US Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch, in her own words

Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney general nominee, was on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, meeting with senators.

As the North Carolina native met with the political leaders who hold a key to her future, others parsed remarks from her past.

If confirmed, Lynch would take the helm of the U.S. Justice Department in the wake of the Ferguson shooting as it begins a nationwide effort to build a better trust between police and the communities they serve.

The New York Times, in an article posted Dec. 2, culled comments Lynch made in her first go'-round as a U.S. attorney under the Clinton administration to offer insight.

Lynch's first term as the chief federal prosecutor in Brooklyn came after several high-profile police-abuse cases — including the choking death of a Hispanic man in 1994 and the charges against the New York police officers accused of beating and sodomizing a Haitian immigrant with a broomstick.

“We live in a time where people fear the police,” Lynch said in 2000, at an Association of Black Women Attorneys luncheon. “But we must also understand that when people say they fear the police, as bad as that is, they are also expressing an underlying fear, that when they are confronted with the criminal element in our society, they will have no one to call upon to protect them. And that feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness is the worst feeling that we can inflict upon fellow members of our society.”

Lynch said the onus of repairing that broken trust fell to "law enforcement because we are the ones who have taken the oath to protect and to serve the people of this city. And we are the ones who have the ability to change from within."

Lynch is a veteran prosecutor who lived the first six years of her life in Greensboro and the remainder of her childhood in Durham before leaving for Harvard to get her undergraduate and law degrees.

In early 2001, Lynch spoke to the Black Law Students Association at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan in early 2001, she described the importance of allaying those fears through closer ties with law enforcement. “Building a better relationship between the police and the minority community serves us all,” Ms. Lynch said. “The community desperately wants it. If people did not want things to get better, they would have burned the city down by now.”

This story was originally published December 4, 2014 at 1:36 PM with the headline "US Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch, in her own words."