Oscar Arias Quotes

As mayor, I would support law enforcement, not knock it down.

In order for us to respect law enforcement, it is necessary for law enforcement to respect us.

We do not allow the Army, Navy, Marines, and the Air Force to be a police force. History is replete with countries that allowed that to happen. Disaster is the result.

We are safer when communities respect the police and the police respect the communities.

I don't support defunding the police.

We need to restore the faith and trust between law enforcement and communities across the country.

Society questions the police and their methods, and the police say, Do you want the criminals off the street or not?

We have to have a national conversation about how police forces should interact with the African-American community, who happens to be paying their salary, who want to be served and protected, who these officers are take an oath to do so.

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

At a policy level, we can support protecting and serving as opposed to militarization or disproportionate response. Step one is making sure we don't militarize and actually call for a review of military equipment in New York police forces.

We can't pick out certain incidentals that don't go our way and act like the cops are all bad... Do you know how bad some of these neighborhoods would be if it wasn't for the cops?

Law enforcement must be guardians in our communities, not warriors against our own people.

For me, in trying to talk about something like policing, it's such a huge issue, and it's an issue that's very local and very personalized to communities, to cities, to legislators, and so, in that way, I think as we started looking into talking about policing, the thing that you realize is that you can't paint everything with the same brush.

I've, in fact, very specifically said I don't support defunding the police.

Cops should not be separate from the black community or any community. Their salaries are paid for by the communities they police. They should be working for the communities they police. But as we saw in Ferguson, Missouri, they are not always doing that.

We don't ever want to create an environment where people are afraid of their own local police officers.

In Baltimore they can't do police work to save their lives. Now because of Freddie Gray they're not even getting out of the car and policing corners - they're on a job slowdown, basically. Right now if the police stopped being brutal, if we got police shooting under control, and the use of excessive force, if we have a meaningful societal response to all that stuff, and the racism that underlies it, the question still remains: what are they policing, and why?

We have to restore trust between communities and the police.

We're now going to develop the standards on transparency, data collection for police, but the whole goal is to fully integrate the police into the community because everybody has the same goals.

We have greater awareness of where we're falling short than we used to. Just take the example of community police relations.

For an ordinary citizen, what is the common interaction you have with a police officer? When they pull you over for speeding, or when they write you a ticket for parking. The rest of the time is patrolling minority neighborhoods like an occupying army. It's suppression of blacks, and it's revenue enhancement. Surveillance is a Band-Aid. That's like saying, "Let's surveil the SS." No! Let's get rid of the SS!

I want to live in a city where the police don't shoot you.

We need to demilitarize local police departments so that they do not look like occupying armies. We want police departments that look like the communities they are serving.

I wouldn't call it "police reform," but I would say that police procedure enhancement could be helpful - these police shootings are absolutely horrible.

Let's dig deep to build the kind of police force that our fatherland really deserves. We need a revolution of the police force here in Venezuela, and I will carry it out without delay, without excuses.