“THE COP GROWLS "TAKE OFF TH OSE JEANS, CITIZEN." I COMPLY, REVEALING THE FULL LENGTH DENIM TATTOOS ON BOTH LEGS. THE COP SCREAMS; DEFEATED”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.”

“I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I’m not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner.”

“The final result will be that the American people will ultimately prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. …People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods.”

“Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.”

“Don't worry, I don't underrate the cops. But cops can't break a guy's arm to make him talk, and they can't shove his teeth in with the muzzle of a.45 to remind him that you aren't fooling. I do my own leg work, and there are a lot of guys who will tell me what I want to know because they know what I'll do to them if they don't. My staff is strictly ex officio, but very practical.”