In real life, it seems like organized crime and the FBI were nearly as bad as each other, by turns.  If you want to point to feds fighting the Klan, you have to remember that one of their informants killed children in an act of race terrorism.  To what extent did taxpayers foot the bill for that atrocity?  Or suicide-baiting MLK, blackmailing gay people, etc.  We can also point to mobsters who did a few good things, like fighting against domestic nazism before the US got involved in WWII, giving some charity back to their communities, etc.

Probably on balance the mobsters were worse.  Those guys are fucked-up monsters.  The feds have “protect people from criminals” in their job description and surely lived up to that ideal in at least a half-assed way once in a while.  The job description for mobster is “do nasty shit that is illegal for a good reason.”  Any good they achieved was optional and incidental.

This is a dreampost tho.  Why get into all that?  I believe these opinions influenced a dream I had recently.  It took place in a Prohibition era setting, with cops and robbers treated as a source of humor.  It was all in good fun there.  Zany hijinks, Keystone Cops shit.  But near the end of the dream, there was a chase scene that took a dark turn.

Cops were pursuing crooks when a car full of civilians got in the way.  There were a lot of people, like it was an open-topped bus.  The cops didn’t stop blasting at all, firing tommy guns through the crowd to hit the mobsters.  The first wound was a guy getting a fingertip blown off, followed by a lady getting shot in the back of the head, with the exit wound in her eye socket.  Not as big as it would have been in real life, tho it was disgusting.

This is normal enough for my dreams.  Gotta bring on the gore the closer I get to the alarm clock going off.  Wake up time.

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