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Notes -
Perhaps historically true, but in modern times it is horribly false. At the outset, modern poor urban youth are now much more lightly policed than suburbanites. Drinking or smoking weed in public is just not payed attention to by urban police forces, same with minor property crime. So they are simply not being arrested for misdemeanors that the suburban kids would be. And as a result they also aren't picking up possessory felony charges for drugs or guns. Then at the court level the prosecutors offices in urban situations have much larger caseloads so they offer much more favorable plea deals. A felon with a gun in the city might get offered 3 years while in a suburb he would be lucky to get 7. This also means that if there is a trial less resources are dedicated to the prosecution than would be in the burbs. In a suburb, good luck with an officer forgetting court for even a misdemeanor DUI. In cities, officers miss court dates for felony burglary and robbery cases because they are responding to a more serious offense, or maybe had a 24 hour shift and dont feel like it. Finally, the judges in urban areas are nowadays progressives that, even after a trial, err towards imposing a sentence near the mandatory minimums. In the burbs, you are looking at a maximum sentence if you lose a trial.
But the general rule that the law is not perfectly blind is very true. The other day a cop was murdered by someone who was released by a judge for Armed Hijacking a few days before that. You know not a single judge was releasing someone who did a gun crime THAT day.
It's still true that the Kennedy kid will get off scot free. It's just that there are three relevant classes, not two -- the underclass, which is typically lightly policed and lightly punished, unless they commit a crime against the top class. The massive middle, who are controlled largely by the fact that even a minor conviction can severely limit them (e.g. by denying them professional licenses or certain careers; if you've ever been busted for shoplifting you can never work for a financial institution, for instance, and if you've ever had a DUI conviction most jobs involving driving are off limits) and a major one tosses them into prison and permanently into the underclass, for which they are not prepared and will probably suicide or die of misadventure shortly after. And the top, who can escape consequences with a word to a prosecutor or a judge, except if they lose some power game with others on top quite badly -- though they may even survive that, like Martha Stewart.
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