Defunding Police Quotes

It's fun to be in California. The police are kind of weird here. They ask you stupid questions. 'Do you know why I pulled you over?' Because I have pot in the glove compartment? ~ Robert Schimmel

Because we're the police,' Harry said. 'And not giggling concubines. ~ Jo Nesbo

After all these years, he couldn't believe he'd recognized her so instantly. He prayed that she wouldn't recognize him, but as her eyes widened, he knew she had.
"Marcos?" she breathed.
And his worst nightmare came true. His cover was blown. ~ Elizabeth Heiter

There's a really classic cliche every time you switch the TV on - you see cops arguing. I have spent a day a week for many years in the presence of police and I have never seen them argue. It's a military hierarchy. They do what they're told. There's no bickering. ~ Peter James

The police pull up in back of my car and run my plates - they don't see you as you are; they see you through a racialized negative gaze. I think the best thing is not to internalize it too much, or it'll make you crazy because you know it's going to happen again. ~ Mark Bradford

Not only are police officers often taken for granted, many people are highly vocal about their dislike for cops. ~ Karen Salmansohn

If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons. ~ Michelle Alexander

Since Thami had the Arab's utter incomprehension of the meaning of pornography, he imagined that the police had placed the ban on obscene films because these infringed upon Christian doctrine at certain specific points, in which case any Christian might be expected to show interest, if only to disapprove. ~ Paul Bowles

On his next job application there was going to be the question "What did your father do for a living?" and if an applicant filled in "Marine," "Police Officer" or "Commando," he was shredding it. ~ Kristen Ashley

I added to my mental list of the odd things I'd done that day. I'd entertained the police, sunbathed, visited at a mall with some fairies, weeded and killed someone. Now it was powdered-corpse removal time. And the day wasn't over yet. ~ Charlaine Harris

A selection of quotes from The Night of Harrison Monk's Death (Jane Hetherington's Adventures in Detection: 1)
"Is this one of the more unusual cases of safe-breaking you've been asked to investigate, Mrs Hetherington?"
"Remember your private detective wants to be able to sleep soundly at night and in their own bed, not one supplied as her Majesty's pleasure."
"It seems to be an open and shut case doesn't it? But it's not you know? How do you know if anything is what it seems?"
"But where is Cheung kin?"
"When I first set eyes on your father, he was spying on a man from between two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
"I don't think I need say more." "On the contrary, if you want me to have any idea what you're talking about, I think you do."
"Why don't you report it to the police?" "Because I stole it in the first place didn't I?"
"It's something of a mystery, I admit."
"Vanished into thin air!"
"You sound so sensible Mrs Hetherington. Please help us get to the bottom of this."
Ah, thought Jane – the old story.
"No body was found?"
"Shall I put the kettle on?" "Only if you fill it with whiskey."
"The course of true love didn't run smoothly for me either, you know."
"Life has its tragedies for sure."
"… What do I want? I want money that's what I want. I want money."
She was even more horrified by the words she heard next.
Callum MacCallum knew what it was like to be an outsider. ~ Nina Jon

As TARDIS comes to rest, the only sound, its insistent hum, seems to fill the space entirely, and then this too is lost as the viewer is thrown outside, no longer a
participant, but forced into the detached role of observer: the police box now sitting at a tilt in a dark and barren alien landscape accompanied by the chilling audionaturalism of wind noise [...] In the silence of electronic sound, the audience ejection is experienced as sudden sensory deprivation, making the impression of das unheimliche
the dominant one. Again the fourth wall is breached, this time a figure cuts between us and the ship, carrying a spear rather than a torch, his shadow lengthening impossibly across the landscape towards TARDIS. When the end titles and signature start up, the eerie recognition threatens to become full blown horror as if the music,
having transported us here, is now leaving us to face an awakening of our repressed pasts. Next week, the titles inform us, THE CAVE OF SKULLS. ~ Dene October

The SAG was a strange three-legged beast equipped by civilian bureaucrats, administered by the police and staffed by the army. ~ Sandeep Unnithan

Question."
"Yes," Candace asked expectantly, eyes fixed on the dark street ahead.
"Have you ever had to chose sides between a friend and a boyfriend?"
Candace nodded.
"Which side are you suppose to pick?"
"The right one."
"What if they're both right?"
"They're not."
"But they are," Melody insisted. "That's the problem."
"No." Candace slowly rolled past a police cruiser. "They both think they're right. But who do you think is right? Which side represents the thing you think is worth fighting for?"
Melody glanced out the window as though she was expecting the answer to be revealed on a neighbor's lawn. Every house except hers had the lights turned off. "I dunno."
"You do," Candace insisted. "You just don't have the courage to be honest with yourself. Because then you'd have to do the thing you don't want to do, and you hate doing anything that's hard. Which is why you gave up singing and why you have no life and why you've always been a -"
"Um okay! Can we get back to the part where you were sounding like Oprah?"
"I'm just saying, Melly, what would you do if you weren't afraid? That's your answer. That's your side." She turned into the circular driveway and put the SUV in PARK. "And if you don't choose it, you're lying to yourself and everyone around you." She opened the door and grabbed her purse. "Oprah out!"
The door slammed behind her. ~ Lisi Harrison

A cop lost his temper and rushed into the crowd to seize an agitator ... and that was the last we saw of him for about three minutes. When he emerged, after a dozen others had rushed in to save him, he looked like some ragged hippie ... the mob had stripped him of everything except his pants, one boot, and part of his coat. His hat was gone, his gun and gunbelt, all his badges and police decorations ... he was a beaten man and his name was Lennox. I know this because I was standing beside the big plainclothes police boss who was shouting, Get Lennox in the van! ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government. Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does.
In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler's will: There were no modern, well-organised police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control. ~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

It continues to baffle me that people's main concern about my activities around peace and grassroots activism in a full-on police state at first centred on my clothes - not my ideas, not my message, not my intentions; all those came second to what I was wearing and whether or not 'a girl' could walk that far. ~ Scarlett Curtis

Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they've done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women's bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it's only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you've told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind. ~ Sady Doyle

To survive in a lot of male-dominated situations - the police, the military, what have you - you put on a bit of the crass, blowhard thing, because you just can't survive being the nice guy in those environments. ~ Dean Norris

The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil - it is merely a restatement of the mystery - and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force. ~ Janet Malcolm

The drone that even according to the police indeed did fly over Seine-Saint-Denis last July 14th is a picture of the future in much more straightforward colors than all the hazy images we get from the humanists. That they took the time to clarify that it was not armed shows pretty clearly the kind of road we're headed down. ~ The Invisible Committee

SLAP! I saw a bright flash in front of my eyes, 'Don't you try and be a fucking smart arse in here, Holland, this is Partick cop shop you're in,' the irate copper retorted.
'So fuck,' I snapped. ~ Stephen Richards

A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around. ~ Dan Gilroy

The San Francisco police force was deeply implicated in the murders of Moscone and Milk. Dan White was not carrying out SFPD orders that morning in city hall, but he was carrying out the department's will. He was no longer on the force, but he was one of them: their star ballplayer, their political representative, their brother. He knew all about the cops' murderous feelings toward the city's liberal leadership. He felt the same way. They had the will, he had the willpower. ~ David Talbot

I cannot believe we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself ~ George McGovern ~ Anthony Summers

We're trying to publicize this one and make people realize that the gun industry can clean up its act and can operate in a way that can reduce the likelihood of guns killing police officers and other innocent people. ~ Michael D. Barnes

Hope you've been keeping your nose clean," DS Bradshaw said, trying to be jovial as he sipped a bottle of beer. I wondered what the police force would make of the fact that he was drinking alcohol at barely half past three in the afternoon. I would inform them at the first given opportunity, and also of his professional misconduct re Mum. ~ Matthew Crow

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

It's up to us, all citizens, regardless of background, to step up to the
plate and address these issues. We need to share our life experiences and offer honest appraisals of the problems we face. We need to do it at kitchen tables all over the nation. In schools, we need to educate our children to celebrate diversity rather than fight or kill over it. We need to promote our core values at home and abroad. That begins with citizens and police officers respecting each other and treating each other as each of us would want to be treated. ~ Mark M. Bello

We'd like to think that it is not our fault that great men and women died fighting for the security of our nation and safety of our communities. But we know this not to be true. They commited their lives for us in instances where either we were too afraid to do it ourselves or failed to find alternate solutions on our own. We enjoy the fruits of their ultimate sacrifice and owe their families a heartfelt thanks and apology everyday. ~ D'Andre Lampkin

I think if a writer is being honest they'd admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They're like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut. ~ Dan Alatorre

You know, before when (the police went) to work, they used to be like, 'I'm gonna kick somebody's ass today and so I hope I can catch somebody in a bad situation or breaking the law, because I'm gonna beat someone's ass in a big way, I think that attitude has changed. ~ Rodney King

People-clueless,clueless people-stood there,staring in confusion as they tried to figure out what kind of show I was doing and whether they should clap or call the police. ~ Kiersten White

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213) ~ Julia Angwin

Heydrich's life therefore offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the emergence of the Nazi police state; the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust; the interconnections between anti-Jewish and Germanization policies; and the different ways in which German occupation regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more personal level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men from perfectly 'normal' middle-class backgrounds can become political extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian fantasies of radically transforming the world. ~ Robert Gerwarth

It is said in those districts that not all the trains which run on the city's tracks are listed in Metropolitan Transit's compendious schedule. The residents will tell you that after midnight, on some nights, there will be other trains, trains whose cry is different, the bellow of some great beast fighting for its life. And if you watch those trains go past, behind those bright flickering windows you will see passengers unlike any passengers you have seen when riding the trains yourself: men with wings, women with horns, beast-headed children, fauns and dryads and green-skinned people more beautiful than words can describe. In 1893, a schoolteacher swore that she saw a unicorn; in 1934, a murderer turned himself into the police, weeping, saying that he saw his victims staring at him from a train as it howled past the station platform on which he stood.
These are the seraphic trains. The stories say they run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie. They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend. And although you will never meet anyone who has seen or experienced it, there are persistent rumors, unkillable rumors, that sometimes, maybe once a century, maybe twice, a seraphic train will stop in its baying progress and open its doors for a mortal.
Those who know the story of Thomas the Rhymer - and even some who don't - insist that all these people, blest or damned as they may be, must be poets. ~ Sarah Monette

We need to hear everyone. We need dialogue between police and the community. They're angry. They're hurt. A dialogue can cause a shift in consciousness in the person if he's understanding you and listening. ~ Russell Simmons

Sexism occurs when we assume that some people are less valid or natural than others because of their sex, gender, or sexuality; it occurs when we project our own expectations and assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality onto other people, and police their behaviors accordingly; it occurs when we reduce another person to their sex, gender, or sexuality rather than seeing them as a whole, legitimate person. That is sexism. And a person is a legitimate feminist when they have made a commitment to challenging sexist double standards wherever and whenever they arise. An individual's personal style, mannerisms, identity, consensual sexual partners, and live choices simply shouldn't factor into it. ~ Julia Serano

In the USA, the police are encouraged to shoot people with the reward of paid time off. ~ Steven Magee

One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don't really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2's Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study? ~ Ahmir Questlove Thompson