This sort of implies the street criminals become cyber criminals, which seems to not be a matching skill set. Call me skeptical of the study I admittedly haven't read.
Does it? I never considered that. It seems obvious to me that they aren't the same actual people.
We have more EV cars on the road displacing ICE vehicles, but that doesn't imply that the old cars "transformed" into electric ones.
But "Why would crime become constant?" is very interesting. For that we turn to "criminology" [0,1]. Roughly, there are three "layers", biological, psychological and sociological. All of these are either fixed, or very slow and hard to change.
Indeed the biggest factors in "how much crime there is" are laws and reporting, how visible the crime is. Obviously we could make crime disappear overnight by declaring all behaviours legal. Really, the justice system can only absorb and respond to what the underlying social and economic conditions set.
Most crimes are resource motivated [2]. Violent crime makes headlines, ruins lives, changes votes and is generally undesirable. "Soft" crimes are less visible and have less impact, especially when they are against actors that are so immensely wealthy they do not even care (for example big-tech companies that see huge fines as simply the cost of doing business as usual)
When we have a fixed pool of criminal potential (set by these structural conditions), which would you choose as a new criminal entering the "market"?
And not surprisingly, Pew Research polls showed "violent and property crimes declined by 51% and 54%, respectively, between 1993 and 2018."
Therefore the hypothesis I was curious about was whether Removing the opportunity for cyber crime (via better security) would have the unintended side effect of shifting crime back into physical robbery and theft with its attendant violence.
What do you think?
[0] https://www.britannica.com/science/criminology/Major-concept...