I had a friend who came up against child services, and showed me incomprehensible and uncompromising behaviour of a child services director.

I eventually managed to download the director's mail. It made it clear why (he'd "promised" one of the guy's children to someone in return for a construction-related favour, essentially for money but slightly more complicated). I handed those mails to him and looked up what happened, and helped the guy arrange a very rapid transfer outside of the country he was working in.

I have worked for political organisations before, so I knew the situation is far worse than "you can't trust the state/bureaucrats", but there is a huge difference between knowing and seeing one of them use the power of the state to essentially kidnap children, "legally". It's not just that these people have a price ... it's cheap. The police will enforce the kidnapping of a child, if it won't draw too much of a crowd, for a free veranda. Casually. Without feeling the need to hide such conversations from their official mail accounts, where their superiors might read it. It made me see the purpose of organisations like the police and child services and I'm sure mental services, the criminal justice system, and so on for what they actually are and do, how and what someone coming into contact will be treated. The upper echelons will defend the bad actors, they won't attack them, but this event, seeing those mails, the fact that they used mail to just banally discuss such a "trade", killed every last bit of belief I had in even the idea of justice through a state, and really drove the yearly "we cannot have judicial oversight for child services decisions" we-must-save-the-children article home. I still have to fight down feelings to the tune of just killing the director and his customer. Killing as in ending their life, cruelly, for trying this.

Every last doubt I had about articles like police officers using phone taps to stalk girlfriends, stealing everything from money to tvs, beating up people for not immediately submitting to them, attacking/arresting/convicting people for racist reasons, ... and of the fact that in all but the most extreme of circumstances the commissioner, mayor, governor, judges, ... will back up those people and enforce their actions, and protect them, essentially because the only power they have comes from those assholes. They can't attack the bad actors without turning 10% of the organisations they control against them, and so they don't, with most probably being bad actors themselves. The worst thing to do is to expect help from them.

And that the right action is not to expose them. You can try but odds are vastly against you. But you can get away from them if you read the rules, and that is the correct action to take. That when a police officer, or a judge, a mayor, a governor or some other bureaucrat asks or tells you something you should look at them in disgust, not say a word and walk away.

Really puts in perspective what the state is : power, to take children, to take anything, to incarcerate and destroy the lives of poor people you don't like for whatever reason, racist, ex-girlfriend, whatever, by giving violence as a tool for social status to exactly the people who would take such an offer and order is really just the result of attempting to play off these people against eachother, leaving very little room to actually protect anyone assuming that's what they want to do in the first place.