Alexandra Petri Quotes

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

Criminal conduct by police officers, federal agents, and their confederates cannot be tolerated and will be met with the full force of the law.

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

I still have admiration for the vast majority of police officers, but there is no denying that some are guilty of mistreating the people they are supposed to serve.

Some cops I don't like - the corrupt, the brutal.

Do I acknowledge that there are some law enforcement officers that abuse their job? Yes.

Cops today are nothing but an armed tax collector

...Right now there's a pair of bad cops on their way out here to shoot me." "You don't know that." "Yeah, you're right," Stranahan said. "They're probably just collecting Toys for Tots. Now go.

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

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

Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.

The full resources of the Department of Justice have been committed to the investigation into Michael Brown's death.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

Anyone who wears a badge has the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens

Under the classification rules observed by the Senate, we are not even allowed to tap out the truth in Morse code—and we tried just about everything else we could think of to warn the American people.

It is especially jarring when police officers are the killers because they are an entity of the state itself, so when the state shows a lack of sensitivity, community members feel it is an obvious example of abuse..

I don't want the books to become PR exercises for the police; I want to have the freedom to write about cops who cross the line: bad cops.

An abusive cop does not equal a bigoted police department.

Police cannot be allowed to continue aggressive, violent, and often unconstitutional policing with impunity.

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

The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

As we move forward, I am looking for a new leader of the Chicago Police Department to address the problems at the very heart of the policing profession. The problem is sometimes referred to as "the thin blue line." The problem is other times referred to as "the code of silence." It is this tendency to ignore. It is the tendency to deny. It is the tendency, in some cases, to cover up the bad actions of a colleague or colleagues.

There's one overriding issue, namely, that we live in a police state so long as the police get to police themselves. And that is why cops go unindicted.

The police are very mean people sometimes.