Howard Safir Quotations

We grieve for Amadou Diallo and the four officers involved and pray they get a fair trial,

Police officers who ignore or brush off a plea for help violate their oath to this city and deserve severe and decisive punishment, ... But what is important is that the NYPD has moved swiftly against those members that violated department policy, and instituted the changes that will prevent the recurrence of future incidents.

If that's true, that's very, very troubling, and that should lead to significant disciplining of police officers,

He was arrested as a result of good old-fashioned detective work. We believe everyone involved with this robbery is in custody.

He was arrested as a result of a call from our tips line. We do know that he was moving around quite a bit, and we were not very far behind him and very often we would get to a place where he had recently been.

He is in my view the perfect law enforcement officer,

What we find is that many of the people involved in minor crimes are the same people that are involved in major crimes,

I accomplished most of what I wanted to accomplish with the NYPD, ... Crime is down ... and it's time to do something else.

I think that any human being should feel embarrassment that one human being would do this act to another if the allegations are found to be true,

It doesn't mean we're perfect, ... It doesn't mean there haven't been these horrific incidents and it doesn't mean that we can't improve. But when you look at the overall record of this police department, it's something that is envied by the rest of the world.

I'm hoping they'll come forward and tell us what happened, but at this point it's very hard for me to make a judgment because I have very few facts,

We just want what is best for him now,

We have not identified them as of this moment,

Those are tragic incidents but you have to put them in context, ... We have six million contacts with the public a year. We arrest almost 400,000 people a year. And you're talking about three incidents.

This is E-commerce, ... It's potentially the future of drug sales, and we realize we have to get in front of this very quickly.

This appears to be something that happened relatively spontaneously, and apparently some of them did not really recognize the seriousness of the matters they were involved in,

This is a day of mixed emotions for me, ... I'm leaving probably the best job any human being can have.

It's the longstanding police department policy to release the background information of officers involved in a shooting incident, such as prior shootings, as well as the relevant background information of the civilian involved, such as arrest history,

There was a pistol on the right front seat -- none of the occupants claimed ownership of it, ... They were all arrested for possession of a weapon and possession of stolen property.

I don't think anybody who's fair-minded believes that those four police officers left their homes that morning with any intention of shooting anybody ... and I think that the verdict in this case is the proper one.

This is like protecting the Ku Klux Klan, ... You don't particularly care for the people you're protecting, but it's your duty to do so.

The head of intelligence for the NYPD is the former deputy director of the CIA, ... I would take his word before I would take some spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security's word.