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if you haven't, you should check out david simons and edward burns book "the corner: a year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood" which is really interesting (much more than the tv version).
it walks you across the divide that separates thinking about the drug economy in a community through the lens of individual pathologies/criminality and into a more sociological view in which drug trafficking functions to stabilize social structures and so operates in a manner that's consistent with police objectives, which are not to rid the world of the evil of x or y but to use social balances to prevent excessive deviation, excessive violence, etc.
one of the claims that simon and burns make is that in the baltimore neighborhood they lived in and investigated for a year, the older heroin economy was far more functional than was the (at the time) newer rock cocaine economy. they link this to the characteristics of the addiction cycle itself, which externalizes in the patterns that link users to dealers to the wider systems of distribution they are part of.
and a drug economy is really just an extension of capitalism, yes?
anyway, the question seems to be what you assume a police force does, what kind of relationship it has to the communities that it's part of (assuming that the police in question are working with a local beat kind of approach, so they're integrated into these communities---this as over against a more los angeles paramilitary/adversarial approach, which has---i think---fallen out of fashion because it doesn't work).
what is order?
is order the same as sin?
does maintaining order mean prosecuting every deviant action, or only those which threaten order?
that kind of thing.
maybe plan 9 will have more to say....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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