Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Absolute Mad Lads - The Quebec Biker War" video.

  1.  @-KillaWatt-  Difference is that organized crime is Organized. There almost certainly wasn't less crime, just more effort put into keeping it out of sight and minimizing the spill over in day to day opperations. For the average citizen, yeah, so long as the guys in charge of the organized crime know where the lines are and stay inside them (and keep their underlings inside them as well) that's great, it actually works fairly well. And then you get the times when it Doesn't go that way, the people at the top are just that bit less motivated by Long Term profitability and sustainability and a bit more interested in any number of other things that encourage less reasonable behaviour. And then it all goes to shit. Like 'much, Much worse than it would ever be if you have a compitent police force but no gangs'. Because fundamentally, organized crime gangs, at their best, do a lot of the cops' work For them, in some respects more effectively due to not having to follow those pesky laws that are intended to stop those in authority from executing some convenient, but unrelated, random so as to 'be seen to be doing something about the problem' and other similar abuses. Which has it's obvious up sides... and obvious downsides. Which, yeah, if your local legal system, politics, and police between them are sufficiently fucked (the problem, incidentally, is almost universally corruption, rather than ideological affiliation), then well behaved gangs can actually be a step up. Of course, at their Worst, such gangs are indistinguishable from terrorist organizations... and it's a Lot more common for them to be closer to the worst they can be than they are to the best they can be, simply due to a combination of their recruitment pool and how human power structures tend to work once a given organization is allowed to grow past a certain size (that size is 'fairly small, with very limited ability to project influence beyond it's members', just by the by.)
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