7 posts tagged with crime by chavenet.
Displaying 1 through 7 of 7.
Spooky in ways that are at once real and imagined, novel and banal
This reaches into other outlets that serve the terror-consumption cycle. In the pre-internet landscape all pain (while no less felt) was local. With the internet, what gives all forms of destruction their double-edged blade is their everpresence, their relatability, and their inescapability. The things that go on in someone’s backyard are no longer confined to their backyard. People don’t have to be caught in an immigration raid to be spooked by it. Listeners needn’t be in earshot of a firearm to hear it crack. from A United State of Fear [The Ringer] [CW: grisly details]
Cheese-it, the cops!
According to Quinn, once drug cartels and other criminal operators gain a foothold into how a food business operates, they spot other opportunities. “They will infiltrate a legitimate business, take control of its distribution networks and use it to move other illegal items, including stolen food.” For criminal networks, food has other attractions. “They know crimes involving food result in less severe convictions than for importing drugs,” says Quinn, “but they can still make similar amounts of money.” Particularly if it’s a premium cheese. from Why luxury cheese is being targeted by black market criminals [BBC] [more inside]
Do any of these people really remember what happened?
A bone-chilling gust of incompetent collusion swirls around this extremely outer-Boston saga, like a Dennis Lehane novel adapted by the Coen brothers. The bumbling attempts to close ranks, the incestuous conflicts of interest, the Wahlbergian “R”s and vowels, the incantation of technical terms such as “butt-dial”—all of it can almost make you forget about the man freezing to death at the foot of the lawn. from The Irresolvable Tragedy of the Karen Read Case [The New Yorker; ungated]
The key word is “stress”
Crimes rates have plummeted in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. Most of the credit for this remarkable trend has been given to an enlarged criminal justice system—largely more police, tougher sentencing and a massive prison complex. But we have found a larger and much more powerful explanation: A drop in interest rates and, in particular, long-term interest rates. When interest rates go up, crime goes up. When interest rates go down, crime goes down. from The ‘Startling’ Link Between Low Interest Rates and Low Crime [The Crime Report]
Cat-Scam
Yet the case still might have fizzled if not for the presence, in Tulsa’s Riverside Street Crimes Unit, of an officer with the improbable name Kansas Core ... the cat racket was hardly a choice assignment. “There’s this ‘We don’t care about catalytic converters, because it’s a property crime’ ” camp at the department, Staggs says. “It’s not a sexy crime. It’s not the robberies and the homicides.” When the previous commander gave Core the case, it wasn’t exactly hazing, but it wasn’t far off. “I’m pretty sure that lieutenant basically was like, ‘Core, you’re the up-and-coming guy,’ ” Staggs says. “ ‘Your last name is Core, and all the criminals call these cores. Here you go.’ ” from How Tulsa cops brought down a $500 million catalytic converter crime ring [Bloomberg; ungated]
“Don’t give away the papaya.”
There was another factor I hated to acknowledge as a freelance journalist. The work biases me toward odd and surprising narratives, the more dangerous the potential story, the more powerful its draw. This sensibility can be helpful when finding and exposing wrongdoing. But there are also those occasions when I only catch myself behaving like an aggressive and mercenary cynic. from Bad Tape by Dan Hernandez
Chump Change
A Euro Scam That Unfolded at a Snail's Pace
“It wasn’t so unusual to get coins from China,” said Susanne Kreutzer, a Bundesbank spokesman. “That is a business model for some people.”
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