If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.
A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.
When you look at police violence, over the last three or four years, whether you call it a social, economic or racial thing, these are the guys that we're supposed to trust. These are the guys who are given these guns and weapons to protect us. Not to use them upon us, but to protect us, and they can't even get it right. So, if they can't get it right, how can you fault a society for fearing them, and fearing them in a way that makes them want to take up arms and fight back.
President [Barack] Obama's choice of Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff was questionable, and perhaps coverups around the police violence against black people in Chicago is reflective of Mr. Emmanuel's values.
Another bigger problem is the fact that these incidents of police violence continue to occur because far too often the officers on the force rally around the one who committed the act of violence and, in this particular instance, may have engaged in a cover-up that itself should be prosecuted.
I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.
There is a problem here in America when it comes to police violence and gun violence, that I believe is being ignored by not giving the proper resources to communities.
Decade after decade, the police culture has been just the very opposite. And that`s been to ignore or to rally around. And that`s something that systematically we are going to need to break this blue wall of silence if we`re ever going to dramatically change and end the culture of police violence.
We call for a welcoming path to citizenship, an end to police violence, and a transformed foreign policy based on international law and human rights - not based on these policies of regime change and economic and military domination.
