In too many ways, Ohio is being run for the benefit of those who have already made it, and too many of our friends and neighbors are being left behind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cuts to police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, and to our local schools, while property and sales taxes are going up.
Instead of speaking about defunding the police, we should be advocating ways to create partnerships and promoting connectivity between communities and police officers.
When you have all these new police officers and resource officers coming into schools, what I'm worried is going to happen is we're going to increase the school-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately affects students of color and lower social status.
We're getting rid of bureaucracy, so that we're releasing time for police officers to be crime fighters and not form writers.
I've had friends who have been beaten up by police officers who put phone books in their T-shirts and then beat them up, then drive off.
My accident happened in what should have been one of the safest places to be: in a police station, at the hands of trained police officers. So more guns are not the answer.
We don't ever want to create an environment where people are afraid of their own local police officers.
Communities of color don't understand what it means to be a police officer, the fear that police officers have in just being on the streets.
Not only are police officers often taken for granted, many people are highly vocal about their dislike for cops.
There are many avenues to peacefully protest, but those rights don't extend to illegal actions, breaching security perimeters, and threatening police officers.
One of the things we do not want is to become a complete fortress. This is not going to happen with military on every street corner or armed police officers everywhere. We do not want that so we have to be intelligent in our response and to be proportionate in our response.
Police officers must act quickly to seize wrongdoers and obtain evidence while protecting themselves and bystanders. It is easy to second-guess their search-and-seizure decisions in a secure courtroom.
Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.