Policing Quotes

“You are in favour of the common people?” said Dragon mildly.
The common people?” said Vimes. “They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit. So I suppose I’ve got to be on their side.”
― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

“On average, American states spend $88,000 to incarcerate a young person, but allot an average of $10,000 to educate them.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.
This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer

“The theory of policing is quite far from the reality of policing. For us, at least, that is.”
― DeRay Mckesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope

“I saw nothing suspicious—which is unusual. A copper can usually find something suspicious if they look hard enough.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Amongst Our Weapons

“The police policing themselves does not work.”
― Steven Magee

“In order for a police force to be effective, it has to earn the trust of its people. But to those who only scratch the surface, to those who do not investigate their simplistic opinions about the root cause of crime in inner cities and the animosity between police forces and communities of color, the answer is simply more policing. But what we need is different policing. Policing not steeped from root to flower in the need to control people of color.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“To the Po'lice

In case you are
wondering
the answer is yes:
you have hurt us. Deeply.
Just as you
intended:
you and those
who sent you.
You do know by now
that you do not send
yourself?
I imagine your Designers
sitting back
in the shadows
laughing
as we weep.
Though usually devoid of feeling,
they are experiencing a sensation
they almost enjoy:
they get to witness, by twisted
enchantment, dozens
of strong black mothers
weeping.
They planned
and nurtured
your hatred and fear
and focused the kill shot.
Then watched you
try to explain
your innocence on TV.
It is entertainment for
them. They chuckle and drink
Watching you squirm.
They have tied you up
in a bag of confusion
from which you
will never escape.
It’s true you are white, but you are so fucking poor,
and dumb, to boot, they say.
A consideration that turns
them pink
with glee.
(They have so many uses planned
for the poor, white, and dumb: you would be
amazed).
You and the weeping mothers
have more in common than you might think:
the mothers know this.
They have known you
far longer
than you have known them. After centuries,
even those in the shadows, your masters,
offer little mystery.
If you could
find your true courage
you might risk everything
to sit within a circle, surrounded
by these women. Their eyes red
from weeping, their throats raw.
(They might strike you too, who could swear
they wouldn’t?)
Their sons are dead
and it was you
who did the deed.
Scary enough.
But within that enclosure
Naked to their grief
Is where you must center
If you are ever
To be freed.”
― Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart

“There’s a reason for the mainstream bipartisan consensus around community policing: it maintains and expands the status quo. As advocates call for fewer police and less policing and criminalization, community policing becomes a way to reshape the narrative to position police as friendly beat cops who know everyone’s name. But community policing doesn’t make policing more effective, less hostile, or more accountable to the communities they serve in. Instead it allows police to further entrench their presence in neighborhoods, justify increases in their numbers, and even mobilize community members to participate in policing by surveilling our neighbors.”
― Maya Schenwar, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“The violence of the imperial project is not a mere historical curiosity, nor did it only take place in a 'distant land'; it shaped and continues to shape the technologies of British state violence today.”
― Tanzil Chowdhury, Abolishing the Police

“One person caring for one neighborhood, that's how we'll change the world, not with policy and policing.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“policing is not a malevolent conspiracy; most police officers take seriously their role as public servants. The widely publicized incidents of police violence and abuse often lead us to forget that the vast majority of police officers spend the vast majority of their time helping people who ask for their help. Americans call 911 both in genuine emergencies and for trivial reasons, and police officers don’t get to choose whether to respond.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“Policemen always have the idea that they can’t have emotions, that you are as hard as a rock, and that’s not true. You are no different than anyone else.”
― A.J. Mair

“2020 was the year of aggressive policing.”
― Steven Magee

“The cost of housing people and providing then with mental health services is actually lower than cycling them through emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and jails, as numerous studies have shown. The drive to criminalize has more to do with ideology than effectiveness: the mentally ill are seen not as victims of the neoliberal restructuring of public health services but as a dangerous source of disorder to be controlled through intensive and aggressive policing. Any attempt to reduce the negative effects of policing on this population must directly challenge this ideological approach to policing”
― Alex Vitale

“The use of guns and militarized equipment undermines the basic ethos of school as a learning environment and replaces it with fear and control.”
― Alex Vitale

“The truth about angry and aggressive policing came out in 2020.”
― Steven Magee

“While there has indeed been an increase in coercive state practices over the past several decades relative to much of the twentieth century, when viewed as part of the long history of capitalism, the carceral excesses of neoliberalism have much in common with the dispossession of the peasantry from the land in England and, globally, the ‘Bloody legislation’ used to terrorize those who violated newly established norms of private property, the criminalization of women who contravened historically specific norms of chastity and femininity, and the violent disciplining of different segments of the population deemed insufficiently ‘rational’ to respond to the market-based incentives that are so often assumed to be the key disciplinary mechanisms underpinning capitalist society”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law

“The reminder that the Nigerian police being understaffed, undertrained and underpaid was why the #EndSARS protest went out of control. Stop blaming peaceful protesters for inability of the police to perform their duties and maintain order.”
― Olawale Daniel

“At the end of you life, if you can say to yourself, "When I die, someone is better off because I lived," then you have accomplished your mission. You can rest peacefully.”
― Chad Holland, Scars of Blue: A story of Policing, Corruption, Mental Health, and Survival

“standard forms are sometimes called conventions, conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrument of the Law, an unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

“I’m not against police brutality, I’m against the police.”
― Frank B. Wilderson III

“We use the law though we are terrified of it, contemptuous of its Janus face. We ask the police for what we need, hoping they will not kill us before we have finished stating our claims.”
― Eddie Bruce-Jones, Abolishing the Police

“It won’t bring Lucy and Scarlet back but it will, at least, mean that justice has been done. The words have a cold, biblical ring that surprises him, but when you come down to it that is what police work is all about. Protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Crossing Places

“Over-policing is driven in part by the law of supply and demand—police go where people ask them to go. To put it a little differently: Police don’t operate in a vacuum. They are paid by taxpayer dollars; they respond to the directives and incentives created by national, state, and municipal laws, policies, and political pressures; and in a day-to-day sense, they respond to whatever calls happen to come in over the 911 lines, whether those calls involve complaints about armed robberies or about disorderly conduct.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“What if instead of telling officers they have a right to go home safe, police training focused on reminding officers that members of the public have a right to go home safe? What if we reminded officers that they are voluntarily taking a risky job, and that if someone dies because of a mistake, it’s better that it be a police officer who is trained and paid to take risks than a member of the public?”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“When you have more crimes, you need more cops—and when you have more cops, you find more ways to use them. (In the US, for instance, we consider it normal to have armed police officers enforce compliance with traffic regulations, even though most traffic violations don’t constitute criminal offenses. It’s the equivalent of routinely sending armed police to enforce IRS regulations or municipal building code regulations. It makes little sense, and increases the number of police-citizen encounters with the potential to go badly wrong.)”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“Campus police and street police are different strands of the same supremacy that plague our resistance.”
― Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

“Despite their best efforts, however, they never encountered the Slasher.”
― Patrick Brode, The Slasher Killings: A Canadian Sex-Crime Panic, 1945-1946

“Many of the verbal expressions that cause people to be detained on "mental health" grounds are — should be — protected speech. People who say things considered incomprehensible or illogical by the police or "mental health" workers are given ostensibly medical diagnoses and imprisoned for a limited time. That is, people who speak in a way those in authority disapprove of are punished, even if the speaker breaks no law. This blatant and often exercised limit on free speech is a "for your own good" exception to the First Amendment. There should be no such exception. But it is so woven into the fabric of American society and jurisprudence that virtually nobody objects. You can refuse a lifesaving treatment for cancer, but you cannot refuse to be jailed for saying something like, "I am Jesus" to the police when they are doing a "welfare check," a euphemism if there ever was one.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz