When crime isn't counted as a crime

Steven Den Beste, who I've known since "the OS/2 days" took a short sebatical to gather his thoughts and has returned to blogging:

http://denbeste.nu/

He has an interesting article this week about relative crime rates:

I ran into this post over the weekend which talks about crime rates in the US. It talks about trends over time, and compares American crime rates to those reported from Europe. He is dealing with two basic issues: the belief held by many in Europe that the US has far more crime than in Europe, and the fact that when it comes to certain kinds of violent crime there are certain groups which are disproportionately likely to be involved both as perpetrators and as victims.

 

Specifically, young black men who live in the inner city are far more likely to commit murder by gunfire, and far more likely to be victims of murder by gunfire. The overall murder rate for the US is somewhat higher than in Europe, but that's being skewed by this particular group. Calculated without them, it turns out that our murder rate is not really much different than in Europe, and in most other kinds of crime (e.g. armed robbery, burglary, rape) it seems our crime rate is much lower.

After having read that article, I spotted this one. The latest report on American crime rates has just been issued, and the crime rate has dropped even further.

 

Nonetheless, it leaves open the question of why it is that inner city blacks are so much more at risk, and whether anything can be done to help them. There have been many attempts to do so, and they're something of a cause célèbre in certain circles. Their apparent failure is used by many as evidence that there are still lingering effects of slavery and discrimination, even after all this time.

I have a problem, in general, with how we define "crime". First off, for whatever reason African Americans do commit a disproportionately greater percentage of violent crime. But whites commit a disproportional percentage of unreported crime. Crime that in actuality that is never enforced because it falls under "civil" laws.

Let me give you an example:

If I walk into a store and steal a candy bar, that counts as a crime.

But if I am a store and don't pay my distributor for that candy bar, it's not a crime. It's a civil action that can only be dealt with by the courts.

The former counts as a crime statistic, the latter does not.

In my brief 10 year career as a business owner, I've eaten around $720,000 in bad debt. That's right, $720,000 was effectively "stolen". But none of that has counted in any criminal report. It all falls under civil. To me, it's the same thing. Someone else took money that was owed us and put it in their own pockets.

The original OS/2 version of Galactic Civilizations, for instance, was published by a company called "Advanced Idea Machines". They never paid a cent in royalties on the released game. Hundreds of thousands of royalties were pocketed by the unscrupulous owner. My first thought was to call the police. This was a cut and dry issue. He was stealing. Nope, the only recourse was a civil lawsuit. I was a college student then, I couldn't afford a lawyer and because the publisher resided in another state, suing would be an expensive ugly mess and no attorney I did talk to was willing to do it on contingency, especially since the publisher appeared to be a master at shell games.

So then I learned my lesson and decided to publish Galactic Civilizations II directly via Stardock. And the game did really well at retail selling tens of thousands of copies. Unfortunately, we only got paid a fraction of what we were owed. Why? Well even though we published the game, we still had to sell to distributors who in turn sell to the retailers. Our main distributor, Blue Orchards, took the hundreds of thousands of dollars they collected, paid themselves, and filed for bankruptcy.

Between that time and very recently, Stardock switched to selling via its own website. Now the money goes directly from the customer to us. But our most recent game, once again, Galactic Civilizations but this time for Windows, is published by Strategy First. A reputable publisher as far as we know. The game has done very well at retail and has won numerous awards. Our first royalty check is actually due this week and we have high hopes that we'll actually get paid this time around.

But the point is, I am not sure that the discrepancy between white crime and black crime is as large as people think. It's just that crimes committed by non white collar people tend to count in these statistics yet stealing by white collared people tends to count as a "civil issue". To me, stealing is stealing. But when it comes to crime statistics, it seems to be dependent on how rich you are.