Police Violence Quotes

“Spring irises bloom.
The caged bird no longer sings—
the knee on his throat.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Getting bodies,” in Border Patrol lingo, didn’t necessarily mean collecting corpses. Bodies were living people. “Bodies” was one of the many names for them. Illegal aliens, dying of thirst more often than not, are called “wets” by agents. “Five wets” might have slipped out. “Wets” are also called “tonks,” but the Border Patrol tries hard to keep that bon mot from civilians. It’s a nasty habit in the ranks. Only a fellow border cop could appreciate the humor of calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Museums alone cannot ease the tensions that come from the debates surrounding the fluidity of national identity in the twenty-first century. Nor can any cultural institution solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice, and police violence. But museums can contribute to understanding by creating spaces where debates are spirited but reasoned. Where contemporary challenges are addressed through contextualization and education.”
― Lonnie G. Bunch III, A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump

“Conspiracy is a vague legal category that does not require the accused to have participated in illegal activity to be guilty of allegedly dangerous associations. Its capaciousness has proven a convenient way to target different anarchist networks and radical groups who have planned protests, participated in direct actions, or organized international solidarity efforts.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“When the bosses exploit them [the workers] they pay no heed to party distinctions and starve them all the same; when the carabinieri pepper their chests with the kings lead, they do not bother to ask what sort of membership card they carry in their pockets.”
― Errico Malatesta

“Those who commit the murders write the reports”
― Ida B. Wells-Barnett

“Many of us didn't choose to become activists. We were activated. We could not stand to sit on the sidelines while our people were brutalized so needlessly. At some point, we choose to accept police violence, or we don't. Where will you stand?

(8/23/2020 on Twitter)”
― Cori Bush

“behind every cop who murders a 13-year-old child, there is a city lawyer working to keep the video secret, a prosecutor lying about it in court, a mayor giving cops more money and weapons, and a professor with a consulting firm deciding which "reform" will make the most money.

(4/15/2021 on Twitter)”
― Alec Karakatsanis

“If you look at African American newspapers from the very early 20th century, there is an ongoing discussion about the problems with policing. Literally nonstop 100 plus year problem...

(4/12/2021 on Twitter)”
― Imani Perry

“when the proletariat, failing to see the justice of this bourgeois economy, begins to murmur, the policeman’s club is called into active service.”
― Lucy Parsons

“Turns out if you write about police violence and atrocities, if you wait a month, it'll happen again, so... That's America.”
― Colson Whitehead

“It benefits the LAPD to have the news describe recommendations for lavish new police spending as the judgment of neutral experts. Imagine what it would look like if an "internal" LAPD report or a report by the company selling police spyware had been the one to recommend more money for more spying on protesters in the wake of the LAPD's widespread crimes. The news's portrayal of the commission report about the LAPD as "independent" is an example of how reporting on police violence becomes a stage in the cycle of police violence.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“When police violence reemerges as a sustained news theme every few years, the words "accountability" and "transparency" are sprinkled into story after story and used as a substitute for informed discussion about the terrible track record of specific policies and broader discussions about how and whether it's even possible to make armed police forces less violent and corrupt as they are currently constituted.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“In my years as a civil rights lawyer, I have seen virtually all the same cycle in city after city: Politicians respond to the fallout from an incident of police violence by pledging various "reforms" that are either meaningless or things the police had been asking for anyway. These pledges are followed by increases in police budgets. Overall police violence grows, and the cycle repeats.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“An emerging vanguard of copaganda is rebranding repressive policies as compassionate. Politicians around the country are increasingly using the concept of "care" to describe policies of violence that jail unhoused people and criminalize people for their mental illness.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“I need little black boys to be able to be
little black boys, whole salt water galaxies

in cotton and loudness—not fixed
in stunned suspension, episodes on hot

asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence
of apology.”
― Nicole Terez Dutton

“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

“A week later another woman did the same thing. She stripped naked and ran through the streets singing. But that day changed the history of the world. For the police chased after the woman, caught up with her and, in full public view, ate her raw. They tore her flesh and drank her blood and ate chunks of her buttocks and gorged themselves on her bones.

After that a new madness came among the people.

At night, in a restless neighborhood, someone might be heard screaming. Those who looked out of the window saw a white van appear outside the house. An hour later men in uniformed would be seen emerging from the house with blood on their faces and blood and gristle on their shirts as if they had been feasting on raw wild animals. The next day nothing but the cracked skull and long bones of the victim were seen in the bedroom.

A new stage in the elimination of undesirables had been reached.”
― Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist

“The casual nature with which they replay the murder video at all hours of the day on tv says so much about the entire society

(5/29/2020 on Twitter)”
― Bree Newsome Bass

“For all y'all talking about "we can't have lawlessness": What do you call it when cops murder without consequence? When a mayor violates the municipal code? Shouldn't the people in power be held to highest level of accountability when it comes to following the law?

(7/1/2020 on Twitter)”
― Nikkita Oliver

“We cannot allow police officers to be judge, jury, and executioner in the street. That is not how this works. That is not the social contract that we all agreed to.

(On The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, 2020)”
― Kimberly Jones

“Amazing how every time the cops kill someone it's up to everyone who didn't kill anyone to remain calm.

(4/15/2021 on Twitter)”
― Kashana Cauley

“The police embrace their brutality. They are proud of themselves.

(4/12/2021 on Twitter)”
― Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

“The answer to all police killings is definitely to punish hundreds of thousands of people who didn't commit them.

(4/12/2021 on Twitter)”
― Kashana Cauley

“I believed strongly in being an engaged citizen and had a certain level of social and political awareness, but my understanding that the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement and its accomplishments shifted during the course of the Obama administration and especially in 2013 when I witnessed the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the attack on voting rights in the state of North Carolina.

(Interview with aaihs)”
― Bree Newsome Bass

“I have lived my whole life as a Black man in the United States. I don't have to go all the way back to Tulsa and Rosewood and Emmett Till to know what it means for a white woman to accuse a Black man, and who would likely be believed. This was potentially a world of trouble heading my way. Her fingers were already dialing; in a split second of self-preservation, I considered that if I just stopped recording, maybe this would go away.
Which of course was her intent. I can't say whether it was a conscious choice or the product of unconscious bias when she grabbed that bloody, blunt object, of the White Damsel in Distress Threatened by the Black Menace, to try to club me into compliance with her wish not to be recorded; I don't know her at all, can't know why it was so easily within her reach, when she was grasping for something to give her leverage in our confrontation. In the weeks that followed, several right-wing mouthpieces would seek to excuse it, justifying her injection of race into the situation as merely her giving a full and accurate physical description of me to the police. (Never mind the falseness of the accusation in the first place.) Except at that moment, she wasn't speaking to the police; she was talking to me. People who think their life is in danger don't pause to inform their supposed assailant, in a rather triumphal tone of voice, that they're about to call the cops and inform them of your race; if they're genuinely scared for their life, they punch the digits, period. Her intent, in saying it to me, was to use the long history of Fear the Black Man, and the resulting unjust police violence against us, to intimidate me into submission.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“a smashed window always rings louder
in the media's ears than the clacking
of six rounds emptied into
a black teen's body
#Ferguson”
― Remi Kanazi, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine

“Certain bodies don't belong to their inhabitants. Never have, never will again. A persistent, inescapable, and horrific truth known by millions of unsettled bodies. The Fear.

It had always been there, but I could see it now. Could really recognize it. And once that happens, once you see it, you can't look away. Can't ever quiet it. Can't ever forget that you don't belong to yourself anymore, but to the hands, fists, cuffs, and bullets of a stranger.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“it goes without saying that bringing police horses to a disabled-led peaceful protest was a needless display of force”
― Hannah Sharland

“the heavy-handed Met swinging its dicks around is hardly anything new”
― Hannah Sharland