Abstract
All crime control involves—consciously or not—the management of risk. The policing of crimes of deception presents special—though not unique—problems because of (a) the social status of some suspects and (b) the relative inaccessibility of most offenses to routine observation and to normal police informant development strategies. This varies over time and place. To the extent that people conventionally defined as “organized criminals” become involved in frauds of various types and in laundering the proceeds of these and other crimes, routine police styles of dealing with racketeering are more likely to pick up frauds earlier. Likewise, the same need of the internet telemarketer to communicate with unknown potential victims also renders them vulnerable to police and regulator surveillance and—perhaps when law-enforcement is motivated, resourced, and provided with a legal mandate to do so—intervention. However, policing frauds and other financial crimes creates particular financial and institutional difficulties because of the regularity with which such investigations cross jurisdictions, even at a fairly modest level of victimization. As the comments above imply, the policing of financial crimes overlaps organized crime and white-collar crime (as defined, however vaguely, in police practices). It may be helpful to outline a typology of such crimes, as it would be a mistake to think that all have similar policing styles: for a more developed analysis, see Levi and Pithouse.1
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Levi, M. (2007). Policing Financial Crimes. In: Pontell, H.N., Geis, G. (eds) International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34111-8_30
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