Criminal gangs ‘costing UK £40bn’

£40bn is quite a lot for criminal gangs.

What they want to do is open up some kind of tendering service. Doubtless those costs would come right down with a bit of competition.

Gangs cost UK £40B? Compared to what? For whom?

‘That’s a headline at the BBC. So it would seem that they do rather less damage to the UK economy tham the various banking groups that needed rescuing ….’

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’).

I know it’s not exactly the same as the point being made here, as, to the best of our knowledge, some/most of the financial behaviour that caused our predicament was not technically illegal, but the basic point remains.

Now, if only we could get them to restrict themselves to robbing bankers and financiers and then immediately distributing all the money widely, we might get some kind of recovery going. Call it Dillingerian Economics.

Well, I just saw Public Enemies, and since Dillinger robbed banks and Robin Hood robbed the clergy and tax-gatherers, the parallel is better with Dillinger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-collar_crime

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

According to the UK papers this morning near 50% of that comes from drugs.

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

Hidari, I teach this stuff. The reason I asked what you meant by w.-c. c. is that I know how complicated it is. As dearly as I love Wikipedia, I don’t think it’s going to solve that problem.

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’.

That’s quite a lot of coin ! Her Majesty’s folks need to get on the ball ! I wonder what the figure is in the USA ?

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

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’.)

Well, I hear that at least you’ll soon be rid of the gang headed by one G. Brown. That one seems to have done quite a bit of damage.

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.

40 billion in the sense we use that word “billion” in the US–a thousand million– does nto seem like an outlandish figure. But I though people in the UK used “billion” to meant a million million–and if that is how this article is using the number billion, that’s a surprising figure indeed . . .

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

Hmm, 40 billion each year would averaged over the long run still be more than banks are costing, isn’t it? I mean, banks cost more right now, but not in every year. Or in other words, banks hide the damage they do yearly and it comes out in bursts.

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