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Police State Quotes

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Police State Quotes

“Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism! So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and innocence.”

CommunismTotalitarianismPolice StateSoviet RussiaStalinism19731938Double ThinkSecurity StateArbitrary Arrest
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? What do you need to make you stronger than the Interrogator and the whole trap? From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: "My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me." Confronted by such a prisoner, the Interrogation will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.”

TotalitarianismRenunciationPolice StateSoviet RussiaInterrogation1969Prison Industry
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of "national security," had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU [Russian State security agency], so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Leon Blum's popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with "prejudices" against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they never bothered to conceal their sympathies. That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.”

National SecurityTotalitarianismNazismRefugeesPolice State1967GestapoConcentration Camps1938Stateless
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.”

PoliticsUnited StatesHealth CareCryingNational SecurityIraq WarPolice StateLibelHillary Clinton2008United States Elections 2008Health Care In The United StatesClinton Health Care Plan Of 1993
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Where conflicts arise between workers and bosses, between the rights of one class and the interests of the other, the machinery of the law is typically used as a weapon against the workers. Even where the law is contrary to the demands of powerful corporations, the police often act not from principle or legal obligation, but according to the needs of the ruling class. This tendency shouldn’t surprise us, if we remember the lengths to which the cops have gone in the defense of White supremacy, even as laws and policies have changed. With class, as with race, it is the status quo that the police act to preserve and the interests of the powerful that they seek to defend, not the rule of law or public safety. The law, in fact, has been a rather weak guide for those who are meant to enforce it.”

PoliceUnionsWorking ClassPolice BrutalityUnionPolice StateState BrutalityWorkers Union
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“Police activism, especially in the guise of union activity, remains somewhat perplexing. The historical development is clear enough, but politically it is troublesome—especially for the left. The whole issue presents a nest of paradoxes: the police have unionized and gone on strike—but continue in their role as strikebreakers. They have pitted themselves against their bosses and the government, but represent a threat to democracy rather than an expression of it. They have resisted authority for the sake of authoritarian aims, have broken laws in the name of law and order, and have demanded rights that they consistently deny to others. (...) Police associations thus developed in relative isolation from the rest of the labor movement, while building close ties with the command hierarchy within the departments. This fact points to two related reasons why police unions are not legitimate labor unions. First, as is discussed above, the police are clearly part of the managerial machinery of capitalism. Their status as “workers” is therefore problematic. Second, the agendas of police unions mostly reflect the interests of the institution (the police department) rather than those of the working class.”

UnionsWorking ClassPolice BrutalityUnionPolice StateState BrutalityWorkers Union
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“If you want to make the police uncomfortable, all you need to do is ask this question: How many complaints does police internal affairs receive annually and how many complaints does it actually uphold?”

PoliceUncomfortableComplaintsPolice BrutalityPolicemenQuestionPolice OfficerPolice CorruptionPolice StateAffairsInternalPolicemanReceivePolice ReformPolice ProceduralComplaintPolice ServiceActuallyUpholdUncomfortable TruthAnnuallyComplaint DeptUncomfortable QuoteUncomfortable Quotes
Author:Steven Magee
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“Police intentionally murdering a mentally unstable person will always be unacceptable when there are numerous other non-lethal options available to them.”

MurderPoliceMental HealthAvailableMental IllnessMentalPersonPolice BrutalityPolicemenSheriffPolice OfficerUnstableAlwaysPolice CorruptionPolice StateMental DisorderOptionsThemPolicemanPolice ReformPolice ProceduralPolice ServiceMental DisordersOptionNumerousLethalUnacceptableIntentionallyOptions QuotesMurderingNon Lethal
Author:Steven Magee
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“Police not enforcing laws results in a high crime rate that is formally reported as a low crime rate in police statistics.”

LawResultsCrimePoliceRateReportsStatisticsEnforcementPolice BrutalityPolicemenHighPolice OfficerNotLawsPolice CorruptionPolice StateLegal SystemResultPolicemanReportingPolice ReformPolice ProceduralPolice ServiceLowReportResults QuotesReportedEnforceStatistics QuotesStatistical AnalysisFormallyEnforcingEnforcing Laws
Author:Steven Magee
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“The best thing to do when someone is trying to argue with you is to repeatedly state "Stay Away" and video record the entire event. You may need that video for the police afterwords when the aggressor starts fabricating fantasies about the event.”

FantasyEventsArgumentPoliceArguingVideoPolice BrutalityPolicemenFantasy FictionPolice OfficerPolice CorruptionPolice StateArgueFabricateRecordEventRecordingArguementsFabricated QuotesFabricated EvidenceFabricated MemoryArgumentativem
Author:Steven Magee
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“When it is a law abiding common person versus the police internal affairs regarding a corrupt or incompetent police officer, the statistics show that it is the common person that most frequently loses.”

LawLosesCommonPoliceCorruptionStatisticsVersusPersonPolice BrutalityPolicemenAbidingCorruptPolice OfficerIncompetentPolice CorruptionPolice StateMostAffairsShowCorruption QuotesOfficerInternalPolicemanPolice ReformPolice ServiceRegardingFrequently
Author:Steven Magee
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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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“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 elaborate and rather flexible political police system established in Russia in the early 1880s was unique in at least two respects. Before the First World War no other country in the world had two kinds of police, one to protect the state and another to protect its citizens. Only a country with a deeply rooted patrimonial mentality could have devised such a dualism. Secondly, unlike other countries, where the police served as an arm of the law and was required to turn over all arrested persons to the judiciary, in imperial Russia and there alone police organs were exempt from this obligation.”

RussiaPolice StateRussian History
Book:Russia Under the Old Regime
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“By apeculiar coincidence, the very day when I was giving my address in Washington, Mikhail Suslov was talking with your senators in the Kremlin. And he said, "In fact the significance of our trade is more political than economic. We can get along without your trade." That is a lie. The whole existence of our slaveowners from beginning to end relies on Western economic assistance....The Soviet economy has an extremely low level of efficiency. What is done here by a few people, by a few machines, in our country takes tremendous crowds of workers and enormous amounts of material. Therefore, the Soviet economy cannot deal with every problem at once: war, space (which is part of the war effort), heavy industry, light industry, and at the same time feed and clothe its own population. The forces of the entire Soviet economy are concentrated on war, where you don't help them. But everything lacking, everything needed to fill the gaps, everything necessary to free the people, or for other types of industry, they get from you. So indirectly you are helping their military preparations. You are helping the Soviet police state.”

WarTradeCommunismEfficiencyUnited States Of AmericaSoviet UnionPolice StateSpace RaceSoviet Economy
Book:Warning to the West
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“Every few months, white people trot out a new title in a series called Cops Keep Killing People. Each new release has the latest tragic scene on the cover. It sure seems to be the same book recycled over and over, but please don't form a judgment until you read all five hundred pages. Maybe this time the story will end differently and the cops will be the hero!”

MurderPoliceBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryPolice BrutalitySystemic RacismPolice StateRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial Injustice
Book:How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice From White People
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“As journalist Matt Taibbi recalls in his book The Divide: It’s become cliché by now, but since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Even now, after JP Morgan Chase agreed to a settlement north of $13 billion for a variety of offenses.… the basic principle held true: nobody went to jail. Not one person. (...) On the one hand, he finds, “Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no charges”; on the other, the San Diego County District Attorney’s office conducts 26,000 warrantless, preemptive searches every year to make sure that welfare recipients really are exactly as poor as the poverty bureaucracy demands that they be.”

PolicePolice BrutalityPolice StateState Brutality
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“American capitalism needs a steady supply of immigrant labor, but it needs it cheap. By criminalizing the workers, the state helps to keep them uncertain, uneasy, disorganized, and docile. The attack on immigrants, therefore, is both “[p]olitically…an organic expression of nativist hostility and a very useful, rational system of elite-inspired class control”—“the primary product” of which “is… fear.”

CapitalismPolicePolice BrutalityPolice StateState Brutality
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed to the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression... Only in the mid 19th century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots - after the dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed the dread of the state - did police departments emerge in the United States.”

PoliceAmerican HistoryAmerican IndianPolice StateOsage
Book:Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
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“In 1924–1929, sentences were determined by joint administrative and economic consideration. Beginning in 1924, because of national unemployment, the courts reduced the number of verdicts which sentenced prisoners to corrective labor while they continued to live at home and increased short-term prison sentences. These cases involved only nonpolitical offenders, of course. As a result, prisons were overcrowded with short-termers serving sentences of up to six months, and not enough use was being made of them in labor colonies. At the beginning of 1929, the People's Commissariat of justice of the U.S.S.R., in Circular No. 5, condemned short-term sentences and, on November 6, 1929, the eve of the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, when the country was supposedly entering on the construction of socialism, a decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars simply forbade all sentences of less than one year!”

SocialismUnemploymentTotalitarianismPolice State197319241929In The Engine Room
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“The apparent conflict between the law and police practices may not be so important as we tend to assume. The two may, at times, be at odds, but this is of little concern so long as the interests they serve are essentially the same. The police may violate the law, as long as they do so in the pursuit of ends that people with power generally endorse, and from which such people profit.”

ViolencePolicePolice BrutalityPolice StateState ViolenceMilitarization
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“When the police enforce the law, they do so unevenly, in ways that give disproportionate attention to the activities of poor people, people of color, and others near the bottom of the social pyramid. And when the police violate the law, these same people are their most frequent victims. This is a coincidence too large to overlook. If we put aside, for the moment, all questions of legality, it must become quite clear that the object of police attention, and the target of police violence, is overwhelmingly that portion of the population that lacks real power.”

ViolencePolicePolice BrutalityPolice StateState ViolenceMilitarization
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“In Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel makes a useful comparison between the rhetoric abusive men employ to justify beating up their girlfriends, wives, or children and the publicly traded justifications for widespread racism. He writes: During the first few years that I worked with men who are violent I was continually perplexed by their inability to see the effects of their actions and their ability to deny the violence they had done to their partners or children. I only slowly became aware of the complex set of tactics that men use to make violence against women invisible and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These tactics are listed below in the rough order that men employ them.… (1) Denial: “I didn’t hit her.” (2) Minimization: “It was only a slap.” (3) Blame: “She asked for it.” (4) Redefinition: “It was mutual combat.” (5) Unintentionality: “Things got out of hand.” (6) It’s over now: “I’ll never do it again.” (7) It’s only a few men: “Most men wouldn’t hurt a woman.” (8) Counterattack: “She controls everything.” (9) Competing victimization: “Everybody is against men.” Kivel goes on to detail the ways these nine tactics are used to excuse (or deny) institutionalized racism. Each of these tactics also has its police analogy, both as applied to individual cases and in regard to the general issue of police brutality. Here are a few examples: (1) Denial. “The professionalism and restraint … was nothing short of outstanding.” “America does not have a human-rights problem.” (2) Minimization. Injuries were “of a minor nature.” “Police use force infrequently.” (3) Blame. “This guy isn’t Mr. Innocent Citizen, either. Not by a long shot.” “They died because they were criminals.” (4) Redefinition. It was “mutual combat.” “Resisting arrest.” “The use of force is necessary to protect yourself.” (5) Unintentionality. “[O]fficers have no choice but to use deadly force against an assailant who is deliberately trying to kill them.…” (6) It’s over now. “We’re making changes.” “We will change our training; we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.” (7) It’s only a few men. “A small proportion of officers are disproportionately involved in use-of-force incidents.” “Even if we determine that the officers were out of line … it is an aberration.” (8) Counterattack. “The only thing they understand is physical force and pain.” “People make complaints to get out of trouble.” (9) Competing victimization. The police are “in constant danger.” “[L]iberals are prejudiced against police, much as many white police are biased against Negroes.” The police are “the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” Another commonly invoked rationale for justifying police violence is: (10) The Hero Defense. “These guys are heroes.” “The police routinely do what the rest of us don’t: They risk their lives to keep the peace. For that selfless bravery, they deserve glory, laud and honor.” “[W]ithout the police … anarchy would be rife in this country, and the civilization now existing on this hemisphere would perish.” “[T]hey alone stand guard at the upstairs door of Hell.”

ViolencePolicePolice BrutalityPolice StateState ViolenceMilitarization
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“Let us concentrate on the question of why the state (meaning, here, the civil authorities) would let the police claim the means of violence as their own. Police brutality does not just happen; it is allowed to happen. It is tolerated by the police themselves, those on the street and those in command. It is tolerated by prosecutors, who seldom bring charges against violent cops, and by juries, who rarely convict. It is tolerated by the civil authorities, the mayors, and the city councils, who do not use their influence to challenge police abuses. But why? The answer is simple: police brutality is tolerated because it is what people with power want.”

ViolencePolicePolice BrutalityPolice StateState ViolenceMilitarization
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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