A cop is a cop. And you know, he may be a very nice man but I haven’t got time to figure that out. All I know is that he got a uniform and a gun, I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way for me to relate to him, at all, because one of us may have to die.

You know in New York there’s a big campaign going on to humanize the policemen and they have billboards upstate and they a picture of a big cop bending over this little blonde girl and the sign said “some people call him pig”. I wanted to buy a billboard, I told a friend of mine, I wanted to buy a billboard and show this big cop and this fourteen-year-old kid with thirty bullets in him and say “some people call him peacemaker”.

James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni