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Police Brutality Quotes

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Police Brutality Quotes

“A man with a rifle or a club can only be stopped by a person who defends himself with a rifle or a club. That's equality. If the United States government doesn't want you and me to have rifles, then take the rifles away from those racists. If they don't want you and me to use clubs, take the clubs away from the racists. If they don't want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Don't teach us non-violence!!!”

ViolenceRacismEqualityCivil RightsPolice BrutalityGun RightsGovernment Abuse
Author:Malcolm X
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“In addition, the distortion of actual crime statistics vs. media coverage, shows that news outlets portray black Americans being depicted as suspects or criminals at a rate that exceeds actual arrest statistics for those same crimes by a whopping 24 percentage points- a disparity which reveals a horrific implicit bias in reporting.”

RaceJournalismPolice BrutalityRacial ProfilingMedia BiasRacial InjusticeRacism In The WestCrime Reporting
Author:Alice Minium
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“As a journalist, in blindly, parroting these police reports, I am also leaving out a significant amount of social context- the context, and begging question all social institutions ought to consider, of whether it is actually advantageous to anyone to persecute nonviolent offenders with a medieval vigilance that feeds the very problems it hopes to fight, and to waste both police resources and valuable news time lending importance to something that is so obviously only “News” in the way that it highlights a particularly ugly facet of our criminal justice system, and by doing so, we lend it a power which is ethically not its due.”

RaceJournalismPolice BrutalityRacial ProfilingMedia BiasRacial InjusticeRacism In The WestCrime Reporting
Author:Alice Minium
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“This style of reporting parrots and gives greater legitimacy to the frankly disturbing level of vigilance police seem to exercise in their war on poor nonviolent offenders, a vigilance which all too clearly paints a scantly unflattering portrait of the priorities of police, and the prevalence of white supremacist attitudes across all institutional levels.”

RaceJournalismPolice BrutalityRacial ProfilingMedia BiasRacial InjusticeRacism In The WestCrime Reporting
Author:Alice Minium
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“I don’t think anyone deserves to rot in jail the rest of their lives for stealing a pack of cigarettes. The court systems will be no kinder to these people than police have been, and both are avid practitioners of a convenient morality that consigns millions of black Americans to poverty with its selective policies, then persecutes those same black Americans at a disproportionate rate (almost a rate of 1:5) for the same (often nonviolent) crimes, openly regards black Americans with brutality (often killing people in cold blood for no reason other than that they ‘look like’ the grainy photos of 'suspects' I report), and then condemns millions of black Americans, each year, to lives in prison- too often for nothing more than the crime of stealing a pack of cigarettes.”

RaceJournalismPolice BrutalityRacial ProfilingMedia BiasRacial InjusticeRacism In The WestCrime Reporting
Author:Alice Minium
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“Popular media uses the depersonalized ‘Unidentified Black Suspect’ as little more than a plot device in its parable of implicit racism- while ignoring the fact that these are people, not plot devices, and that black lives are not ours to own, and the story of black culture is not one white people get to define and rewrite according to what generates clicks and viewership.”

RaceJournalismPolice BrutalityRacial ProfilingMedia BiasRacial InjusticeRacism In The WestCrime Reporting
Author:Alice Minium
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“Curiously, the surveillance, harassment, infiltration, arrests, sabotage, slander, disruption, and petty bullshit endured by the left is only rarely matched by the level police action against the right. Even during World War II, when the U.S. was at war with Nazi Germany and allied with the Soviet Union, the NYPD still invested more resources in infiltrating the Communist Party than in monitoring fascists. Likewise, though the FBI eventually initiated COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE against the Klan—an effort that lasted seven years and included infiltration, sabotage, snitch-jacketing, electronic surveillance, black-bag jobs, and petty harassment — 98 percent of COINTELPRO files concerned leftist movements.”

PolicePolice BrutalityLeftistsPolice StateThe Left
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“Need Teachers Not Cops (The Sonnet) The world needs less cops and more teachers, While cops enforce law, teachers instill accountability. Thus law enforcement only produces an illusion of order, It's the teachers who can create a crime-free society. If students are the future, teachers are future maker, So be civilized and focus on lifting teachers and students. Government of baboons invests in police 'n defense contracts, While a truly civilized government invests in education. Arm the teachers with books and students with sustenance, Then watch them accomplish the impossible future, A future of true lasting order, reform and harmony, Which a billion police cannot achieve in a billion years. Society that empowers teachers empowers peace. Society that empowers police empowers malice.”

EducationLaw EnforcementPolice BrutalitySocial DevelopmentCriminologyCrime PreventionTeaching As LeadershipDefense ContractorsDefund The PoliceTeachers And Students
Book:Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission
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“If one views police as sophisticated agents who have effectively infiltrated and repressed progressive social movements for 150 years, then their violence and spying on 2020 protesters cannot be mystified as anomalous or the result of a lack of "preparation," "training," or "resources." And you can see the obfuscation in one of the most glaring omissions in the articles: they make no acknowledgment that police committed many thousands of intentional crimes. If the news acknowledged those acts as crimes, it would have to turn a piece about a lack of "training" into one about why police, prosecutors, and federal authorities in virtually every city largely chose to ignore those crimes. And what would that story get people thinking about?”

Police BrutalityCopagandaThe Mafia In BlueGeorge FloydPolice MurderPolice Murder Of George Floyd2020 ProtestsPolice Criminality
Book:Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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“The news affected Senderovsky more than it did the others. He watched the video footage of the Midwestern murder-by-cop over and over while he was on the toilet locked in the upstairs bathroom. He memorized the scene. The ugly institutional shoes, the ugly institutional pants, the baton and flashlight and walkie-talkie, the upturned sunglasses worn high over the buzz cut, and beneath all that brute institutional force, a dying man crying out the last word that was likely also his first, those two repeating syllables, Ma and Ma. And then he was a man no more, but a lifeless slab hoisted on an institutional gurney, and there was static and instructions and dispatch codes. All of it perfectly commonplace, like an order for Gruyere cheese placed at the local market for curbside pickup.”

DeathMurderPolicePolice BrutalityCopsGeorge Floyd
Book:Our Country Friends
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“As an immigrant his mission had been simple. He was brought here by his parents to make money off what an important Jewish author had once termed "the American berserk." You came, they laughed at your accent on an urban playground, and then you were given your degrees and guided into battle. By which point, you were just a scab sent in to reinforce the established order. In the video, as the white policeman was draining the air from his Black victim's lungs with his knee, another cop, a Hmong immigrant, stood in front of him in a wide-open stance, daring anyone to come to the dying man's aid. He could have been a Russian, a Korean, a Gujarati. All of us, Senderovsky thought, are in service to an order that has long predated us. All of us have come to feast on this land of bondage. And all of us are useful and expendable in turn.”

AmericaUnited StatesRacismPoliceImmigrantsUnited States Of AmericaPolice BrutalitySystemic RacismUsGeorge Floyd
Book:Our Country Friends
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“I read about Ahmaud, I said. I read about Breonna. I don’t say, but I thought it: I know their beloveds’ wail. I know their beloveds’ wail. I know their beloveds wander their pandemic rooms, pass through their sudden ghosts. I know their loss burns their beloveds’ throats like acid. Their families will speak, I thought. Ask for justice. And no one will answer, I thought. I know this story: Trayvon, Tamir, Sandra. Cuz, I said, I think you told me this story before. I think I wrote it.”

RacismPoliceBlack Lives MatterPolice BrutalityGeorge FloydBreonna TaylorAhmaud Arbery
Author:Jesmyn Ward
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“Despite the fact that there are many honest and capable police officers in our States, with the persistent events of brutality and incompetence in mind I am compelled to say that the US police department is one of the most unfit, brainless, gutless and backboneless police forces in the world. Defunding such police force won't do any good, we must legislate compulsory regular clinical counseling for each and every officer of the law.”

Police BrutalityLaw And OrderPolice StatePolice OfficersPolice ForcePolice ReformPhilosophy Of LawImplicit BiasesDefund The PoliceCops Politeness V Brutality
Book:Bulldozer on Duty
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“The black officer checks Daddy while his partner glances around at all of the onlookers. There's quite a few of us now. Ms. Yvette and a couple of her clients stand in her doorway, towels around the clients' shoulders. A car has stopped in the street. "Everyone, go about your own business," the white one says. "No, sir," says Tim. "This is our business.”

PoliceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityInstitutional RacismWitnesses
Book:The Hate U Give
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“I asked another friend what it's like being the mother of a black son. "The condition of black life is one of mourning," she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son's reality. At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.”

RaceDangerRacismPrejudiceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityInstitutional Racism
Book:The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
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“Lieutenant Thomas R. Gilligan, thirty-seven, was off duty and out of uniform, checking out TVs in an electronics store. He went to investigate the commotion and stopped James Powell, a ninth grader who had joined the mob of angry students. Powell was unarmed, according to witnesses. Gilligan maintained that the boy flashed a knife. He shot him three times. Two days later, Harlem erupted. Pierce told Carney, "You have the people who are angry. Justifably so. And then there's the police force. How are they going to defend this shit? Again! And city hall and the activists. And in the way back of the room, you can barely hear a little voice, and that's the family. They've lost a son. Somebody has to speak for them." "They're going to sue?" "Sue and win. You know they ain't going to fire the bastard." Sermon crept into his voice here. "What kind of message will that send--that their police force is accountable? We'll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.”

RacismPoliceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityHarlemRiotsInstitutional RacismUprisings
Book:Harlem Shuffle
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“You mean when you called Khalil a drug dealer?" He nods. "Even if he was, I knew that boy. Watched him grow up with you. He was more than any bad decision he made," he says. "I hate that I let myself fall into that mind-set of trying to rationalize his death. And at the end of the day, you don't kill someone for opening a car door. If you do, you shouldn't be a cop.”

DeathPoliceDrugsAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityRationalizationDrug Dealers
Book:The Hate U Give
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“A primary function of police for 150 years has been to surveil, infiltrate, and crush progressive social movements seeking to reduce inequality. It's why police spied on, infiltrated, brutally repressed, and continue to crush labor, feminist, civil rights, anti-war, LGBTQ, environmental, reproductive rights, indigenous, and economic social justice movements.”

Civil RightsPolice BrutalityEnvironmentalismReproductive RightsCopagandaThe Mafia In BlueWorkers RightsLabor Rights
Book:Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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