Hey folks. I know you're expecting a poorly thrown together tuesday post about some random thought I stewed over for a day or two. Well, I'm pretty busy dealing with my second mid-life crisis, so the old think box has been a little distracted. But, not one to shrug responsibility, here's... something.
How are criminals keeping up? Sure, many crime levels aren't what they were in the late 80s and early 90s, but it seems like it should have gone way down, not sort of down. Consider the advances in forensic technologies, increased understanding of criminal psychology and criminal profiling, more highly specialized law enforcement units, better surveillance options, easier wire taps, more informants, better inter-agency cooperation, cell and satellite phones, real-time gps, credit card tracking, phone record data bases, instant DMV plate results, and on and on and on.
Police standards are going up, more and more cops have four year degrees, attend longer academies, and have more formal continued training opportunities. What are criminals doing to keep up with all of this? There's no indication that perps are better educated or highly trained, there's an increase in computer crimes and fraud, but the violent crime rates are holding strong - still just people with guns and knives killing, raping, kidnapping, blowing stuff up, and keeping the ratings on cable news high.
I don't get it. Maybe I'm naive and simply expect too much of our justice system. In my mind, more resources and better trained cops should be out-pacing criminals unless they have some parallel increase in competency that I'm completely failing to imagine. I can see where the internet provides a lot of information pertinent to a successful criminal career, and, although often as misleading as they would be educational, perhaps the prevalence of law enforcement related television shows and media (both the realistic and highly fictionalized) help prepare the self-motivated criminal understudy learn where to avoid errors. By in large, though, it seems like nothing's really changing.
Ideas? Thoughts? Glaring omissions of pertinent lines of thought?
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I can think of a couple of things:
ReplyDeleteDepending on the crime, more severe or certain penalties may not be enough of a deterrent. A lot of crimes are committed without premeditation or when criminals don't feel like they have any other options. I don't have numbers, but I'd be interested in seeing if the arrest/ conviction rate has improved compared to the base rate at which they are committed. A big disparity would be evidence for the claim that the justice system punishes crime better than it deters or prevents it.
On the issue of prevention, a lot the the 'advances' in recent decades focus on the behavior without looking at the underlying causes. An excellent example is the War on (some) Drugs. Here's a really good article about the topic from Ro;ling Stone a couple of years ago:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs
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Hope everything turns out ok on the crisis front.