What did MLK say about police and justice?

The relationship between law enforcement and justice was one I had to address directly and personally — not as an abstraction, but from lived experience. In Why We Can't Wait, writing about Birmingham, I was deeply troubled by those who praised Bull Connor's police force for maintaining "order." I asked whether they would have offered that same praise “if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes”. Order without justice is not peace — it is the suppression of conscience. This connects to a deeper principle I laid out in the Letter from Birmingham City Jail. There I distinguished between just and unjust laws, and described what authentic respect for law actually looks like: “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law”. The police, when they enforce unjust statutes, do not uphold law in any moral sense — they merely enforce power. And I drew the starkest possible contrast: “everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘le- gal and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was illegal”. True justice, I always insisted, is not the same as order. A peace that silences the cry of the oppressed is not peace at all — it is a negative quiet, the absence of tension rather than the presence of justice.