Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Honestly the older I get and the more I learn about criminals, of all stripes really be they petty thieves all the way up to state actors behind the most atrocious crimes against humanity we know of, they are all a bit on the dumb side. The ones that get caught are, anyway.

...but the last sentence if kind of important, right?

We only know about the criminals who got caught. Which probably means they did something dumb.

It's conceivable to me that there could be many—maybe even a majority—of criminals we don't know about because no one ever caught them. Maybe they committed fraud once, decided not to push their luck, and lived the rest of their life quietly. Maybe they killed someone and made it look like an accident, and no one ever suspected anything. How would we know?

You can look up crime clearance rates. It's a little depressing.

Here's an FBI chart for 2019 [1]

Though some countries like Japan and Germany have really good clearance rates for homicide. [2]

But more heartening, it seems like it doesn't really matter how many people the cops catch. Crime rates are still generally on a long downward trend (with some bumps along the way). [3]

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_clearance_rate

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/types-violent-crime-rate-...

And even those are only the crimes we know about! I imagine a really smart criminal wouldn't let anyone know a crime had taken place.

I actually completely agree with that. I guess it depends how you want to slice that in terms of categorization.

Which is to say: If a criminal gets away with a crime and faces no punishment, not even public scorn, are they really a criminal? Or did they just work a situation, even of their making, to their advantage?

I don't particularly know where we should draw that line. But yes, my statement does deserve a big caveat there.

Zodiac killer was never caught and it seems he already died a few years back - it was established some time ago through some teen's DNA whose grandfather was ex-cop or something. Don't quote me on that but it's on the net somewhere and was there before AI slop happened.

Basically a lot more evil goes unpunished than most realize, because carma is a thing only when it's a thing - sometimes it just isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com