Corrupt Police Quotes

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No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder
Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)
Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.
Frank Herbert (God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4))
In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.
Aberjhani (The River of Winged Dreams)
Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
Corrupt and incompetent police officers have a long history of being protected by their colleagues, police internal affairs and the government.
Steven Magee
It is the common peoples duty to police the police.
Steven Magee
It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
Dear God, please help me to be the kind of person who my dogs think I am.
Jerrie Brock (Something Taken (Terry Roche #1))
If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.
Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.
Dale Carpenter (Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas)
Corporate media rarely reports the fact that police internal affairs uphold hardly any complaints from the masses.
Steven Magee
I have interacted with the police complaints and internal affairs division twice and both times I came away with the opinion that I was dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people.
Steven Magee
And then they would watch her closely as the dark, coagulated masses took form before her eyes, became flesh and bone, became gradually human. For all their show of reluctance, she had a sense that they enjoyed introducing her to these horrors, as seducers took pleasure in the corruption of innocence.
Philip Sington (The Einstein Girl)
It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.
Wilhelm Reich (Listen, Little Man!)
There was a ringing in his ears, like a dead phone line that he couldn’t hang up on.
Mark Capell (Run, Run, Run)
The police have lost sight of the fact that they are public servants.
Steven Magee
I almost forgot to tell you - you have the right to remain silent, but if you do, my boys at the station will process your bones to help you confess.
Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)
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?
Steven Magee
The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit." If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
John was still making comments regarding violent things that he shouldn't, but I hoped he was just being a big mouth. Nobody was going to listen to me anyway.
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
Until the police internal affairs system starts prosecuting and firing a substantial number of corrupt and incompetent police officers, I will not be lighting it up blue!
Steven Magee
In the era of angry and aggressive policing, it is an honorable service to your fellow citizens to video record police officers interactions with the common people.
Steven Magee
As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise.
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
Surrender is no guarantee that an armed police officer will not shoot you.
Steven Magee
No amount of community policing will cause the common people to accept a known corrupt police department.
Steven Magee
It was unsettling. For a moment he believed she could see straight through his brain. Not that there was much to see. Still, he doubted she'd feel more amiably toward him if, for instance, she could discern how vast an amount of mental space his fantasies of seduction occupied, compared to the cramped corner devoted to the problem of murdered guides and corrupt police.
Loretta Chase (Mr. Impossible (Carsington Brothers, #2))
Most police cars are the equivalent of an electrical room on wheels and it does not surprise me that police officers that spend time in such a biologically toxic environment are displaying aggression.
Steven Magee
Perpetual war allows globalists to continue funding dirty black-ops drug smuggling, corrupt banking practices, political bribes, and assassinations. Perpetual war can be seen as an excuse for spying on Americans, militarizing police agencies, and laws allowing the federal government to declare any American citizen an “enemy combatant” and holding them without warrant or habeas corpus as well as spying with drones. With
Jim Marrs (Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us)
Most USA citizens never realize that the systems of public protection are essentially useless until they try to use them. At that point they learn the hard way that government agencies like OSHA, FCC, FDA, police internal affairs, disability, and the like do not work for them.
Steven Magee
I think it is a wise person who does not answer the door to uninvited police officers. Who knows what kind of crazy person could be standing there with a loaded gun!
Steven Magee
We live in, arguably, the most developed, powerful country in the world, yet we are still unable to find a way to keep corrupt cops from killing black men. Why is that?
Carlos Wallace
We live in a lawless society with a facade of law enforcement.
Steven Magee
Police officers are among the most corrupt people that I have encountered in life.
Steven Magee
You know that when a police officer refuses to produce formal identification on request, they are probably engaging in some form of corruption.
Steven Magee
Police intentionally murdering a mentally unstable person will always be unacceptable when there are numerous other non-lethal options available to them.
Steven Magee
More powerful than armies and police, stronger than guns and bombs, words are what change the world, and that is why they’re always a threat to those that rule with corrupt ways
Brandt Legg (The Last Librarian (The Justar Journal #1))
...I never once believed what they wanted us to believe - that we as black people are inferior to whites...
Darcus Howe
Police internal affairs is amongst the most corrupt departments that you will find in governments.
Steven Magee
I think we may have reached the point where guns need to be confiscated from police officers.
Steven Magee
You know that when ex-military personnel start assassinating their own government's agents that something funky is going on.
Steven Magee
At its core, police brutality is about power and corruption. Police brutality is about the intersection of fear and guns.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
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.
Steven Magee
The Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence. He is impatient for the time when he will be sent to Siberia; for his martyrdom comes to an end when his punishment begins.
Alexander Herzen (Childhood, Youth and Exile)
All the methods of appointing authorities that have been tried, divine right, and election, and heredity, and balloting, and assemblies and parliaments and senate—all have proved ineffectual. Everyone knows that not one of these methods attains the aim either of entrusting power only to the incorruptible, or of preventing power from being abused. Everyone knows on the contrary that men in authority—be they emperors, ministers, governors, or police officers—are always, simply from the possession of power, more liable to be demoralized, that is, to subordinate public interests to their personal aims than those who have not the power to do so. Indeed, it could not be otherwise.
Leo Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You)
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.
Steven Magee
Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?
Don DeLillo (Mao II)
Police officers seem nice until they start targeting you for stops, give you a bogus speeding ticket and write fake police reports about their interactions with you
Steven Magee
The problem with law enforcement is not corruption, but an absolute denial of that corruption.
Abhijit Naskar (Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent)
The government is just as corrupt as their police officers.
Steven Magee
The police can be more corrupt than the criminals.
Steven Magee
There is no shortage of despicable law enforcement departments in the USA.
Steven Magee
While police officers who blatantly shaft the common people believe that they are God, they are the Devil to those that they wrong.
Steven Magee
If you have bought the law enforcement department, then you have done nothing wrong when you willfully break multiple laws.
Steven Magee
If you want to kill someone and get away with it, become a cop.
Steven Magee
No country can police corruption in other countries when it itself is not free from corruption. You cannot clean a dirty wall with dirty hands.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
The 'thin blue line' is nothing more than the no snitching policy found in any other criminal gang.
Dane Whalen
The world doesn't need more bent police who pretend to uphold the law in front of an investigation, it needs more just police who practice justice even when nobody is looking.
Abhijit Naskar (Operation Justice: To Make A Society That Needs No Law)
I will focus on how the institution is organized, and how that structure—anachronistic, paramilitary, rigidly bureaucratic—produces a workplace culture that serves as a breeding ground for racism, corruption, sexual predation, brutality, unjustified lethal force, and excessive militarism.
Norm Stamper (To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America's Police)
The point is, our health-care system is a terrible mess. It's expensive, wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive, and infested with lawyers. Which is why there has been a big push, in some quarters, to place it under the management of... The federal government. This is like saying that if your local police department has a corruption problem, the solution is to turn law enforcement over to the Sopranos.
Dave Barry (I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood)
It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts....nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.
Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister (Philip Marlowe, #5))
Police Officer Angry Aggression Theory (POAAT) is why you need to video record the police before they shoot you. Always start the video camera at the first contact, as it can go sour at any time and without warning.
Steven Magee
Bane: We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you... the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please. Start by storming Blackgate, and freeing the oppressed! Step forward those who would serve. For and army will be raised. The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests, and cast out into the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed. Blood will be shed. The police will survive, as they learn to serve true justice. This great city... it will endure. Gotham will survive!
Christopher Nolan
In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.
Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it. At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves
Mike Bartos (Bash)
After the Civil War, Worth drifted, like so many veterans, to New York City, which by the mid-1860s was already one of the most concentratedly criminal places on earth. The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and the police were corrupt,
Ben Macintyre (The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief)
When you realize that incompetent police officers are harassing you, you need to call 911 and demand that a police supervisor be immediately dispatched to the scene. In the mean time you need to be video recording everything, as police officers are known for their blatant lies and fabrications.
Steven Magee
what is right is not always clean, and does not always feel good. In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.
Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
The Democratic Party would like to be re-elected so that they can continue to uphold almost no Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) whistle-blower complaints, enforce hardly any police internal affairs allegations, and corrupt corporations with lobbyists can continue operating outside of the law.
Steven Magee
He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.
Cecilia Rabess (Everything's Fine)
Nobody of sound mind can dispute that there is something fundamentally wrong, and intrinsically corrupt, about a legal system that encourages police officers and prosecutors to do everything in their power to persuade you and your children (no matter how young or old) to “do the right thing” and talk—when they tell their own children the exact opposite.
James Duane (You Have the Right to Remain Innocent)
We live in a society where interacting with government agents is a potentially hazardous activity
Steven Magee
Having a valid reason why you commit crime. It doesn't make it right to commit crime and it doesn't take away the fact that doing crime is wrong and is not allowed.
D.J. Kyos
Smart people avoid interacting with agencies of a corrupt government.
Steven Magee
There were times that I may have broken the rules for justice. I may have done things that were wrong but it was for the right reasons.
Pete Thron (One Under: Face to face with the violent offenders he put away, can a New York City police officer survive the rigors of a corrupt prison? (End Of Tour Series Book 2))
The police are corrupt and the government is corrupt.
Steven Magee
The police protect the corporations and not the people.
Steven Magee
When you hire criminals to be police officers. It is easy for innocent people to be arrested, convicted and jailed, but It is difficult ,close to impossible to have criminals arrested, convicted and jailed.
D.J. Kyos
...it was becoming obvious that the war he had been anticipating, "in three to five years" might have already begun, as many wars do begin, he said, not with a major event reported in the news but with sufferings barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress.
Carolyn Forché (What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance)
You have to have money these days. The roads are falling apart, so you need a Pajero or a Land Cruiser. The phone lines are erratic, so you need a mobile. The colleges are overrun with fundos who have no interest in getting an education, so you have to go abroad. And that’s ten lakhs a year, mind you. Thanks to electricity theft there will always be shortages, so you have to have a generator. The police are corrupt and ineffective, so you need private security guards. It goes on and on. People are pulling their pieces out of the pie, and the pie is getting smaller, so if you love your family, you’d better take your piece now, while there’s still some left. That’s what I’m doing. And if anyone isn’t doing it, it’s because they’re locked out of the kitchen.
Mohsin Hamid (Moth Smoke)
A totally corrupt police-force is the next best to a perfectly honest one. Ours is quite livable with. Mark you, it takes a bit of time occasionally finding out who’s bidding against you, but there are only a few possibilities in a small community like ours.” “So when he said he had a clean genotype but he was going to be sterilised anyway I lost my temper—can you blame me?” “It’s twentieth-century for me to be jealous, isn’t it? You keep away from my wife or I’ll get Gwinnie to make you pay forfeit for behaving in a twenty-first century manner!
John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar)
And what is corruption, I ask you? Who gets hurt if a poor cop gets a new car or a week’s vacation in Kenya for letting the Baltic girls earn a living in peace, down on the docks? I mean, where’s the harm in that?” Police Officer on Radio Fake 112.8 MHz In The Shadow of Sadd.
Steen Langstrup (In The Shadow of Sadd)
Police throughout the United States have been caught fabricating, planting, and manipulating evidence to obtain convictions where cases would otherwise be very weak. Some authorities regard police perjury as so rampant that it can be considered a "subcultural norm rather than an individual aberration" of police officers. Large-scale investigations of police units in almost every major American city have documented massive evidence of tampering, abuse of the arresting power, and discriminatory enforcement of laws. There also appears to be widespread police perjury in the preparation of reports because police know these reports will be used in plea bargaining. Officers often justify false and embellished reports on the grounds that it metes out a rough justice to defendants who are guilty of wrongdoing but may be exonerated on technicalities. [internal citations omitted]
Dale Carpenter (Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas)
Though private rewards can be provided directly out of the government’s treasury, the easiest way to compensate the police for their loyalty—including their willingness to oppress their fellow citizens—is to give them free rein to be corrupt. Pay them so little that they can’t help but realize it is not only acceptable but necessary for them to be corrupt. Then they will be doubly beholden to the regime: first, they will be grateful for the wealth the regime lets them accumulate; second, they will understand that if they waver in loyalty, they are at risk of losing their privileges and being prosecuted.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics)
Law enforcement loses its moral compass when what is asked of it undermines its ethical base. When in service to corruption—and when that corruption is thoroughly even if only unconsciously perceived—despair and nihilism follows. The good is deemed ineffectual. The bad is set upon a movable scale of permissibility, one that inevitably climbs to ever greater extremes. In this context, the police become tribal and will act first and foremost in defense of itself. Further indoctrination reinforces this escalation. In effect, the law rises above the law, and the sudden absence of restraint is an invitation to unchecked brutality.
Steven Erikson (Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart)
Under conditions of extreme deprivation people will continue to grow crops that promise economic relief, and they will continue to trade in those crops and their products. The ultimate beneficiaries are neither the impoverished Afghan or Columbian peasant nor the street-corner pusher in the U.S. ghetto or on Vancouver’s skid row. The illegality of mind-altering substances enriches drug cartels, crime syndicates, and their corrupt enablers among politicians, government officials, judges, lawyers, and police officers around the world. If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except, perhaps, to add tobacco to the list of contraband substances. That way the traffickers and their allies could profit even more, although it’s unimaginable that their legally respectable counterparts—tax-hungry governments and the nicotine pushers in tobacco company boardrooms—would ever allow that to happen.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
David Nicholls (Us)
My brave, conscientious officers of the law, if you want people to trust you, don't use the phrase "police are your friends", for it only makes you sound authoritarian, egotistical and condescending - instead, remind them "police are humans too" - acknowledge your mistakes and work towards correcting them, so that you can truly become the Caretaker of People, which is the very definition of COP.
Abhijit Naskar (Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent)
protectionI requested the figures on OSHA whistle-blower complaints made and the number actually upheld. OSHA refused to supply them. They also refused to uphold my OSHA complaints and provide whistle-blower protection to me. My independent research leads me to understand that they uphold almost no OSHA whistle-blower complaints. It is very concerning that it seems like the same thing is happening with complaints made to Police Internal Affairs.
Steven Magee
why do we talk about police brutality like it is about race? At its core, police brutality is about power and corruption. Police brutality is about the intersection of fear and guns. Police brutality is about accountability. And the power and corruption that enable police brutality put all citizens, of every race, at risk. But it does not put us at risk equally, and the numbers bear that out. My fear, as a black driver, is real. The fact is that black drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers1, between 1.5 and 5 times more likely to be searched (while shown to be less likely than whites to turn up contraband in these searches),2 and more likely to be ticketed3 and arrested4 in those stops. This increase in stops, searches, and arrests also leads to a 3.5–4 times higher probability that black people will be killed by cops (this increase is the same for Native Americans interacting with police, a shamefully underreported statistic). Even when we aren’t arrested or killed, we are still more likely to be abused and dehumanized in our stops. A 2016 review of a thirteen-month period showed that Oakland police handcuffed 1,466 black people in nonarrest traffic stops, and only 72 white people5, and a 2016 study by the Center for Policing Equity found that blacks were almost 4 times more likely to be subject to force from police—including force by hand (such as hitting and choking), pepper spray, tazer, and gun—than white people.6
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations found evidence of systemic profiling, abuse, and corruption. Officials testified that officers routinely arrested blacks on suspicion and brought them “into court without a bit of evidence of any offense.” A former chief of police admitted that black migrants “naturally” attracted “greater suspicion than would attach to the white man.” Such startling testimony proved that police bias and discrimination were baked into the arrest statistics, leading the commissioners to abandon
Khalil Gibran Muhammad (The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, With a New Preface)
Under the protection of U.S. occupation authorities, the Police, courts, military, security agencies, and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits—as is true to this day. The perpetrators of the Holocaust murdered six million Jews, half a million Gypsies, thou-sands of homosexuals, several million Ukranians, Russians, Poles, and others, and got away with it—in good part because the very people who were supposed to investigate these crimes were them-selves complicit.
Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
This divide is characterized by the demonization and privatization of public services, including schools, the military, prisons, and even policing; by the growing use of prison as our primary resolution for social contradictions; by the degradation and even debasement of the public sphere and all those who would seek to democratically occupy it; by an almost complete abandonment of the welfare state; by a nearly religious reverence for marketized solutions to public problems; by the growth of a consumer culture that repeatedly emphasizes the satisfaction of the self over the needs of the community; by the corruption of democracy by money and by monied interests, what Henry Giroux refers to as “totalitarianism with elections”;88 by the mockery of a judicial process already tipped in favor of the powerful; by the militarization of the police; by the acceptance of massive global inequality; by the erasure of those unconnected to the Internet-driven modern economy; by the loss of faith in the very notion of community; and by the shrinking presence of the radical voices, values, and vision necessary to resist this dark neoliberal moment.89
Marc Lamont Hill (Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond)
Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of which I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and without remembering what they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War Office--something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers
G.K. Chesterton (Heretics)
There are very few SJWs who would be willing to give up indoor plumbing or their iPhones for their ideals. The fact that they cannot see the contradiction now does not mean they will always be unable to do so, particularly given the way in which their corrupted institutions are falling into rapid decline, one after the other, and being replaced by radical new institutions. The public schools can no longer educate, so people are turning to homeschooling. The universities can no longer provide liberal arts educations, so people are becoming technology-assisted autodidacts. The banks no longer loan, the state and local governments no longer provide basic public services, the military does not defend the borders, the newspapers no longer provide news, the television networks no longer entertain, and the corporations are increasingly unable to provide employment.
Vox Day (SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1))
Citizen participation will reach an all-time high as anyone with a mobile handset and access to the Internet will be able to play a part in promoting accountability and transparency. A shopkeeper in Addis Ababa and a precocious teenager in San Salvador will be able to disseminate information about bribes and corruption, report election irregularities and generally hold their governments to account. Video cameras installed in police cars will help keep the police honest, if the camera phones carried by citizens don’t already. In fact, technology will empower people to police the police in a plethora of creative ways never before possible, including through real-time monitoring systems allowing citizens to publicly rate every police officer in their hometown. Commerce, education, health care and the justice system will all become more efficient, transparent and inclusive as major institutions opt in to the digital age. People who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will
Eric Schmidt (The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business)
Letter to Law Enforcement Every field of human endeavor has its own unique problem. The problem with science is lack of warmth. The problem with philosophy is lack of empathy. The problem with religion is lack of reason. The problem with politics is lack of expertise. And the problem with law enforcement is not corruption, but an absolute denial of that corruption, and until you acknowledge that many of your officers are corrupt and prejudiced to the neck, you can never in a million years build a healthy relationship with the people. Prejudices thrive on biases, and biases are a part of our psyche - of the human psyche, and no matter what we do, we cannot erase them from our mind - but we do have the ability to be aware of them, and only when we are aware of them, can we choose whether or not to be driven by them. However, when you don't even acknowledge that you have biases, that you are filled with prejudice, then you are inadvertently choosing not to accept the root of all the mistakes committed by you and your fellow officers in the line of duty. A civilian may choose to stay biased and prejudiced all their life, but you as a defender of the people - as a defender of their rights, their security, their serenity - do not have the luxury to let your biases, to let your prejudices come in the way of your duty, for the moment they do, you the keeper of law and order, turn into the very cause of disorder. Therefore, it's not enough for an officer of the law to have combat training and legal knowledge, it is also imperative that you learn about biases, that you learn about the fears, insecurities and instinctual tendencies of the human mind. An officer of the law without an understanding of biases, is like a ten year old with a knife - they may feel that they have power, but they have no clue as to the real life implications of that power. Remember my friend, power that doesn't help the people, is not power but pandemic. Your combat training doesn't make you a police officer, for when enraged even an ordinary civilian can take down ten police officers - your knowledge of law doesn't make you an officer of the law, for when pushed even a mediocre college student can defeat an army of elite legal minds - what makes you a police officer is your absolute acceptance of your role in society - the role of selfless servants. Once you accept the role of selfless servants wholeheartedly, people are bound to trust you. My brave, conscientious officers of the law, if you want people to trust you, don't use the phrase "police are your friends", for it only makes you sound authoritarian, egotistical and condescending - instead, remind them "police are humans too" - acknowledge your mistakes and work towards correcting them, so that you can truly become the Caretaker of People, which is the very definition of COP.
Abhijit Naskar (Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent)
The year 1789 does not yet affirm the divinity of man, but the divinity of the people, to the degree in which the will of the people coincides with the will of nature and of reason. If the general will is freely expressed, it can only be the universal expression of reason. If the people are free, they are infallible. Once the King is dead, and the chains of the old despotism thrown off, the people are going to express what, at all times and in all places, is, has been, and will be the truth. They are the oracle that must be consulted to know what the eternal order of the world demands. Vox populi, vox naturae. Eternal principles govern our conduct: Truth, Justice, finally Reason. There we have the new God. The Supreme Being, whom cohorts of young girls come to adore at the Feast of Reason, is only the ancient god disembodied, peremptorily deprived of any connection with the earth, and launched like a balloon into a heaven empty of all transcendent principles. Deprived of all his representatives, of any intercessor, the god of the lawyers and philosophers only has the value of a demonstration. He is not very strong, in fact, and we can see why Rousseau, who preached tolerance, thought that atheists should be condemned to death. To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well. But that will only come later. In 1793 the new faith is still intact, and it will suffice, to take Saint-Just's word, to govern according to the dictates of reason. The art of ruling, according to him, has produced only monsters because, before his time, no one wished to govern according to nature. The period of monsters has come to an end with the termination of the period of violence. "The human heart advances from nature to violence, from violence to morality." Morality is, therefore, only nature finally restored after centuries of alienation. Man only has to be given law "in accord with nature and with his heart," and he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt. Universal suffrage, the foundation of the new laws, must inevitably lead to a universal morality. "Our aim is to create an order of things which establishes a universal tendency toward good.
Albert Camus (The Rebel)