“If the cop honestly felt that this was a young black man (as politically incorrect as it sounds, this is the most violent category of people in the USA) aiming a gun at him, the cop can hardly be blamed for shooting first.”

“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”

“Only two kinds of people drink their coffee black: cops and serial killers.”

“It creeped him out, the way it just sat there looking so plastic and harmless among the old-time good intentions of all that downtown architecture, no more sinister than a chain motel by the freeway, and yet behind its neutral drapes and far away down its fluorescent corridors it was swarming with all this strange alternate cop history and cop politics—cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good—insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they'd all be given to control, or, as they liked to put it, protect and serve.”

“When confronted on the street by the police, a common emotion for a person to feel is fear. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it's quite healthy, but do not show it to the cop. If the cop realizes you are afraid of him, he will take full advantage of the situation and play on your fear. This doesn't mean act belligerently, and, for God's sake, do not be a high school or college lawyer, and explain to the cop what he can and cannot do. He can do anything, he's got the gun.”

“Let me be transparent about my affection for cops. When you dial 911, whether you are white or black, the cops come, and they come quickly, and they come quickly whether they are white or black. That’s what cops do, in addition to all of the other hard and difficult and dangerous and frightening things that they do. They respond to homes in the middle of the night where a drunken father, wielding a gun, is threatening his wife and children. They pound up the back stairs of an apartment building, not knowing whether the guys behind the door they are about to enter are armed, or high, or both.”

“It’s the first principle, isn’t it? Whoever’s arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.”

“An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.”

“You've heard of Beverly Hills Cop - well I want to do a Brixton Hills Cop.”

“The hell with him, he thought bitterly. The hell with patriotism in general. In the specific and the abstract. Birds of a feather, soldiers and cops. Anti-intellectual and anti-Negro. Anti-everything except beer, dogs, cars and guns.”