Crime

The June 9, 2007 issue of The Economist has an interesting article on how crime rates have been dropping in three of America’s largest cities–New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago–even though those cities have fewer police officers than they did in the late 1990’s. In Chicago, at least, the drop in crime has not been the result of putting more people in jail–Chicago’s incarceration rate has dropped since 1999. The secret? Focusing attention on high-crime areas, with local commanders responsible for their particular regions. So why don’t all metropolitan police departments do that? The article goes on to mention a demographic cause for crime reduction–each of these cities has seen property prices skyrocket, with a corresponding decline in the number of residents aged 15-24. Those three cities have lost over 200,000 residents in that age range between 2000 and 2005, as well as a displacement of poor native-born citizens by poor immigrants, the latter of whom tend to be better behaved. (The article suggests a racial factor as well, noting that “This trend is symbolised by the disappearance of blacks. Roughly half of America’s murder vitims and about the same proportion of suspected murderers are black. In five years America’s three biggest cities lost almost a tenth of their black residents, while elsewhere in America their numbers held steady.”) The criminologist cited in the article, Wesley Skogan, is the author of a number of books about dealing with crime, including a book on community policing in Chicago (link is to a review of the book by Sawyer Sylvester) and books and articles about race and crime. While searching online for some of his work to see what he has to say about race and crime, I came across an article by John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt (of Freakonomics) titled “The Impact of Race on Policing and Arrests," the abstract of which says: Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing. In spite of this awareness, there has been little previous research that attempts to quantitatively analyze the impact of officer race on tangible outcomes. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial composition of a city’s police force and the racial patterns of arrests. Increases in the number of minority police are associated with significant increases in arrests of whites but have little impact on arrests of nonwhites. Similarly, more white police increase the number of arrests of nonwhites but do not systematically affect the number of white arrests. These patterns are particularly striking for minor offenses. Understanding the reasons for this empirical regularity and the consequent impact on crime is an important subject for future research.I also came across an article by Matthew Robinson titled “The Construction and Reinforcement of Myths of Race and Crime," which has this abstract: Much of what we know about crime is myth. Myths are falsehoods that have become accepted as truth because they have been told and retold over time. Many myths of crime revolve around race. This article documents how myths of crime associated with race are created and reinforced through the criminal justice process and the media. The examination begins with the process of lawmaking, demonstrating how American criminal law creates biases against particular groups and benefits others by creating myths about race and crime. The article then analyzes how portrayal of crime in the mass media and activities of law enforcement, courts, and corrections reinforce myths of race and crime. A model of myth creation and reinforcement is presented, and implications of the model for the American criminal justice system and larger society are discussed.I suspect that race is a factor in crime in the same way that technical analysis patterns are a factor in stock price movement–it’s the social concepts doing the work rather than underlying objective facts, but the consequences are still real. ...

With the FBI being directed to focus its attention on counterterrorism, its investigations of fraud, identity theft, civil rights violations, and crime in general have plummeted: – Overall, the number of criminal cases investigated by the FBI nationally has steadily declined. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 – a 34 percent drop. – White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases – a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000…. ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit, ruled last week that if you are driving around with large amounts of cash, the government may presume that you are guilty of drug trafficking and seize that cash. The case in question was United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency (forfeiture cases name the seized items as the defendant). Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez was pulled over for speeding in Nebraska in 2003 while driving a rented Ford Taurus. In the car was a cooler with $124,700 in cash, which was seized on suspicion of a drug crime. A drug-sniffing dog barked at the car and the cooler, which was taken as evidence. Friends of Gonzolez testified that they had pooled their life savings to purchase a refrigerated truck in order to start a produce business. Gonzalez was sent on a one-way ticket to Chicago to buy the truck, but it had already sold. He had no credit card, so had a third party rent a car for him. He says he hid the money in a cooler to prevent it from being stolen. The District Court had found for Gonzolez, saying that there was no evidence of drug activity. The Appeals court disagreed, with a strong dissent by Judge Donald Lay. Forfeiture laws have long been heavily abused in the name of the war on drugs. In 1991, the Pittsburgh Press ran a six-part series on forfeiture abuse called Presumed Guilty: The Law’s Victims in the War on Drugs which can be found in various places online. UPDATE: Ed Brayton has also commented on this story at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. ...

Phoenix cracked the top ten for the first time in Forbes magazine’s best metropolitan areas for business (at #6); Arizona is down at #15 in the list of best states for business. Tucson ranks #77. Phoenix scored high for colleges, cost of doing business, culture and leisure, job growth, and net migration; it scored poorly for cost of living, and crime rate, and was somewhere in the middle on educational attainment, cost of doing business, and income growth. Tucson scores better than Phoenix on educational attainment and income growth, but is worse on every other measure. Arizona was ranked highly for labor costs (#7), economic climate (#1), and growth prospects (#13), poorly for regulatory environment (#36) and quality of life (#43), and in the middle for business costs (#24). Arizona has four billionaires–John Sperling and his son Peter of the Apollo Group (and University of Phoenix and Kronos Group), Campbell Soup heir Bennett Dorrance, and Arturo Moreno of Outdoor Systems. An interesting point in the summary is that the United States now has the highest corporate taxes of any OECD nation. UPDATE (March 9, 2007): Forbes has updated its billionaire list for 2007, and there are no changes for Arizona–the same four Arizonans are billionaires, with none dropping off the list and no new ones showing up. Bennett Dorrance is at #432, Arturo Moreno, John Sperling, and Peter Sperling are all tied at #799. Last year the list was much smaller–Bennett Dorrance was at #153, John and Peter Sperling were tied at #297, and Arturo Moreno was at #354. ...

AOL has published logs showing web activity data for 650,000 users–it’s 20 million searches in about 800MB. Although the AOL screen names were converted to random numbers, the numbers are consistent across an individual user’s activity and in many cases is no doubt sufficient to identify the individual based on ego surfing and other activity. As Tech Crunch points out: The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with “buy ecstasy” and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless.The Paradigm Shift blog notes an instance of an AOL user who appears to be plotting to kill his wife (though there are, of course, possible innocent explanations). Commenters note that over 100 users used search terms which included references to child porn. There is no doubt that this will be used to argue for greater release of data to the government with fewer safeguards against misuse; commenters have already made the claim that “if you don’t do anything wrong, then you have nothing to be afraid of - even if people can view your search history.” Commenter Robert follows up with a good response: Do you ever search for your SSN#, phone number and/or name on line to see if it was posted without your consent? Do you ever worry your day care provider might be a child molester so you search for child molestation and the care takers name or their business name? Do you ever want to find ways to explain sex to your teen age daughter? Gee I wonder what those search terms might look like? Are you famous? Imagine if you type in the name of restaurant you want to go to and the word paparazzi to see if they are known to hang there. Let’s hope they do not see that? Oh, do you have a rare disease or maybe you are pregnant and are looking for clinic in your area so you type in your zip code? In a rural areas that might leave oh 1-30 people it could be? Oh, maybe you think your son is gay? I wonder what you would search for then? Do you have any fetishes or other unusual hobby that might be embarrassing for people to know about but is not illegal. Remember that rural issue again? Getting it yet, because I could go on and on. This is an personal invasion at its most basic level. Not only does it expose personal details of peoples lives, but it is open to wild misinterpretations. Take the wife killing search. Has anyone thought they were simply looking for news they had heard of on the topic, looking for a good book they had heard about with that topic whose title they could not remember, were a wife worried their husband was thinking about this, or maybe that it was exactly what they were looking for but it was only a private fantasy that let them cool off one day after an angry argument? Without context any term can seem scandalous or even criminal. Finally, there is the greater issue. When you start taking away more and more privacy. Each time you chip away at the greater fundamental concept that you deserve this right at all.Releasing this data to the general public was sheer idiocy on AOL’s part (and apparently a mistake), and demonstrates that an AOL account is not a good idea even when it’s free. The data has been downloaded hundreds of times and is now being redistributed on other websites. UPDATE August 8, 2006: AOL has admitted and apologized for its mistake. News.com has an article which gives some more examples of the kind of information that can be gleaned from the search records. ...

The United States Senate has, after a three-year delay, ratified the Convention on Cybercrime. This treaty requires United States law enforcement to help other countries enforce their cybercrime laws against offenders in the United States–even if the actions are not illegal in the United States. There was an option for the Senate to attach an amendment to the treaty that said the FBI would only aid in cases where the crime in the foreign country was also a crime here (“dual criminality”), but they did not take that option, at the behest of the Bush Administration and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The result is that other countries that have ratified the treaty can force U.S. law enforcement to conduct searches, seizures, and surveillance on U.S. citizens who are doing things that are legal in the U.S., but illegal in those countries, which is the main concern that has been raised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Technology Liberation Front, Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and Declan McCullagh in his discussion of the treaty at ZDNet. A list of current signatories can be found at the Council of Europe’s website. Looking at the actual content of the treaty, I don’t think it’s as bad as the critics have made it sound. The treaty targets specific crimes in chapter II, section 1, Titles 1-5, and I don’t see how it could be expanded to cover things like the Internet sale of or discussion of products that are illegal in other countries. Title 1 covers crimes which involve “Offences against the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer data and systems,” which include illegal access to computers, illegal interception of data traffic, data interference (intentional damage or destruction of data), system interference (e.g., denial of service), and misuse of devices. The last item seems to be the most potentially problematic, but it is qualified to say that the signatories need not enforce that one, and that it only applies to devices intended to be used for the other offenses (i.e., it carves out an exception for security testing). Title 2 covers computer-related forgery and computer-related fraud. Title 3 covers child pornography. Title 4 covers copyright, which imposes nothing worse than is already in place in the United States. Title 5 covers ancillary liability–aiding and abetting the aforementioned offenses, and corporate liability for participation in such offenses. The problematic provisions are in chapter III, on international cooperation. Title 3 on mutual assistance provides for the possibility of requiring dual criminality–which I agree is the way the Senate should have gone. But it appears to me that the wording is such that it only mandates mutual assistance for the offenses listed in titles 1-5 (articles 1-11 within those titles). If this really mandated the U.S. to go after people in the U.S. who are doing things like selling Nazi memorabilia in violation of French law, wouldn’t other countries be worried about the U.S. ratification on the grounds that they could go after online gambling in their countries?

CNN reports that Mel Gibson has released a statement about his DUI arrest in which he says: I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said, and I apologize to anyone who I have offended.But they don’t tell us what these things are. TMZ.com, however, has published a very plausible account of the full police report (including images of report pages): The actor began swearing uncontrollably. Gibson repeatedly said, “My life is fd.” Law enforcement sources say the deputy, worried that Gibson might become violent, told the actor that he was supposed to cuff him but would not, as long as Gibson cooperated. As the two stood next to the hood of the patrol car, the deputy asked Gibson to get inside. Deputy Mee then walked over to the passenger door and opened it. The report says Gibson then said, “I’m not going to get in your car,” and bolted to his car. The deputy quickly subdued Gibson, cuffed him and put him inside the patrol car. … Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother fr. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’ and will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me.” The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?" ...

Mel Gibson, whose idiotic views on evolution and the role of women resulted in more hits to this blog than any other post, was arrested in Malibu on suspicion of driving under the influence. Historical Comments Einzige (2006-12-09): I wonder if he went crazy and started rubbing his own feces all over himself like he did in South Park Colorado that one time.

Back on January 8, I wrote a posting titled “Cell phone call records available online." In that post, I wrote about sites on the Internet where you can pay a fee and get the calling records for cell phones and long distance call records for land lines. The companies providing these services are typically private investigators who use “pretexting”–pretending to be the legitimate owner of the phone–in order to con phone companies into turning over the data. Some also used social engineering or exploited server security flaws to gain access to phone provider online web portals. Subsequent to the publicity around that story, there was a brief attempt to pass a law making “pretexting” illegal for telephone records as it already is for financial records. Frankly, I think unauthorized use of someone’s phone provider web portal account should already be illegal under most state computer crime statutes, and obtaining phone records through misrepresentation should constitute theft by deception or violation of identity theft statutes, but I am not a lawyer. Now, we are learning who some of the major users of these services are: various offices of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, including the FBI; police departments in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, and Utah, and most likely hundreds of other police departments. These agencies are bypassing legal processes to obtain private phone records without warrants from private companies engaged in highly unethical if not illegal activity. Hat tip: Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Part II of my interview on Michael Santarcangelo’s Security Catalyst podcast is now available. (Part I is here.)