Police Power Quotes

There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.

There is no fear exception to the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

Every bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol was my bullet. If you call that murder, then I am the murderer.

Without the burden on the police to adhere to the requirements of the 4th Amendment, you loose the dogs.

What is the point of the police if wrongdoers aren't afraid of them?

I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

Conscience and public opinion enforce the laws. The police suppress the exceptions.

That power which had both the purse and the sword, had the government of the whole country, and might extend its powers to any and to every object.

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

There is no drug exception to the Constitution.

The idea of dual sovereignty rests on the premise that the power of the states to prosecute crimes existed before the creation of the federal government, and is reserved to them by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Law and order are the medicine of the body politic and when the body politic gets sick, medicine must be administered.

Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.

We still give the nation state the monopoly on the legal use of violence in our own defense.

I think there should be a law - and I know this is extreme - that no one can have a gun in the U.S. If you have a gun, you go to jail. Only the police should have guns.

If stop-and-frisk was a fair and balanced practice that targeted everybody equally across the board, then I could understand the extra precautions being taken, but since it's a practice that targets blacks and Hispanics and gives the police the right to lawfully profile us, I'm not with it.

The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

If any person - white, black, brown or yellow - objects to having a police officer potentially ask them for their ID, it makes me wonder what that person is trying to hide.

Lack of lawful access certainly affects our ability to do our jobs, but we know where the harm really falls when evidence is kept unavailable - it falls on innocent people, the people we're sworn to protect.

We have a wider political and economic system in which ancient, landed power still carries immense weight. There is nothing some landowners would like more than to set the police on those who dare to venture into their vast estates.

The court’s agents may enter into men’s houses, break up their chests and chambers

The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

It is a fundamental principle of American law that the regulation of the local police of all the domestic affairs of a State belong to the State itself, and not to the Federal Government.

It would not be permissible for you to build a home and not let law enforcement in if they had a search warrant. If they think there's a crime ongoing, they go to court and get a warrant, and they're permitted to come in your home under the Fourth Amendment.