Cal Cunningham Quotes

Every American expects and deserves the protection of law enforcement that is effective, responsive, respectful and, most importantly, constitutional.

This is the problem with the United States: there's no leadership. A leader would say, 'Police brutality is an oxymoron. There are no brutal police. The minute you become brutal you're no longer police.' So, what, we're not dealing with police. We're dealing with a federally authorized gang.

When law enforcement violates departmental policies or operates outside of its certified training, it should not be insulated from liability to the victims of these breaches.

The horrific cases in Ferguson, in Staten Island with the death of Eric Garner, and all across the country serve as stark reminders that we must have a say in who polices us, and how that policing is done. We must, we must, let our voices be heard on Election Day.

When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe.

The full resources of the Department of Justice have been committed to the investigation into Michael Brown's death.

While we all respect the solemn responsibility of our law enforcement officers to protect the public, we must also safeguard the rights of Missourians to peaceably assemble and the rights of the press to report on matters of public concern.

The term "free society" is a meaningless, empty phrase if it does not mean a society that is free from harassment from its own police.

Anyone who wears a badge has the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens

When I was a kid the police just whupped you. Today, they whup you, and then they arrest you in order to protect themselves.

Nearly every day on the television set the hero cop breaks into the bad guy’s house and beats a confession out of him and we cheer on the cop. Propaganda smears our clear vision. It causes us to accept the diminishment of our constitutional protections as something to be lauded — after all, the cop was protecting us.

There are 18,000 different police forces in the United States and sometimes something wrong happens.

There is no such thing as a bad cop, only disturbing and dominant cop thinking that will invariably lead to excessive force and tragic outcomes.

Police brutality is definitely still very alive and active.

Stop and frisk - whether done while walking down the street or while driving a car - is a civil rights violation.

I think police brutality has been going on since - I don't know - ever since I can remember and, you know, hearing about it in my childhood.

There have to be consequences for police who take the law into their own hands. There has to be a shift in the use-of-force policies that are used in departments across the country.

Do I acknowledge that there are some law enforcement officers that abuse their job? Yes.

If you feel your rights are being abused by the authorities, and you don't say something, sometimes the cops don't know how far to take it. They have a hard job, but at the same time, I think it's just about educating yourself.

There's one overriding issue, namely, that we live in a police state so long as the police get to police themselves. And that is why cops go unindicted.

Who will protect the public when the police violate the law?

My accident happened in what should have been one of the safest places to be: in a police station, at the hands of trained police officers. So more guns are not the answer.

You don't need any indictment in order to arrest someone; probable cause is sufficient to arrest civilians, so it must be enough to arrest police.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

Either we need to redefine what probable cause means and say that police are not subject to it, or we arrest officers right away just as we would with any other person accused of committing a crime. Either we write new laws or enforce existing ones; we cannot have it both ways.