The New York Times published a book review entitled “Thin Blue Lines.” The two books reviewed were about street crimes. Based solely on reading the NYT book review, and wearing my criminology hat, neither book adds materially to the useful literature. The two books, and the book review, however, share a common characteristic that is worth analysis. All three conflate “street crime” with “crime” and “police” with “law enforcement.” The “blue lines,” of course, refer to police, rather than the FBI white-collar crime section that is supposed to investigate elite white-collar crime. If the American police represent “thin blue lines,” then in comparison the pittance of law enforcement personnel charged with investigating elite white-collar crime represent the sheerest tissue paper – so insubstantial that they must be described as diaphanous or gossamer.
We are living with the consequences of the three most devastating epidemics of elite financial frauds (liar’s loans, appraisal fraud, and the fraudulent resale of these fraudulently originated mortgages through fraudulent “reps and warranties”) in U.S. history. Not a single executive who led, and became exceptionally wealthy, by leading those epidemics has been imprisoned or even required to pay back the fraud proceeds. But none of this shows up in reported “crime rates” for a reason so basic and so outrageous that it reveals how little our political cronies care about crimes by their elite supporters. The FBI and the Department of Justice refuse to keep statistics on the most damaging white-collar crimes committed by elites.
The reviewer, Barry Friedman, is an academic whose principal areas of expertise are street crimes and policing. The authors of the two books that Friedman reviews are distinct. Malcolm Sparrow is a former police official in the UK and a U.S. academic. He is best known for his disastrous aid to Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s “reinventing government” (ReGo) movement. ReGo, exacerbated by George W. Bush’s “Wrecking Crew” (see Tom Frank’s devastating book by that title), created the intensely criminogenic environment that was critical to generating the three fraud epidemics that drove the financial crisis and the world’s largest cartels (Libor and FX).