[kennywinker]

If you work alongside bastards, like civil-rights-violating bastards not chew-with-your-mouth-open bastards, and aren’t actively working to get them removed from the force - i’ve got bad news about your bastard status.

Which is the point of the saying. It’s not that all cops are individually bastardly, it’s that all cops are part of a system that both protects bastards regularly, and does systemically bastardly things (like say heavily policing crimes of poverty while ignoring crimes of wealth).

[pc86]

I'd have to go through a decent chunk of the dictionary before I started referring to people who chew with their mouth open as "bastards."

> systemically bastardly things (like say heavily policing crimes of poverty while ignoring crimes of wealth)

I'm the last person I would expect to be defending police, but I think if you look at the rate of physical and property violence perpetrated by "crimes of poverty" vs. "crimes of wealth" that might have a lot more to do with it than the cop trying to decide if the victim has money or not before they do anything.

[kennywinker]

> than the cop trying to decide if the victim has money or not before they do anything.

Who said that? The cops don’t need to ”decide” to bust you based on how much money you have, the system already put them on patrol in the poorer neighborhood.

The police are too busy going after crimes of poverty to go after the crimes that impoverish people. “Crimes of wealth” do plenty of violence, it’s just laundered thru abstractions and layers of misdirection.

[pc86]

Poor neighbors are where the crime happens - at least the crime that some beat cop is qualified to see or investigate.

> “Crimes of wealth” do plenty of violence

Not for actual definitions of violence, no. I'm not saying they're not crimes, or they're not serious, but there's a reason "violent crime" is a category of its own. It's an important distinction. Words mean things, and trying to say murder or aggravated battery is just one kind of violence and embezzlement or stock fraud is a different kind is, at best, incredibly dishonest.

[amanaplanacanal]

"property violence"? Isn't it well known that wage theft is much larger than shoplifting, for example.

[array_key_first]

It's deeper than this. If you try to justify why Marijuana is schedule 1, you can't. The only reasonable explanation is "the DEA hates black Americans and poor people and wants to punish them most". That's the reasonable explanation, not the conspiracy.

[pc86]

"The DEA" doesn't have opinions because it's not a person.

Marijuana was made schedule 1 close to 60 years ago, and it's very possible the people who made that decision had racist motivations. It's also possible they didn't and they just wanted to punish anyone who was using marijuana more than other drugs.

"People working at the DEA 60 years after this decision was made are very obviously racist and hate blacks and poor people" is much more of a stretch than "nobody really cares enough about this to change it and it wouldn't change very much anyway," isn't it? Unless, of course, you're not interested in actually understanding why things are the way they are and are more interested in perpetuating some victimhood fantasy.

[array_key_first]

The decision was undisputably made with racist intentions, and anybody not willing to acknowledge that is not a reliable narrator and isn't worth arguing with. It would be like me trying to argue with someone in a mental institution - it's just not worth it, neither of us will gain anything from it.

I also didn't say everybody at the DEA is racist. You said that, based off of I guess you profiling me as some radical. I'm not, I understand that the DEA is an organization.

But what some people don't acknowledge is there are two types of racism in America: individual racism, and systemic or institional racism. You don't have to say these n-word to be racist. Most of our institutions are structured and designed in such a way to be racist. The DEA is structurally racist, and so is ICE.

It's not some "victimhood fantasy", you're just uneducated on it. But it's real and the rabbit hole goes very deep, I recommend some research on these topics. And, for the record, I'm white, I'm just not blind.