Even from the outside this is obviously true. They consider themselves the good guys by definition, because they see themselves as representing justice, as defined by the criminal code. A noble calling. Once you accept that, pure job performance (convictions) becomes an easy metric. The thought of ruining some individual's (or family's) life over recreational amounts of pot is either justified or compartmented away. Or like aaronsw...once the prosecutors are on it, there's no more question of proportion or actual justice, it's a matter of looking for the conviction.

Edit: I want to amend this a bit. It is something of a noble calling. In a better world, the executive legal function could depend a lot more on legislative and judicial functions to produce a criminal code that served justice better, and just worry about prosecuting what they can according to the law. But in so many cases now, the law is an ass.

I think you have downvoters not because people don't believe you, but because there still are people who believe people you sarcastically ridiculed as "good guys" are actually good guys.

In the meantime a (white) woman in a different district was given a stern talking to for deliberately voting on behalf of her dead mother.

She was contrite and acknowledged the severity of her crime, we got her sentence reduced! Good guy wins again!

For me, it's impossible to respect these professions (prosecutor, police, and to a major extent, judges) or any of the people in it. They throw around words like "justice" and "fair" without having a single clue as to what they mean. Maybe one day, they'll be the ones on the other side of the bars for the cruelty and harm they've caused to society. This kind of simple minded "good vs. bad" thinking or "I'm just doing my job" thinking has no place in any legal system and certainly not in any justice system. [Insert comparison to Nazis "just doing their job" here because after all, we have a few million people locked up, most of them for no reason.]