Police Militarization Quotes

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

Being a cop is often seeing the worst of the human condition and behavior. With all of that said, there is no reason that Mike Brown and also Eric Garner are dead today - except bad policing, excessive force, and the hunt-and-capture-prey mentality many thrill-seeking cops have adapted.

There is not one single police officer in America that I am not afraid of and not one that I would trust to tell the truth or obey the laws they are sworn to uphold. I do not believe they protect me in any way.

I've portrayed cops as heroes for far too long, I think.

I think the over-militarization of local police forces is also true of the over-militarization of the federal government, so I don't really run and hide from the comment that I think there are 48 federal agencies that have SWAT teams.

Ultimately, policing in and of itself is problematic.

I think occasionally it's the presence - or increased presence - of federal law enforcement that can cause that fear.

I will never forget the first time I was teargassed or the night I hid under my steering wheel as the SWAT vehicle drove down a residential street. I will never forget that it was illegal - in St Louis, in the fall of 2014 - to stand still.

For instance, why are we terrorizing this country, leading with murder and mayhem, when crime is actually on the decline, as somebody, as somebody mentioned?

The police are not taking accountability for the violence that they enact in our communities, and yet there isn't as much outrage about that as there is about some broken windows and lost property.

I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.

What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.

Police Against the New World Order

There are now 17,000 local American police forces that are armed with rocket launchers, bazookas, heavy machine guns, all kinds of chemical sprays, in fact some of them have tanks. You now have local police departments that are equipped beyond the standard of American heavy infantry.

Indiscriminate firing by police on people is absolute barbarism. Instead of solving their problems, the government is trying to suppress the people by force.

It's an issue that we need to have a national discussion about, the militarization of local police forces, and then when they are used to quell peaceful demonstration. Then we have a problem, and especially around this entire case of the murder of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson police officer.

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

I know there are those in the community who, rather than have us invest more in policing, even for community policing, instead want us to disinvest in the police department. We need a police department. We are going to have a police department.

I'll be honest with you: I think that it's really difficult, this framing around 'good cops' and 'bad cops.' Policing, as a system, is incredibly corrupt, period.

This is the problem with the United States: there's no leadership. A leader would say, 'Police brutality is an oxymoron. There are no brutal police. The minute you become brutal you're no longer police.' So, what, we're not dealing with police. We're dealing with a federally authorized gang.

Everyone is now considered a potential terrorist, providing a rational for both the government and private corporations to spy on anybody, regardless of whether they have committed a crime. Surveillance is supplemented by a growing domestic army of baton-wielding police forces who are now being supplied with the latest military equipment.

Our nation has slashed budgets for education, job training, economic development, and drug treatment while investing billions in prisons and militarized police. A penal system unprecedented in world history has been born. Millions have been arrested and stripped of basic civil and human rights.

What the media does to Trump is what they did the cops - say the police are really harmful, then later ask why people are so scared of the police.

No one made a decision to militarize the police in America. The change has come slowly, the result of a generation of politicians and public officials fanning and exploiting public fears by declaring war on abstractions like crime, drug use, and terrorism. The resulting policies have made those war metaphors increasingly real.

We make violent cops, we make violent criminals, and no wonder we have shootouts in slums all of the time.