Paul Butler > Quotes

“Criminal justice" is what happens after a complicated series of events has gone bad. It is the end result of failure--the failure of a group of people that sometimes includes, but is never limited to, the accused person.”
― Paul Delano Butler, Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice

“He is literally hundreds of times more likely to be on his way to work, school, or the movies than he is to rob, rape, or murder you.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“Most of the time, however, people being afraid of you is aggravating, embarrassing, and dispiriting. You take steps to allay the fear. You look down on the elevator. You wear your college T-shirt, and conspicuously display your work ID. You love the Dodge Charger, but if you buy the Mini Cooper you won’t get pulled over as much. You try not to care. But it comes to feel like you are apologizing for your existence. It eats you up inside because it is relentless. Every time you leave your home, you are the star of a bizarre security theater.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“legal violence by our own government poses a greater threat to the future of this country—and certainly to individual black men—than illegal violence by terrorists.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“A white person’s lifetime chance of being the victim of homicide, assault, or robbery by a black person: 1 in 480.22 A black person’s lifetime chance of being the victim of homicide, assault, or robbery by a black person: 1 in 115.23 A woman’s lifetime chance of being raped by a man: 1 in 5.24”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“As we will see, the crisis in law and order in the United States stems from police work itself rather than from individual cops.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“Our moral justification for forcing human beings to live in cages is that they have freely chosen to do wrong. But the United States has never had the capacity to make those judgments on a non-racial basis and it is hard to imagine that it ever will.”
― Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men