Basically, it you wrote the script to this....small town just beyond Memphis influence...got infiltrated by Memphis gangs and some bogus 18-year-old kid who now owns a gas station and poses like he’s an insider to the gas-station guests. Young gal from the area gets heavily involved in various comings and goings with the gas station customers (drug crowd) and spends two or three years within their group of thugs. She says the wrong thing to one of them, and it triggers ‘payback’. Andy and Barney? The local cops are situated to handle 1970s type crime and problems. They can’t handle this, and there’s suggestion that they might be insiders to the drug cartel.
If it sounds like some Latin American country script for a movie....it’s precisely how you should have seen things in the 1980s and how life would be relate to thugocracy. We have arrived. The authorities are powerless....the cops are either part of the problem or too weak to figure out the mess, and the public can’t overcome reality.
A fair summation.
I’m reminded of the beginning of Mad Max. Cops getting killed trying to do their job against bold criminals and the criminals having every resource to stay out of jail.
You just cash the check and go home. Till there is no home.
And add to that the fact that government law enforcement at the federal level is run by those whose only concern is “racial injustice” if not supporting the thugocracy.
It’s not just there. Remember the case in FL a few months ago when a white kid attending an “alternative school” was approached by a couple of blacks who offered to sell him marijuana, he refused to buy it, reported the attempted sale to the school authorities, and they “investigated” his charges in a way that revealed his identity to the perps. Then the perps caught him on the bus home that day and administered a Sopranos’ style beatdown. They just received very easy probation with no jail time. In that case it looked like the school authorities and prosecutors were in cahoots with the drug sellers.