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[Phmcw]

Hell the problem of racial profiling it's that it's about as natural as favoring a cute girl. Boh it's a stranger, it's suspicious, he look poor and he is badly dressed. Ok let's be careful.
Now I don't know where you live, but I don't have to worry a lot about aggressions where I live, and the few time I've been attacked in the street, I easily bested my opponents. So why do I keep finding myself thinking that. Well because it's natural and I suspect you will find similar behaviors in chimps.

Forbidding it is good, but it won't stop it.

Also, almost everyone I know that is working with poor poeple has become a tad bit racist.
But everyone I know that work in the university isn't.
The amusing bit is that in both case, most poeple they work with are immigrate.
I let you draw conclusions.

[fenrif]

You've read the law, right? You noticed how it strictly forbid racial profiling, right? You completely ignored it because it was inconvenient, didn't you?

And you noticed how it vaugely requires all police officers to stop and card anyone they consider suspcious of being illegal? See Zifnab's pie chart for how that will go with the racial profiling.

"Hey guys, don't pick on mexicans... But seriously go check all those mexicans"

I ignored it because it contradicts the essance of what the law is trying to do. "Go get all the somali pirates... But don't pick on the Somalis" Doesn't make any sense, at least it makes as much sense as telling people to card anyone suspected of being illegal immigrants and then saying not to pick on the group that has the highest numbers of illegals.

Aside from that, cops racial profile all the time. It's been going on for years. And yes, there are laws against it allready. Funny how that doesn't stop them. Just like there are laws againt police brutality, or shooting someone in the back numerous times with no provocation, yet those happen too. Just because something is a law doesn't mean people will unquestioningly follow it. If that were true we wouldn't need police.

I'll make the same assumption about a *portion* of said law enforcement because I work with them. Some are blatantly racist. That said, others are Hispanic themselves. Actually, a LOT of law enforcement personnel on the border are Hispanic. I mean, two of the major job requirements are that you live in the area, and speak at least passable Spanish.

If people want to come here and work and pay taxes, I say let 'em in, just get a basic cataloguing. Americans tend to forget--when most of our ancestors came here, there were no reams of paperwork to fill out, no hundreds of dollars worth of clerical fees and licenses to pay, no lengthy background check. My great-grandparents got off the boat, gave their names in a barely understandable dialect of German, said what country they were from, and what state they were headed for. That was IT.

I think the immigration issue really should take a backseat to the narco-war issue. That shit is starting to make the Taliban look like a British polo club by comparison. They found a handful of corpses in some caves near Cancun the other day, with their f**king hearts cut out and "Z" (probably for "Zetas") carved into their stomachs. I know Federal agents who have flatly said that they would take a year's detail in Baghdad over a month in Juarez.

The problem being that the non-racist police aren't the ones you remember. It's the ones who are on youtube harassing some kid because of the colour of his skin. This combined with the general us V them attitude of the police (well certainly in England, I'm not sure about the US but it seems the way it's going) rubs people the wrong way.

Sure there are good and bad cops they're just human after all. Every sampling of people will have a few bad people and a few awesome ones. But the police should be held to a higher standard than normal people. Especially in a country where they all carry firearms. (That said, I've never met a cop I thought wasn't an asshole, but that's here in the UK)

Also: it's increasingly looking like the only thing that'll stop Mexico from becoming a cartel-run narco state is if America stops the war on drugs. Well either that or just sends in the army.

[smigenboger]

Because they're human....wait! That's the problem! We need robot police. But in seriousness, police will be just as racist and bigoted as everyone other person.

[smjjames]

Yes. It is remarkably stupid to assume judges, juries, officers, detectives, political action groups and politicians will all hop on the "lets be racist fuckwits" wagon just because of your bias against the police.

Hey, what do you call assuming someone behaves in a certain way just because of who they are or what they do?

Profiling! The same mortal sin you presume the police officers will commit, you yourself are committing against them! What a glorious hypocritical discussion we're all having here. Lets keep this thread unlocked for shameless and self-rightous bigotry.

I'll make the same assumption about a *portion* of said law enforcement because I work with them. Some are blatantly racist. That said, others are Hispanic themselves. Actually, a LOT of law enforcement personnel on the border are Hispanic. I mean, two of the major job requirements are that you live in the area, and speak at least passable Spanish.

If people want to come here and work and pay taxes, I say let 'em in, just get a basic cataloguing. Americans tend to forget--when most of our ancestors came here, there were no reams of paperwork to fill out, no hundreds of dollars worth of clerical fees and licenses to pay, no lengthy background check. My great-grandparents got off the boat, gave their names in a barely understandable dialect of German, said what country they were from, and what state they were headed for. That was IT.

I think the immigration issue really should take a backseat to the narco-war issue. That shit is starting to make the Taliban look like a British polo club by comparison. They found a handful of corpses in some caves near Cancun the other day, with their f**king hearts cut out and "Z" (probably for "Zetas") carved into their stomachs. I know Federal agents who have flatly said that they would take a year's detail in Baghdad over a month in Juarez.

Their hearts cut out? Thats right out of the Aztec manual for sacrifice, plus a few other Mesoamerican cultures.

@Fenrif: I don't understand how stopping the war on drugs will stop Mexico from becoming a narco-state, wouldn't that just give the cartels even more profit? It almost sounds like you're saying Mexico should give up and let the cartels take over, and then the cartels will probably still fight each other.

War on Mexico is probably the last thing we want and I'm sure you can think of the international repurcussions if we did an UNPROVOKED attack. There's a difference between actually waging war on Mexico vs sending peacekeeping troops to help.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I don't understand how stopping the war on drugs will stop Mexico from becoming a narco-state, wouldn't that just give the cartels even more profit? It almost sounds like you're saying Mexico should give up and let the cartels take over, and then the cartels will probably still fight each other.

Illegal drugs are attractive, due to being forbbiden.
Illegal drugs allow for extreme profit, due to being illegal.
Cartels make money off of said extreme profit.
People work for the cartels to get money.

If we were to legalize said drugs, they will have entered the public market. Their value will drop like a rock, due to a sudden lack of risk value. The cartels in Mexico and the gangs in the United States will still exist for a time, but they will find themselves missing a huge amount of income they just had before the legalization. This will create a power vaccum, and the cartels will tear themselves apart trying to maintain their income. The end result of this action will leave Mexican cartels and United States gangs (Most of them, anyway. A few don't do it for money, but they are small.) in shambles. If you need a historical example, look no further than Prohibtion. We outlawed alcohol, and there was a whole criminal empire created overnight. We realized we were being stupid, and ended Prohibiton. Suddenly, there was nothing to be gained from smuggling alcohol into the States. And so it ended, almost as fast as it formed.

[smjjames]

I don't understand how stopping the war on drugs will stop Mexico from becoming a narco-state, wouldn't that just give the cartels even more profit? It almost sounds like you're saying Mexico should give up and let the cartels take over, and then the cartels will probably still fight each other.

Illegal drugs are attractive, due to being forbbiden.
Illegal drugs allow for extreme profit, due to being illegal.
Cartels make money off of said extreme profit.
People work for the cartels to get money.

If we were to legalize said drugs, they will have entered the public market. Their value will drop like a rock, due to a sudden lack of risk value. The cartels in Mexico and the gangs in the United States will still exist for a time, but they will find themselves missing a huge amount of income they just had before the legalization. This will create a power vaccum, and the cartels will tear themselves apart trying to maintain their income. The end result of this action will leave Mexican cartels and United States gangs (Most of them, anyway. A few don't do it for money, but they are small.) in shambles. If you need a historical example, look no further than Prohibtion. We outlawed alcohol, and there was a whole criminal empire created overnight. We realized we were being stupid, and ended Prohibiton. Suddenly, there was nothing to be gained from smuggling alcohol into the States. And so it ended, almost as fast as it formed.

You do know how controversial something like that would be though, the legalizing of drugs. I'm sure there are groups that want to do so, but those are in the minority.

Although I'll admit that it will free up alot of room in our prisions/jails since there are alot of people in for possession of illegal drugs.

[fenrif]

MetalSlimehunt ninjad me, but posting anyway because why not

@Fenrif: I don't understand how stopping the war on drugs will stop Mexico from becoming a narco-state, wouldn't that just give the cartels even more profit? It almost sounds like you're saying Mexico should give up and let the cartels take over, and then the cartels will probably still fight each other.

Its a pretty widely accepted notion that stopping the war on drugs would severely hamstring the cartels operations. Think about it, they make the vast majority of their money via smuggling drugs across the boarder into the US. If Americans could just go down to the mall and pick up a bag of weed or whatever, or grow their own, then the cartels wouldn't make any money on the stuff. They wouldn't need to control farmers in order to get their supply, control boarder towns for easy smuggling routes, etc.

Legalising certain drugs wouldn't mean they'd profit more, but much much less. Who's going to deal with shady muderers and theives when they can get the same product for cheaper (cost of smuggling, Vs cost of just growing it) and easier from a friendly neighborhood shop? Sure it wouldn't completely destroy them, but it'd severely cripple them. Where else are they going to smuggle the stuff?

You do know how controversial something like that would be though, the legalizing of drugs. I'm sure there are groups that want to do so, but those are in the minority.

Although I'll admit that it will free up alot of room in our prisions/jails since there are alot of people in for possession of illegal drugs.

Mexico tried to legalize drugs (not sure on the specifics of which ones, etc) but the USA pressured them not too. In the end they settles for decriminalizing personal use and possession of small amounts. It's a shame really.

Also, the groups that want drugs legalized aren't necissarily in the minority (3 out of 4 Americans apparently consider it a waste of time), it's just that it won't happen unless some politicians grow a spine and admit that the 30+ "war" was a huge waste of lives, resources, money and time. It's even more ridiculous considering that it's an inherited problem from past administrations.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Controversal or not, it remains a good idea. The United States Government has done all it could to make drug use the worst thing ever in the public eye, ever since the war on drugs was started. Charging people with what is admited to be a victimless crime is just childish. Without an injured party, how can one claim a crime was commited?! It's the most backwards, insane part of most modern laws.

[RedKing]

Problem is, not all drugs are the same. I've no problem with legalization and regulation of marijuana (hell, it's happening at the state level, and I figure within 20 years it'll be de facto legal anyways), but legalizing crystal meth and crack? That's a tough sell. And it's NOT a victimless crime. Ask anybody whose family member is a drug addict.


I'm increasingly of the opinion that the US military is going to have to become involved directly in Mexico. The Mexican Federal government is simply too co-opted to be effective. Top judicial and law enforcement officials frequently wind up either dead or bought off by the cartels. I've seen some say that the cartels together have a larger Federal payroll than the Mexican government, which isn't much of an exaggeration. Local police are typically severely underpaid, and thus highly susceptible to corruption and intimidation. The answer so far has to been to bring in the army when the local authorities are too corrupt, but now even portions of the Mexican Army are suspect.

And we can't ignore it much longer, because it's increasingly moving across the border. The cartels have their franchisees in US gangs like MS13, and the turf wars are spilling over into the US. It's also no longer confined to the northern hinterlands or the rural West Coast states. Like I said earlier, they're finding mass graves in places like Cancun and Veracruz. So far the cartels have been generally careful to avoid targeting Anglos, because they want to keep the US involvement limited. But it's only a matter of time. Frankly, I think all it would take is one young white girl to get abducted while on Spring Break and wind up mutilated. FOX News would be all over that, and pretty soon you'd have a wave of public opinion backing US military action.

But as long as it's brown people gutting brown people, too many folks here will tell themselves it's not our problem.

[Zifnab]

I'll make the same assumption about a *portion* of said law enforcement because I work with them. Some are blatantly racist. That said, others are Hispanic themselves. Actually, a LOT of law enforcement personnel on the border are Hispanic. I mean, two of the major job requirements are that you live in the area, and speak at least passable Spanish.

If people want to come here and work and pay taxes, I say let 'em in, just get a basic cataloguing. Americans tend to forget--when most of our ancestors came here, there were no reams of paperwork to fill out, no hundreds of dollars worth of clerical fees and licenses to pay, no lengthy background check. My great-grandparents got off the boat, gave their names in a barely understandable dialect of German, said what country they were from, and what state they were headed for. That was IT.

I think the immigration issue really should take a backseat to the narco-war issue. That shit is starting to make the Taliban look like a British polo club by comparison. They found a handful of corpses in some caves near Cancun the other day, with their f**king hearts cut out and "Z" (probably for "Zetas") carved into their stomachs. I know Federal agents who have flatly said that they would take a year's detail in Baghdad over a month in Juarez.

There may not have been reams of paperwork, but there were still certain qualifications.  My ancestors on my mother's side tried to emmigrate from Ireland to the British colonies in the 1760's, but got turned away because they were Catholic.  After they had already got off the boat.  So they went to Mexico instead.  From there they worked up into New Mexico and Arizona, and less than a 100 years later, they are Americans by virtue of being in the area when it was conquered.

Oh, and where I am now in New Mexico, the hispanic people who have been in the area for a long time generally dislike the illegal hispanic immigrants more so than the general population.

My grandfather and an uncle spent a lot of their careers as policemen working as narcotics agents against the cartels, often in deep cover in the border area.  So I grew up on stories of some scary shit that went on down there.  The stuff that is going on now makes their stories look like stories to put your kids asleep with.  Has anybody seen the stories about the piracy going on in some of the lakes on the US-Mexico border?  US fishermen get approached by a speedboat with a machine gun, have to turn over all their valuables, and if it isn't enough the pirates take the boat.

If anything we need to wrap up the wars in the Middle East and come back to the US to drive the cartels out of the country.  As long as we don't do anything stupid such as say, "Hey, the gangs from our country know the criminal underground better than we do, so lets give them arms to fight the cartels." 

[fenrif]

Problem is, not all drugs are the same. I've no problem with legalization and regulation of marijuana (hell, it's happening at the state level, and I figure within 20 years it'll be de facto legal anyways), but legalizing crystal meth and crack? That's a tough sell. And it's NOT a victimless crime. Ask anybody whose family member is a drug addict.


I'm increasingly of the opinion that the US military is going to have to become involved directly in Mexico. The Mexican Federal government is simply too co-opted to be effective. Top judicial and law enforcement officials frequently wind up either dead or bought off by the cartels. I've seen some say that the cartels together have a larger Federal payroll than the Mexican government, which isn't much of an exaggeration. Local police are typically severely underpaid, and thus highly susceptible to corruption and intimidation. The answer so far has to been to bring in the army when the local authorities are too corrupt, but now even portions of the Mexican Army are suspect.

And we can't ignore it much longer, because it's increasingly moving across the border. The cartels have their franchisees in US gangs like MS13, and the turf wars are spilling over into the US. It's also no longer confined to the northern hinterlands or the rural West Coast states. Like I said earlier, they're finding mass graves in places like Cancun and Veracruz. So far the cartels have been generally careful to avoid targeting Anglos, because they want to keep the US involvement limited. But it's only a matter of time. Frankly, I think all it would take is one young white girl to get abducted while on Spring Break and wind up mutilated. FOX News would be all over that, and pretty soon you'd have a wave of public opinion backing US military action.

But as long as it's brown people gutting brown people, too many folks here will tell themselves it's not our problem.

The US military getting involved is probobly not going to go down too well. Either the Mexican government will ask for assistance, proving to all their citizens that they can't handle the problem, and severly diminishing any faith in them, or they wont and America will have another huge PR disaster on their hands, plus will probobly end up being seen as the enemy to many Mexicans.

The thing about criminalizing specific drugs and not others is that it just doesn't work. If people want to do meth then they will, regardless of it being legal or not. However if it is legal, or at least decriminalized then they can be treated, and feel much safer seeking out help. Criminalizing the users never helps anyone, and prohibition just doesn't work.

Alcohol addiction isn't a victimless crime either. Depending on your meaning nicotine addiction isn't either. Criminalizing them isn't the answer though. You can't fight human nature.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Oh, hardline drugs hurt people, have no doubt. But ultimately, it's the user's choice. Besides, anyone with a functioning brain can see that the risk of such drugs far outweigh the benifits. But they are illegal. Forbbiden. Out of reach. When the time comes, a forbbiden thing can look quite glorious indeed, no matter its real risk.

Didn't some little white girls get abducted this spring break, though? I forget.

[Phmcw]

Drug war isn't the only thing favoring drug traffic in the usa ; inept social law, and highly segregated society also play a major role.

[Zifnab]

Hypothetically, if the US military were to become involved, Mexicans lost faith in their government, and the Mexican government collapsed, what would happen?  Would the US be forced into trying to annex Mexico to bring peace to the region?  Would we let it be chaos, and a breeding ground for terror?  Would we try to set up a new government, like we have been doing in Iraq?

[RedKing]

I for one, welcome our new Amerixican overlords. There's a lot of conspiracy theory garbage out there about a hypothetical North American Union, but I don't see the big deal. CanAmerExico wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.