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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

> Private intelligence firms claim that illegally obtained information is routinely submitted to courts in the U.K., with the third industry figure telling POLITICO there are “ludicrous cover stories put in front of judges” where people are trying to “launder stolen information into court proceedings.”

This sounds like "parallel construction" with fewer steps.

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Outsourced parallel construction.

The world seems to be moving away from long-established (and established slowly over a long time) rules and regulations around law and due process due to it feeling slow and inconvenient.

Haven't crime rates been declining in the West for quite a while now?

>Haven't crime rates been declining in the West for quite a while now?

Yes but not for the reasons you think. More crime is going unreported, unsolved, unenforced than ever before. It started during Covid and hasn’t really gotten any better. The Leo’s that are die hard are now out there wearing masks looking for people of a specific skin color.

Any source for that?

Many say the opposite. Crimes are more often reported especially if suspects have a „specific skin color“.

There's really no way to know so it's silly to ask for a source. The only crime statistic that's fairly reliable (at least in developed countries) is murder because it's hard to hide a body. Lesser crimes are heavily under reported but no one knows by how much, and the reporting rates vary widely by location and time. In many places the police actively discourage victims from reporting minor crimes because it creates more work for them and looks bad in their statistics.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (formerly the British Crime Survey) should provide some insight, since it's based on interviewing a random sample of the general public.

It suggests that around a third of violent crimes are not recorded by police - but, contrary to the gp's assertion, that proportion doesn't seem to have changed significantly since the BCS began in 1982.

>There's really no way to know so it's silly to ask for a source.

Well then its even sillier to make the claim in the first place, isn't it?

Other than a few small relative blips like we had around 2020 and other big events, crime rates have been falling since around the 1400s across the western world, regardless of how stringent or lax law enforcement has been. It is near a worldwide phenomenon other than places experiencing a total collapse of local government or active war.

Violent crime, sure, but white collar crime and blatant corruption of our institutions hasn't abated and our inability to grapple with it is the fundamental cause of all of the other issues in our society today.

... and yet don't seem to be much of a priority.

I can't speak for all of western civilization but one of my favorite facts is that violent crime has been plummeting in the US and the trend started with the release of Doom

The UK has only very limited restrictions on illegally gathered evidence. Poison Tree doctorine is not a thing here. So yes.

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