Al Sharpton Quotes

A militarized police force facing down innocent protesters with sniper rifles and machine guns is totally unacceptable in America.

While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police, only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos.

What the cops did to Rodney King was wrong, and the officers who beat him should be sent straight to prison.

Hundreds of policemen and detectives, swinging nightsticks, blackjacks, and bare fists, rushed into the crowd, hitting out at all with whom they came into contract, chasing many across the street and into adjacent thoroughfares and pushing hundreds off their feet. From all parts of the scene of battle came the screams of women and cries of men with bloody heads and faces.

The kind of violence, looting, destruction that we saw from a handful of individuals in Baltimore, there's no excuse for that. That's not a statement. That's not politics. That's not activism. That's just criminal behavior.

I can't believe that OMON [Russia's riot police] would hit a girl. I simply can't imagine it.

Who can sit back as our towns and cities are torn apart by violence and be content with the status quo?

No one knew what Rodney King had done beforehand to be stopped. No one realized that he was a parolee and that he was violating his parole. No one knew any of those things. All they saw was this grainy film and police officers hitting him over the head.

I was knocked down and dragged by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run.

I could see flames from the windows of my chambers. For the next three or four days we had major rioting here in Washington and I stayed at the court day and night.

We're not anti-police... we're anti-police brutality.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

I don't like the idea that the police department seems bent on keeping a pool of unarmed victims available for the predations of the criminal class.

The police seemed to lose their head completely as they dashed into the crowds on their horses and slashed out with their clubs.

Laquan McDonald is a wake-up call to all of us. It's a reminder there's a lot broken.

Michael Brown's death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America.

I can remember being young and being outside and watch guys go through what they go through with the police, and old ladies come outside their house and be like, 'Oh, Lord, they're hitting him,' or whatever is happening. You see it right in front of your face.

Freddie Gray was a story I followed closer than others, for whatever reason, in this larger narrative of police brutality.

I know a lot of police officers who are on the force to do the right thing to protect people. But how can you deny this pattern, this disturbing pattern, Alton Sterling, Mr. Castile in my own community, Philando Castile, but then Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland?

Police brutality is definitely still very alive and active.

No one's pro-police brutality.

It's a tragedy. It was tragedy for Freddie Gray and the family. It was a tragedy for the city. And we're still trying to figure out how it happened and why it happened.

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.

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

I've had friends who have been beaten up by police officers who put phone books in their T-shirts and then beat them up, then drive off.