Quotes About Police Violence

#1. The Polish freedom movement of 1968 lost its confrontation with police violence; the Prague Spring was crushed by the armies of five Warsaw Pact members. But in both countries, 1968 gave birth to a new political consciousness.

Adam Michnik

#2. I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

Angela Davis

#3. Another bigger problem is the fact that these incidents of police violence continue to occur because far too often the officers on the force rally around the one who committed the act of violence and, in this particular instance, may have engaged in a cover-up that itself should be prosecuted.

Hakeem Jeffries

#4. Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protestors.

J.G. Ballard

#5. A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective.

Molly Crabapple

#6. An act of violence against any innocent person eludes moral justification, disgraces the millions of Americans and people throughout the world who have united in peaceful protest against police brutality, and dishonors our proud inheritance of nonviolent resistance.

Benjamin Crump

#7. Through baseball we channel boys desire for exercise and let off their explosive violence without letting them get into the police court.

Herbert Hoover

#8. The police, and the strikers also, were determined that there should be no violence; but there was another party interested which was minded to the contrary - and that was the press.

Upton Sinclair

#9. Power depends ultimately on physical force. By teaching people that violence is wrong (except, of course, when the system itself uses violence via the police or the military), the system maintains its monopoly on physical force and thus keeps all power in its own hands.

Theodore Kaczynski

#10. In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other's blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven's love.

Aberjhani

#11. The amount of gender violence that I experience is absolutely extraordinary. And a significant part of my day today will be spent filing police reports at home about gender violence that's directed at me in social media.

Ashley Judd

#12. I cannot speak adequately, especially considering my race and my privilege, to the violence of the NYPD or the police in racial terms. That is something that I cannot speak adequately to.

Cecily McMillan

#13. There are people that are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use your violence in certain circumstances.

George Orwell

#14. If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.

Malcolm X

#15. I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?
Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#16. We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were much younger and our lines were headed to the cafeteria or recess or the carpool line. Or it could've been a fire drill. Except for the stone-faced police officers weaving between us with rifles.

Laura Anderson Kurk

#17. The power to prevent violence is a power that no police force seems to have anywhere in the United States.

John Abizaid

#18. I get it,' said the prisoner. 'Good Cop, Bad Cop, eh?'
If you like.' said Vimes. 'But we're a bit short staffed here, so if I give you a cigarette would you mind kicking yourself in the teeth?

Terry Pratchett

#19. Any use of the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, in connection with any violence or killing of police, is reprehensible and against the pursuit of justice in both cases.

Al Sharpton

#20. There was just one cheeky bastard in the club that night and it started World War Three. There was a bloodbath down there, they all got locked up, and the police dogs didn't need feeding for a week after that.

Stephen Richards

#21. I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred.

Tess Gerritsen

#22. As had been the case in the founding of Citizens Alert in 1965, the point that most linked gay politics to the struggles of other marginalized communities was that of state violence - in particular, police brutality.

Christina B. Hanhardt

#23. I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language - violence.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#24. People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

George Orwell

#25. [The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.

Allen W. Dulles

#26. How can I make a movie about the violence of the police if the police aren't going to let me film it?

Jose Padilha

#27. Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.

Guy Debord

#28. Where there are drones, there will always be police. Where there are police, there will always be violence.

Ian McDonald

#29. I live in Miami, which can be a dangerous place, with a segment of the population capable of horrific acts of violence. And those are the police. The criminals are even worse.

Dave Barry

#30. I am deeply worried because we are seeing an unleashing of violence by 2,000 to 3,000 thugs who come to smash and loot. My objective is to avoid mistakes by the police, so that people can protest in safety.

Nicolas Sarkozy

#31. Sarah Palin's whole family got into a drunken public fistfight. Something police are calling a 'tragic case of trash-on-trash violence.'

Bill Maher

#32. The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules.

Steven Pinker

#33. Although I had committed just about every sort of assault imaginable on people and even the odd one or two against the police, I still had and still do have respect for the old school policeman.

Stephen Richards