I think the new headlines could be “Organized crime worse for economy than banking” . That would give a real scare to the British public.

No, not for a few years.

Or, it could simply be that I’m a small town boy from West Michigan, unfamiliar with the usages of the sohisticated wide world . . .

Damn sight tighter than ‘crime’, in some lights.

Yes, but they’ll be replaced by the worse of two evilsTories. In crime terms, this is like replacing a third-rate, imitation-Robin Hood with Scarface minus the redeeming features.

My point is that government statisticians aren’t sitting in a big room with a Cost of Crime meter running in the corner, and deciding which of the figures on it to report. The headline figures that get quoted are the end result of a whole set of social practices, which in turn rest on a bunch of highly contested definitions. We can tweak at bits of this picture and say that, well, obviously the ‘cost’ of harmless-but-illegal practice X shouldn’t be calculated on the basis of the cost of policing it, or obviously the economic cost of harmful-but-legal practice Y should be included under the heading of ‘crime’, but that’s about all we can do – we can’t pull out a set of alternative figures for the Real Cost of Real Crime, because those figures aren’t systematically being collected.

So no, it’s not obvious that the cost of white-collar crime is higher than that of predatory street crime. Nobody knows what the cost of white-collar crime is, not least because hardly anyone agrees what white-collar crime is.

(This is partly why a lot of the smart money is moving out of crime altogether and into ‘social harm’.)

‘I will defer to those who actually know about crime statistics, but rumour has it that of course (of course) the middle classes are the most criminally minded: however this is not reflected in the crime statistics because, apparently, white collar crime is simply not included in those stats (even though white collar crime costs the economy far more than ‘blue collar’).’

So what I was saying is that I was under the impression that white collar crime stats aren’t counted, which you actually confirmed for me in your post!

The issue isn’t to do with your definition of ‘crime’ it’s to do with cost to the economy of crimes as inferred from official stats. It seems obvious to me that the cost (i.e. in pure monetary terms) of white collar/corporate/state-corporate crime is always going to outweigh the cost of a junkie robbing a post office of twiglets, but then I suppose you could argue that the whole argument is meaningless because, as stated, the State doesn’t collect white collar stats anyway.

My obvious point was not so much about costs anyway: it was, (obviously I would have thought) about why white collar/corporate crime stats aren’t included in the ‘regular’ crime stats, and the reasons for that should be self-evident.

Citation needed for what bit in particular, ajay?

Tim – if that’s right, they could cut it by a good proportion of that 50% by not quoting essentially imaginary ‘street values’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qHQ-y8ijSY

Thus we could cut the cost of organised crime by nearly 50% simply by legalising drugs….

As the kids say, [citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_crime