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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

CCTV only deters blue collar crime. White collar crime still has no equivalent deterrent. In a sense, CCTV helps us punish those who are already desperate. While not necessarily a negative in the abstract, in concrete terms one has to wonder why there's no CCTV cameras in executive offices, no screen recordings of everything they do on their computer.

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Maybe not exactly the same thing, but there are tax auditors, tax audits, access logging (for some administrative systems), "know your customer" bank regulations and public insider registries for example.

But unfortunately, regulations only bind the weak: https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich

Desperation is just one reason people commit crimes.

Such as wanting what other people have. Such as vengeance.

If only we had to worry about people who were desperate, paying them off would actually work.

Just because something doesn't solve all problems doesn't mean it's still not incredibly useful for the problems it does solve. And plenty of crimes aren't out of class-based "desperation" at all -- e.g. rape or stalking.

So I'm not sure why you're acting like there's some intentional effort to target the lower class but not upper class. The US goes after white collar crime heavily as well -- you'll find out quickly if you try to embezzle funds from your employer.

Obviously, CCTV is effective against physical crimes. White-collar tends to be caught with digital records like bank reporting, e-mails and texts, and so on.

So I don't know what you mean when you say white collar crime has no equivalent deterrent. In a nutshell, databases are the equivalent.

Thank you for making this very important point.

If we imprison the lower class, we can get them to work for free. There's no downside for the upper class. Cracking down on white collar crime is rife with downsides for the upper class, so we defund the IRS, EPA, etc

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