Law Enforcement. The Break Between Law and Crime

July 16th, 2008 Posted in Crime

The law does not always fall on the miscreant. There is the possibility of the crime being matched with a not-punishment. The link might be crime and reward.

In the old sociology as in the old movies the criminal as well as the deviant and the norm breaker inevitably receives an appropriate negative sanction. The world returns to status quo ante, all wrongs corrected. We receive this reassurance as deep wisdom. We applaud as good triumphs over evil, and then we return to our ordinary lives where our real experience (at least partially) negates our theory. On the sly we recognize that the criminal has the possibility of winning.

The alternate situations are also familiar. The famous doer-of-the-good-deed has some chance of being zapped in return. And the falsely accused, the truly innocent, might suffer an unearned consequence.

If a law, telling us what to do or what not to do, works perfectly the targeted criminal action will always be followed by swift and certain justice. The incidence of the wrongful act will reduce toward zero. The break in the connect can be thought of as the criminal’s edge of hope and optimism upon which the persistence of the criminal act depends. (I appreciate the undiminished possibility of a Don Quixote acting against impossible odds in his radically misperceived settings.)

Admittedly, we exaggerate toward an absolute vision of the legal machine in order to call attention to the actual nuanced and understated imperfections.

We can recite into the night examples of this break. I’ll start with a few and you can add those from your own recollections and misadventures.

(1) Body is found and coroner rules person has been murdered. Police can not find or identify the murderer. (Chandre Levy Case)

(2) Long serving British espionage official turns out to have been a USSR undercover agent. He and his associates escape before they can be arrested and charged. (Kim Philby Case)

(3) Piracy at sea, officers and crew share their ill-gotten wealth unequally but according to accepted practice and disband . Some return home and find higher socio-economic positions and receive great esteem and respect from the sovereign and the people. (Sir Francis Drake)

(4) French military officer Alfred Dreyfus is sent to Devil’s Island imprisonment for an act of espionage that he did not commit.

(5) Immigrants cross border illegally and, except for a usually minor fear of being uncovered and deported, live an ordinary and respectable working life. Sometimes a new law is passed regularizing their actual status.

(6) All cases of felonies committed where the criminal escapes detection. Auto theft, pickpocketing, robbery, burglary, homicide: e.g. thieves break open mail boxes, steal mainly government checks and sign them with the wrong signatures and cash them out in check-cashing shops who then deposit and clear them through the banking system. The government and its police arms rarely track and arrest these felons.

We are identifying a class of events where the supposed intent of a law is thwarted, where the link between a law and the acts it defines and the punishments it proscribes is broken.

The social order of this break-space is the enforcement arm of government–the police and the courts and the prison authorities and the parole agencies and the various lawyers who become involved as officers of the courts. The actual work of this order generates the pattern of connection between law and crime. They as a group make the concrete justice of their society including its imperfections.

The analysis of this institutional link and its imperfect outcomes starts with four patterns.

(1) Error. The link would work except for mistakes by man and machine. It could involve practical issues of training and supervision. Information in a computer is lost by an inept operator. A body hidden in a wooded area is not found by a police sweep. But sometimes error may follow from and relate to cultural and organizational issues. The mistake may suggest a cultural difference or an organizational glitch.

(2) Culture. The law and the legal process may presume an agreement in moral commitment and appreciation that does not exist. The Prohibition Amendment suppressing consumption of alcoholic beverages was based on a fundamental religious sensibility supported by rural communities but not shared by urban, recently migrated Euros, newly empowered by service in World War I. The difficulty in enforcing the law on the large numbers of violators who supported an illegal trade became quickly visible.

(3) Organization. In the famous case of Iran-Contra an informal police unit in the executive branch of government is constituted to carry out policies favored by the President but forbidden by Congress. The police appear to act criminally but they are under the Commander-in-Chief’s orders, that is they are legitimate. Even if they are found guilty of a felony by a court they are pardoned by the executive. The law is contravened in a practical way.

(4) Sometimes the law sets up its own contradictory pattern within the law itself–a double bind where the people are subtly encouraged to do and not do at the same time. Supply and demand are implicated in the drug trade and in the traffic in illegal immigrants. The supply is attacked with little success because of the demand. When the demand is finally attacked the resistance and the true nature and cost surfaces but the legislative motive (the hidden compromise) can not be fully recognized.

Organizationally the police, say the border guards and the INS, are asked to enforce a law without adequate support in funds, personnel and equipment. It is as though the governing cadres do not want perfect compliance.

The perfection of law and norm in action does not exist though it may be approximated. The law itself may contain contradictions, compromises, and attempted finesses of moral disagreements within the society. The police function may be inept, untrained, unprepared. Or it may be riven by political and ideological and even its own criminal elements–involved like the Mexican police in bribes, extortion, drug trafficking. The suspects meanwhile are busy covering their tracks, establishing alibis, deflecting attention. Even the unsuspecting innocent, minding his own business, transiting the scene. All contributing to the confusion, the imperfection…awaiting an imperfect sociology.