I respect the police officers, but something you learn as a young black man in this country is that... life is a little bit different for you even though, on the surface, it seems to be the same.
My family are police officers, detectives. My brother Mitch is FBI. Mitch is like that - a stern enforcer.
At one stage of my film career, between 2007 and 2010, I had taken up many projects where I played the role of a police officer. Later, I deliberately took a decision to not do any police roles. Since then I've been growing my hair and beard so that I'm not roped in for any such roles.
To be a police officer in New York requires so much more than just we, as a citizen, need to walk around. Your job is to put yourself in this place where a horrible event has happened and try to figure it out. That's what you do, day in and day out. You have to have a certain distance to it. You can't let yourself go too far into it.
If police officers routinely issue tickets for the most serious traffic offenses, they'll be treating drivers of all races, sexes, and ages equally.
A 'Globe' examination found that Boston police officers exercise broad discretion when deciding whether to issue a ticket.
We don't ever want to create an environment where people are afraid of their own local police officers.
I actually wanted to be a police officer like my dad for the longest time, up until my sophomore year in high school when I started doing plays. I did plays when I was little, but in high school, I started getting into acting.
There's a larger conversation we need to have about the role of police officers, their relationship to the people as enemy or executioner, when they're not supposed to be either.
I think the only thing that's really going to make a change in terms of how we feel as citizens in terms of safety and our relationship with the police is if we start seeing more federal indictments, arrests, and convictions of police officers.
