is institutional, and unless systems are put into place that will ensure accountability, we can expect racially biased police practices to continue.

Excessive stop-and-frisk divides communities. That's why the New York City Police Department has moved away from it.

The good news is that the American people, not just the African-American community are saying enough is enough. You can't hold people in custody and suddenly find out that they are dead. You can't shoot people in the back.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that if you stop or curtail stop-and-frisk, or if cops are reluctant to do it, violent crimes are going to go up.

When you have 4,000 people killed in Chicago by guns, from the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama, his hometown, you have to have stop-and-frisk.

I assume Obama knows about stop and frisk, so this is not the person that should be the head of homeland security. I had to say something. Kelly's nomination would go against who President Obama is.

When it comes to stop-and-frisk, you know, Hillary Clinton is talking about takes guns away.Well, I'm talking about taking guns away from gangs and people that use them.

Trump started talking about bringing back stop-and-frisk, which was ruled unconstitutional. And as a black man, that was the last thing I wanted to hear. That you will basically pass laws to say that I can be profiled, and it is legal.

We don't ever want to create an environment where people are afraid of their own local police officers.

Black folks tell their kids they have to be twice as good as a white person? Well, if I tell a child of mine that, or that they have to be careful - that this is what a cop would do if you do this - they think something is wrong with them. I tell them death is better.

The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.

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?

We need law and order in the inner cities, because the people that are most affected by what's happening are African-American and Hispanic people. And it's very unfair to them what our politicians are allowing to happen.

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York, because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

In the United States the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s, and in the process, has been increasingly directed against young people, low-income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, and women.

Michael Bloomberg is a sensible guy. He's just privileged. He's a goddamn billionaire, and he or his family members have never had to deal with anything as remotely degrading as stop and frisk. So he has no point of reference.

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.

People shouldn't be afraid to bring up issues of bias in law enforcement.