Don Winslow

The tragedy is that the police and inner city communities should be allies. Who suffers most from violent crime in America? Inner city communities. Who has a personal and professional interest in lowering that violence? Cops.

We have contradictory expectations of police: We want to be perfectly safe and perfectly free. We want total security and total privacy. We want the bad guys stopped and the good guys unmolested. That's great for the consumer; try providing it.

Police departments are always a reflection of the society that they serve. Is there such a thing as 'police culture?' Absolutely. Is that culture isolated form the surrounding society? Absolutely not.

When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.