SFO: Fewer white collars to be felt
In Die Hard, just before the chief terrorist/robber Hans Gruber paints the wall with his brains, cocaine-snorting weasel Ellis tells him, ‘Business is business. You use a gun, I use a fountain pen. What’s the difference?’
In the film, both comes to sticky ends. These days however, thanks to proposals made by the Serious Fraud Office this week, white collar criminals can look forward to an easier life than their gun-toting compadres:
The director of the Serious Fraud Office plans to spend less money prosecuting and investigating in order to pursue alternative “harm reduction” initiatives, including educating on fraud prevention, alerting potential victims and civil court actions to disrupt potential criminality.
As the SFO proved a few months back, when it binned Saudi arms investigation, they don’t mind you selling guns as long as you’re not using them.
But why not extend this thinking to violent robbery as well? ‘Harm reduction’ initiatives like stab and bullet-proof vests for all. Educating on stab prevention and alerting potential victims. Put the onus on them to protect themselves rather than getting the stabby and shooty crew to pack it in. You’d certainly save money if that’s your priority in a criminal justice system.
Still, its easier to sell feckless single mothers and disaffected youth to the media and public. Fraud and its besuited perpetrators just don’t fire the popular public imagination in the same way. Why bother dragging them through the courts?
Posted on July 18th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
| See also • Twitter thingy daily digest for 2007-04-22 • Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown • Lies, damn lies and Peter Hain |
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[...] face of benefit fraud and helps enforce neoliberal hostility against welfare systems) and today via Chicken Yoghurt- The director of the Serious Fraud Office plans to spend less money prosecuting and investigating [...]
Who scripted Die Hard? The line about the fountain pen is surely lifted from Woody Guthrie (Pretty Boy Floyd).
ejh’s latest blog post… But not today the struggle
Die Hard is based on a novel (quite faithfully, according to Wikipedia), so the line may have been lifted by a real writer called Roderick Thorp, rather than by a Screen Concept Update Manipulation specialist.
I mean it might even be a deliberate reference - I’m sort of keen to know but I’d much rather somebody else did the work required to find out.
ejh’s latest blog post… But not today the struggle
The DWP intranet leads with and boasts an entire section dedicated to the BBC programme On The Fiddle, inviting comments from that enlightened section of our staff who just love to lather themselves into a rage at benefit fraud.
Sean’s latest blog post… I don’t need a lecture from David Cameron