Introducing New Crime: Criminals Are Just Going Online, Like The Rest Of Us
Gregg and I are friends with a guy who's in the criminal justice arena, who has, for years, been telling us what this guy is talking about in this Edge piece.
There's old-school crime and there much more profitable new crime -- techno, don't-get-your-hands-dirty crime. More and more, crime is not face-to-face, hold you up with a gun, but really smart hackers cleaning out your bank account, getting big companies to pay invoices they don't really owe, holding hospitals' computers for ransom (as seen in recent days), etc.
At The Edge, Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, and one of the founders of the field of information security economics, explains:
Meanwhile, in society at large, what we have seen over the past fifteen years is that crime has gone online. This has been particularly controversial in the UK. Back in 2005, the then Labour government struck a deal with the banks and the police to the effect that fraud would be reported to the banks first and to the police afterwards. They did this quite cynically in order to massage down the fraud figures. The banks went along with it because they ended up getting control of the fraud investigations that were done, and the police were happy to have less work for their desk officers to do.For a decade, chief constables and government ministers were claiming that "Crime is falling, we're doing a great job." Some dissident criminologists started to say, "Hang on a minute. Crime isn't actually falling, it's just going online like everything else." A year and a half ago, the government started publishing honest statistics for the first time in a decade. They found, to their disquiet, that online and electronic crime is now several times the rate of the traditional variety. In fact, this year in Britain we expect about one million households will suffer a traditional property crime like burglary or car theft, and somewhere between three and four million--probably nearer four million--will suffer some kind of fraud, or scam, or abuse, almost all of which are now online or electronic.
From the point of view of the police force, we got policy wrong. The typical police force--our Cambridgeshire constabulary, for example, has one guy spending most of his time on cybercrime. That's it. When we find that there's an accommodation scam in Cambridge targeting new students, for example, it's difficult to get anything done because the scammers are overseas, and those cases have to be referred to police units in London who have other things to do. Nothing joins up and, as a result, we end up with no enforcement on cybercrime, except for a few headline crimes that really annoy ministers.
Consider also that departments, to a great extent, need to believe in the cops chasing robbers with batons mode. It's a mode that allows for physicality being the way officers are chosen rather than intelligence. This isn't to say police officers in the force now are stupid; just that you encounter some who seem highly intelligent but many who might be working manual labor if not for getting a position on the force.
If you're wondering, "Hey, Alkon, what the fuck do you know about the makeup of the police department?" I have, unfortunately, a lot of contact with cops because of the way the LAPD and the Building and Safety department ignore violations of quality of life laws here in Venice.
The other night, at 3 a.m., a restaurant was (again!) illegally having their grease removed by a huge truck. This is not permitted before (I believe) 7 a.m., but they regularly do it at (usually) 5 a.m. Saturday, in the wee hours, it was so loud that it woke me -- a block away, in my bedroom in the back, behind closed doors, while I was wearing noise-canceling headphones, earplugs, and listening to "brown noise" on my phone.
I couldn't go back to sleep because the roar was too loud, and I called the LAPD. This happens too often, so I have met countless cops in my precinct over the years. (Captain Jon Peters, notably, once held a meeting for residents to beg for sleep from a bar here that violated the noise laws nightly. Petitioning the City Attorney and others did nothing. Only when we went to our State rep, Ted Lieu, who sent his aide to the Alcohol board, was the music turned down so I didn't hear it in my pillow every night.)
Lovely, huh? The thing is, as grateful as I am to cops who fight the scary criminals, most of us will not be robbed or raped in our lifetime, but we all need to sleep at night, and not at the whim of wealthy and connected bar owners. I can't prove corruption by the cops, but either they're corrupt or too dim to understand the noise laws (and this includes Captains at my precinct), and neither is acceptable.
via @harpersnotes
"We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferroconcrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment…." ~ Harry Harrison (The Stainless Steel Rat)
Conan the Grammarian at May 14, 2017 8:02 AM
Amy, there is a court case upholding the right of a police department to refuse to hire people who score too HIGH on an IQ test.
The PTB do not want officers who are too smart.
Jay R at May 15, 2017 12:38 PM
Amy, there is a court case upholding the right of a police department to refuse to hire people who score too HIGH on an IQ test.
The PTB do not want officers who are too smart.
Jay R at May 15, 2017 12:38 PM
From what I understand, too much of police work is pretty boring, and a smart cop would go crazy after a while - and likely not do a good job as a result. So it does make sense.
lenona at May 16, 2017 1:17 PM
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