# Do you believe a sting to be a legitimate way of catching potential law breakers?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-believe-a-sting-to-be-a-legitimate-way-of-catching-potential-law-breakers/499148>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [June 8, 2009, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-believe-a-sting-to-be-a-legitimate-way-of-catching-potential-law-breakers/499148 "2009-06-08T21:24:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\
**Post date:** [June 11, 2009, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-believe-a-sting-to-be-a-legitimate-way-of-catching-potential-law-breakers/499148/41 "2009-06-11T23:58:18Z")

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> [@begbert2](#):
>
> Yawn. This has squat to do with whether sting operations are inherently immoral. At best you’re erroneously conflating unrelated issues (sting operations/cop predjudices) and at worst you’re smokescreening.

Some laws are just not really enforced. You don’t ever hear about police enticing “criminals” to jaywalk against a red light, or buy a gross of prohibited bottle rockets. So when cops are spending a disproportionate effort on enforcing laws against crimes that are mainly perpetrated by poor people and really don’t harm anyone else, I have to question their motives.

Yeah, it doesn’t address the legitimacy of police stings in general, but it is tangentially related. I think drug and prostitution laws are generally a proxy for locking up certain undesirables who are otherwise innocent and law-abiding. And I think that police stings are part of that effort.

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