Falling Crime: Where have all the burglars gone?
economist.com
economist.com
Sure policing has gotten better, and crime prevention tech has advanced, but these studies tend to ignore the fact that would-be criminals rarely leave the house anymore...
We looked at this once in class from a quantitative perspective, and IIRC, family planning was the only one that comported with the data.
I really like your argument but I remember how ubiquitous the SNES, Sega Genesis and PS1 were in the 90s. I do wonder what role the quality of graphics plays here too (especially with regards to portraying violence).
Games in the 90s did cost more than AAA titles today but not by a huge amount and the hardware was similarly priced. Maybe it just took a couple more decades for gaming to be considered a truly mainstream activity rather than something for the geekier kids.
They weren't "ubiquitous" for poor kids. For those kids, there was no way they would get their parents to buy us anything for (the 1991 equivalent of) $350 and $85/game.
Nobody assumed that upper middle class kids were normally carrying out burglaries...
Ps1 was actually 100x more common than sega/nintendo in my 3rd world childhood because it was almost free to get games.
For the price of a cartridge rental for two days you could get a pirate cd.
Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 sold more units in less time and haven't been discontinued yet. And they are competing with the internet.
In Finland, there has also been a drop in alcohol consumption and an increase in Cannabis use. Most of the offences here are done under the influence of alcohol.
And time spent consuming entertainment of any kind is time spent being docile. It's been postulated that the Arab Spring protests were heavily spurred by regular people who, having their Internet cut, had little else to do but express their anger
I don't have data, but I doubt it's the boys who otherwise would have become criminals who watch kitten videos.
Where you, by chance, looking for a synonym for 'kitten'?
I don't think most people want to commit crimes and hurt others. They do it out of necessity. That necessity might be hunger, money or boredom coupled with a bad environment.
So next up is definitely hunger. I'd say in the end people who wish to steal for money when they're well fed, entertained and not homeless are just bad batch of humans we need to deal with.
Just like holding a brightly coloured object in front of someone doesn't cure depression. Nothing does, it only temporarily sets it aside.
It's a distraction if anything.
Smartphone and camera ubiquity probably also plays a role. Just as cops know if they try to Rodney King somebody it will be on YouTube an hour later, so are criminals aware there will be a bunch of digital evidence.
Support is given to this by the fact that many of the crimes that are rising are things people can't witness you doing (bank fraud, identity theft etc).
And it's definitely not a silver bullet doing this. It's a combination of all of the factors in the article and here on HN and more we haven't thought of, all doing their part.
Kevin Drum (a left-leaning US journalist) has been making this argument: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime...
It seems clear that other factors play a more important role. Things like police effectiveness, or economics.
Edit: reference for lead ban dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
This article has some data about lead levels in children in Brazil: http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1...
In Brazil, Teixeira (32) has found that 11% of pipes used in the water distribution systems of 100 schools in São Paulo present lead levels above the limit considered safe by the WHO. In 2% of the water samples, the lead level was found to be five-fold higher than the highest acceptable value (< 10 µg/L, according to the WHO), thereby threatening the neuropsychiatric health of children.
Several studies have shown that high BLL in preschool children are strongly correlated with high lead levels in house dust (33-35). This association has been attributed to dust intake from the frequent hand-to-mouth behavior of young children. Flaking lead-based paint, road dust, garden soil and airborne lead-bearing particles are believed to be the sources of lead in household dust (36).
Leaded gas has caused more exposure to the metal than any other source worldwide (37). According to the São Paulo State Health Department (19), about 80% of the lead found in urban air samples before 1982 was derived from leaded gas. Car battery manufacture is the main source of secondary lead (38), but other sources cannot be discarded.
None of that is to say that lead is the only factor of course, just that I don't think your data disproves the theory that lead plays a significant part.
If lead was banned at different times in different countries, the bans can't be responsible for a crime drop that happened at the same time.
Exactly: (Lead => Crime) =/> (Crime => Lead).
I can't speak to the implementation of lead reduction leading to the outright ban in Brazil, but in the USA the outright ban was more of an after-the-fact recognition of the reality rather than an enforcement action.
However, if lead was widely used in Brazil right up until the ban date there (1989) then it would stand to reason that the crime rate wouldn't start dropping for another six or seven years.
This is not logically sound. Brazil could have other factors which increase crime more than getting rid of lead reduces it. The fact that Brazil's crime has increased does not, in any way, tell us that the lead ban couldn't possibly be a major factor in the US's drop in crime.
There are reasons to be skeptical of any claim based on correlations between such widely separated variables as lead exposure (the cause) and crime (the effect). Consuming lead does not instantly turn someone into a criminal in the way that consuming vitamin C cures scurvy. It affects the child’s developing brain, which makes the child duller and more impulsive, which, in some children, and under the right circumstances, leads them to grow up to make short-sighted and risky choices, which, in some children and under the right circumstances, leads them to commit crimes, which, if enough young people act in the same way and at the same time, affects the crime rate. The lead hypothesis correlates the first and last link in this chain, but it would be more convincing if there were evidence about the intervening links. Such correlations should be far stronger than the one they report: presumably most kids with lead are more impulsive, whereas only a minority of impulsive young adults commit crimes. If they are right we should see very strong changes in IQ, school achievement, impulsiveness, childhood aggressiveness, lack of conscientiousness (one of the “Big Five” personality traits) that mirror the trends in lead exposure, with a suitable time delay. Those trends should be much stronger than the time-lagged correlation of lead with crime itself, which is only indirectly related to impulsiveness, an effect that is necessarily diluted by other causes such as policing and incarceration.
http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_o...
On the other hand, if a convincing causal chain can't be identified, it shouldn't be assumed true either. It should go into the (very large) pool of interesting possibilities that may or may not be substantiated if someone wants to invest in the time and energy to research.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olym...
http://www.treehugger.com/aviation/leaded-gas-banned-around-...
Also, most small-engine planes can already burn regular unleaded autogas. It's just the high-compression engines that require the lead. The FAA, AOPA and others are working on developing alternatives, but it takes time. Perhaps they should have done this sooner.
Your points about engines and fuel make sense, though.
I pay about $85/hour to fly and don't own a plane. If I lived in the USA it would be $68/hr due to lower gas prices. I think the majority of Americans can afford to spend $68/month on their hobby (assuming they flew once a month).
I also have to wonder where high-school students who drop thousands of dollars into their hobbies are getting their money from. Parents?
I often wondered the same thing, given that neither I nor my parents had anywhere near that much money to fritter away.
I think it comes down to parents directly or indirectly though. You can make a fair amount of money with a summer job and part-time job the rest of the year, when you don't have to pay for rent, food, etc.
It becomes harder to maintain a hobby once you have to move out and live on your own.
So they could change engines, but would rather continue to poison us to save the cost/loss of performance. AOPA is fighting against it in the bureaucratic way, via numerous stalling tactics, for 40 years now:
http://www.aopa.org/Media-Relations/Position-Papers/Issues-r...
If your toys cost as much as new cars, you are rich and can afford to stop poisoning us.
The majority of private pilots I've met are hardworking people (not rich) who love aviation. They either rent from a flying club or partnership, or own a cheap cessna 150/172 or homebuilt. You can buy a decent buck 50 for about $20k, which doesn't make you rich if you own one. The average HN programmer earns $150k+ if they work at Microsoft (like you), Google or facebook in silicon valley. That's fairly rich, and it's a bit hypocritical of you to be calling me rich when my income for the past few years has been around $40k. I used to earn over 100k 15 years ago, but I chose lifestyle over stress and being rich.
I pay $50/hr dry to fly a friend's plane, and he's not rich. He is retired and never earned much money during his career. He can only afford to own a plane because he was left money by his father, and also because his wife has a good pension. He absolutely loves flying, so that is what he has decided to spend his retirement money on. He drives a falling-apart car from the early 90s.
Getting back to the discussion: the high compression engines that run avgas tend to be in light twins, which are mostly used to train airline pilots, air-taxis, medevac, etc. There certainly are some rich people with high performance piston planes, but that is probably a minority. At the moment there simply isn't any viable engine replacement for these planes. AOPA is actually working hard with industry groups to find a drop-in replacement for avgas, which will work in all these engines. It's not an easy thing to do, as you have to make sure the new fuel isn't going to damage the engine, cause an engine failure, etc.
Perhaps they should have started looking for a replacement earlier. Part of the problem is that there isn't too much innovation in aircraft engines, in order to avoid possible problems and because it's very expensive to develop (and aircraft sales are a few orders of magnitude lower than car sales). Even new aircraft piston engines don't tend to have ECU/FADECs (or even electronic timing).
2) Small airplanes aren't necessarily expensive, so you don't necessarily have to be rich to afford them. For instance, there's a Cessna 150 in good condition for sale on ebay for $16500 right now.
3) The FAA is actively working on unleaded replacements.
4) Many small planes can already run on unleaded.
Something should probably be done about the use of leaded fuel in general aviation. However, trying to turn it into class warfare (while every single pilot I know, and I know a lot of them, is middle-class) severely hurts your argument.
I would still say "rich jerks" is overstating things, but there's not zero relevance.
Give me an electric powered tri (trash) cycle anyday.
If the effects of chemical substances on the brain are indeed a factor... and yes, they probably are. Then there is probably a far more simple explanation.
Drugs.
Instead of police being faced with impoverished young men of the 70s, 80s and 90s who are hyped up on cocaine, crack or pcp and trolling for their next hit. They are dealing with the impoverished young men of today, high on pot and trolling for snacks. That is, they would be trolling for snacks if the munchies are ever able to override their desire to keep playing whatever video game.
If we consider the issue in a rational fashion for a moment, it's not terribly surprising that Rodney King was hyped up on PCP and trolling for another hit, whereas Trayvon Martin was high on pot and trolling for snacks.
And, again, when one tries to consider the matter rationally, these two people represent two fundamentally different elements. With predictable impact on statistics when their stories are "writ large" in a society.
If your crime is coming from demographic groups like this... then your crime will probably change with the changing drug use pattern.
It's not a popular notion, because it smacks of "evil"... but drugs really can be used to determine and direct the course of a society.
Reaching???
There was strong evidence that lead caused widespread and permanent damage to children's brains. Therefore the USA spent billions to remove it from our environment. After it is removed, asking whether this made a difference IS NOT a reach.
PARTICULARLY NOT when compared to a hypothesis of differences in drug use over time that you've provided no evidence for.
>asking whether this made a difference
You're equivocating here, intentionally. The question is whether it made a difference in crime, not whether it "made a difference."
My standard is that I don't use phrases like "reaching" unless I either am quite positive of what I will say, or am somewhat certain then did a Google search to verify.
You're equivocating here, intentionally. The question is whether it made a difference in crime, not whether it "made a difference."
I assure you that any equivocation was absolutely unintentional. I have been aware for years from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07... and other articles that the correlation between lead exposure and criminal statistics has been examined and proved very strong. And, of course, we have the known causal links between lead exposure and behavioral problems that could potentially lead to criminal acts.
Thus we have strong evidence of both correlation and causation between lead poisoning in childhood and criminal behavior decades later.
Downvoted for being hilarious while talking out of your ass. FYI, pot has a (very) mellowing and relaxing effect. The idea of the munchies as some sort of dangerous rampage in search of food is hilarious; it usually involves more sitting on the couch and putting some Pink Floyd on (or Flying Lotus if you like rap, whatever), than presenting menaces to racially prejudiced vigilantes.
PCP is a dissociative anaesthetic. You aren't going to be very dangerous on it. More like dizzy, and confused, and very clumsy. Hardly killer stuff, for others at least.
Now, what's funny is the drugs you don't mention. Some people on cocaine, or alcohol, usually white Wall Street guys and other posh denizens, can behave like assholes. The kind of people who'll be self-aggrandizing, selfish douches, and hit you on the neck from behind if they get angry. But, since neighborhood watchers don't kill white drunkards, there's no need to rationalize retroactively our racism with those drugs.
I'm not sure why he's been downvoted to gray. I don't know that his ideas extend well to areas outside of NYC, but there's at least one (fairly large) data point lending credence to his notions.
I wonder if marijuana used by teenagers could sometimes have a similiar effect; the actual payload is peaceful and gentle, but seen as part of the broader system of someone's emotional development, there might be a net-negative effect of antisocial behavior. (Hippies may smoke pot, but so do violent gangsters.)
I'm not reflexively pot-negative; it's absolutely nothing compared to alcohol, and should not be illegal (among other things, street dealers don't ask for ID). But like you, I'd be very interested to see the data.
We aren't reaching. There is strong evidence for lead being a major factor
Sounds like a totally unrelated issue.
In my country we had a 400% raise in burglaries etc in the course of 15 years, and it was all due to poverty (including an iflux of poor unskilled illegal immigration).
Oh, and that was AFTER the "lead cleanup".
Crime can go up and down with no relation to lead whatsoever, as it has in tons of places.
Who still keeps items of large value at home?
(And if the phone is locked down and the thief can't jailbreak it it essentially has a value $0)
I've been selling my family's old phones and computers for years, and the market is robust. Not $500 robust, but two-year-old iPhones go for about $200 (which, probably not coincidentally, is the upgrade price for a new phone).
Please anyone buying old phones/property ask for the purchase invoice. It's possible that it's a stolen property and you can get in trouble later.
People are better informed than ever, read more than ever, and are more satisfied with their lives than ever. You dismiss this monumental progress by calling it a drug.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/chart-americas-r...
what is Soma?
...Soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "holidays". It was developed by the World State to provide these inner-directed personal experiences within a socially managed context of State-run 'religious' organizations; social clubs.
In it, the government uses entertainment and technology to keep people within their assigned classes as opposed to military force and surveillance.
Or perhaps this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma
Another thought - just a half-silly toss out, but perhaps the Web played a role. It changed a lot of social behaviors, and that would have began in the early to mid 1990s in the industrialized world. It altered how and where people spend their time; how they do their shopping; how they communicate; how often they leave their homes; knowledge available when it comes to almost everything, such as instantly being able to look-up good / bad neighborhoods based on crime.
I first got online around 1994/95, at 14 years of age, and it's almost hard to remember time before the Web. I have to consciously remind myself that it wasn't always there.
- Parking garages with no cameras
- Security is part time, and they wait until they're gone
- They hit only cars that are unlocked, so no breaking, just entering
- Occasionally, if they see a big score like a laptop, they will break a window, but probably as their last act before getaway.
- They hit a building only once every few months, when people have let down their guard again.
I'd never heard of this until I was a victim, and the police told me the were aware of it but couldn't catch them. Then I asked around and they've hit buildings in several cities. Simply remembering to lock your door and leave nothing obvious on your seats will protect you.
I bring this up because although the crimes are reported to the police, I wonder how much they are reflected in statistics like these.
But some people leave their GPS in there (not everyone has a smartphone for that), or they forget their phone, or maybe keep some emergency cash there.
http://news.yahoo.com/detroit-crime-down-murder-rate-1736002...
And yet the murder rate is relatively stagnant, and this year reached a peak: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/04/16352612-weve-los...
How to reconcile these things? Is crime really falling, or have reporting standards changed? Or, if cops can't respond to reports, do the reports ever get filed?
1. 'urban lead' is a studied off-shoot of the lead hypothesis. Detroit's lead situation is a studied and known problem. So lingering crime in Detroit is actually expected under the lead hypothesis. Particularly as the population shrinks and the remaining citizen 'average' shifts poorer, with a more-toxic environment.
2. 'structural' crime. Opportunists considering theft as a means to an end might be dissuaded as the risk/reward equation shifts. But convincing a (drug) gang that it's no longer a good idea to murder a rat/rival is much more difficult.
3. Detroit's shrinking police coverage. The police department has explicitly warned people away from certain areas of the city, because they don't have the resources to provide effective coverage. This can only be interpreted as an 'opportunity' for structural crime.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/08/14294269-visit-de...
This is not an unusual state of affairs, but the news for the general public has no interest in educating people on this topic - after all, they need something with which to excoriate politicians; something will usually be 'on the rise', so politicians will be 'failing' in the whole field.
In the end, I'm sure the answer is a combination of all these factors. As individuals and as a species, we get better at living as time goes on.
In any case: since poor, unemployed young men commit crime, and we're never going to see 100% employment, lifting them out of poverty will reduce the impact of crime on everyone else. Intolerable for Ayn Rand; pragmatic for the rest of us.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/11/p...
Soon it will be 30%, 40% and more. As soon as robots for stocking shelves, driving trucks and flipping burgers will be cheaper than minimum (or any livable) wage, we can expect that there will be no practical need whatsoever for large parts of population to work - the goods/services will be more and better if they don't get involved, and instead of "job" the question is how social policy will distribute resources to them - welfare, universal income, crime or starvation?
Where is the next wave? Historically new sectors opened up three times, but it's not a natural law that requires that to happen once more. There are some new jobs created in software engineering and product design, however, they are an order of magnitude less than the shrinking areas. Unlike the earlier shifts towards artisanal, industrial and later service jobs which could employ a majority of population, the new industries need relatively tiny numbers of employees - such as the (classic, exaggerated) example of 140.000 employed by Kodak vs 11 by Instagram.
The "new new" jobs are scalable - i.e., you need a few of the best specialists that can cover some need X for a billion people, instead of earlier nonscalable jobs where there was a need also for lots of average and below-average employees to fulfill the quantity of work. The whole modern "information age" that we enjoy needed only 3-5 million engineers to create it, that's 0.1% of the global working population. Even the ever-shrinking farming currently needs more people than the Silicon Valley 'digital economy'.
Crime
Welfare
Gainful Employment
In some environments that's crime. There's no jobs and the welfare can't pay the bills.
In others it's welfare, as there's no jobs and nothing to steal.
Thankfully, most of the time it's gainful employment that comes out on top. Low risk, steady rewards, and significantly more affluent than welfare or prison.
That is, everything Herman and Peterson say about US postwar military adventures is more or less correct, but that doesn't undermine Pinker's argument that overall rates of violence have been in steady decline for centuries. Neither high levels of civilian casualties nor military industrialism nor mercantilism nor imperialism nor ideological conflict nor genocide nor civil war were inventions of the 20th century - an in all cases, their overall global trajectory has been downward.
With respect to WWI and WWII, Pinker goes to a great deal of trouble to explain and justify his argument that they represent outliers - trouble Herman and Peterson dismiss with dripping sarcasm but no counter-arguments.
Sidenote: there are only 8 footnotes, of which one is a note that the essay was first published elsewhere. The only references to critiques of Pinker's book (rather than general references to studies on particular wars or American militarism) are a few references to critiques of Pinker's assertion that pre-civilization nomads lived violent lives. One reference refers to anthropologist Douglas P. Fry, but while Fry takes issue with Pinker's case for rates of violence in pre-civilization societies, he does not disagree with Pinker's main thesis: "Pinker’s basic claim is itself largely on target: Physical violence has been decreasing over recent millennia."
Anyone with a genetic/cultural predisposition to addiction died as a crack addict in 1980-something, therefore no kids with the same predisposition alive in 2013? Don't have to be dead, just a reproductive failure. No kids, kids taken away, life in prison, etc.
Another interpretation is most crime is done by young urban males. A recent-ish development is the Daddy-figure has basically disappeared from the lives of those people, criminal or non-criminal alike. Therefore no following in Dad's footsteps if you have no idea who or what a Dad is. Which is too bad when Dad's not a dirtbag, but if he is, its probably a net positive.
Lack of employement opportunities, especially among the most disadvantaged, means the most disadvantaged kids are no longer latchkey kids?
Then there is credit card fraud too which is non-violent. In other words info and contraband crimes.
What year are they talking about? 2012 was the highest in something like 10 years, and 2013 is on pace with 2011.
A better way would be to compare what people focus on / use on a daily basis today vs in the 80s. If you are restless today you can pacify yourself with a mobile phone. In fact it's an addiction that gives you a boost of dopamine. And the virtual world is much less .... physical and violent, which reduces people's tendencies over time.
Another great pacifier of the 20th century is consumerism. Feel bad? Buy an ikea, veg out in front of the TV. There is a great documentary about how the PR industry was invented and Freud's theories about the "collective ego"
But seriously ... I think that, although before it was not the internet, now the internet has accelerated it.
The internet came later, but games like Doom were huge long before that, which is pertinent as you mention violent crime specifically.
More electronic transactions, less cash. More surveillance. More cameras. Traceable goods/tracked shipments. Better crime data analysis and police patrol routing. Consumer purchases tending toward electronics that are ever-cheaper and more-powerful. More digital goods, less demand for physical goods. Better media distribution. etc.
It may also explain the outliers to the global crime trends: places where computerization of the society (or subset of society) has lagged.
“What are the facts? Again and again and again--what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"--what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"
Heinlein
Linton Barwick
I've known of property and other crimes that did not show up in the statistics/annual reports of a particular city. The city in question was/is known for low crime and used that as a selling up point to attract businesses and home buyers. I'd be surprised if this was the only municipality that "fudged" their numbers.
This could not be more true where I live, and with police departments shrinking nationwide, I would guess that it's true in other places as well.
Plenty of people are still getting their back doors kicked down while at work, and come home to find their laptops and consoles, and television missing.
You call the police, and they'll show up 4 hours later, and all they really do is put your name on a list. It's basically up to you to go around and search pawn shops and craigslist to find your stuff.
Most people don't even bother to call the cops, and don't bother filing an insurance claim since an LCD TV is $450 and the insurance deductible is $1500, not to mention the rise in rates or risk of getting your coverage dropped.
Reported crime is down. That's about it.
2) For simple thefts, of course, a large portion is not reported because people don't bother - but are you really arguing that in suddenly all the (very different) countries people started reporting crimes much less than 20 years ago; or that municipalities in 2000'ies are fudging numbers much more massively than they could in 1980's?
(not that numbers can't be fudged, just that if you were fudging numbers you wouldn't fudge them that much)
On the other hand I also wonder what is there even left to steal. Apple might singlehandedly sustain burglaries because their gear is the only stuff worth stealing these days?
Then again an acquaintance told me when her flat was burglared the thieves took everything, including photographs and files. I suppose there might be villages somewhere in eastern countries dedicated to scanning those files for bank account information.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2212093/Spike-iPhone...
Hopefully you had everything backed up somewhere.
This has led to a decline in two professions: electronics/appliance repair and thievery. Just as it doesn't make sense to repair most consumer goods, it doesn't make sense to steal them, either.
The street price of stolen goods is a tiny fraction of the new or even the used goods price. When new prices are so low, the miniscule price of stolen goods means that it is not worth the risk of getting caught stealing.
The decline in domestic manufacturing may also have a bearing on other crime rates. Depression and hopelessness in a population, paradoxically, do not necessarily lead to increased violence.
Look at any enslaved population; the first job of the keepers is always to create hopelessness, so that the population is easier to control.
Violence declines in any enslaved population--at least, violence against the keepers. And violent crime among the enslaved is rarely reported, partly because the keepers don't care and partly because the enslaved do not trust the keepers.
Criminals have either become anergic or else they have switched to confidence scams like organized religion. Religion, unfortunately, does not get reported as a crime.
Edit:sp.
Crime falling in some places just because being dumb looter or thief is less respectable than being "easy" credit consumption bunny. Why should you try to knock down a drunk for a smartphone, or press some fast-food stall for money while you can drive a cheap new Korean car "brought" without even first payment.
But in places like Russia even this doesn't work. These miserable rednecks will never learn (being uneducated and unemployed have no access to A-class credit) and because they are the wast majority, anyone who is trying to lead modern consumption lifestyle are regarded as a peacock or even gay.
And, of course, being a low-level criminal is inferior comparing to a "successful" corrupted official of any kind, driving $100k cars on the very same streets. It is very common in Russia to see people who live in a miserable soviet time panel housing blocks, but having a luxury car in a parking lot.
So, street crime falls with easy credit, but this is only temporarily. Any severe economic disturbance and you will have it all back on the streets.
Here's an old article about medicare fraud: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/23/60minutes/main5414... "They've figured out that rather than stealing $100,000 or $200,000, they can steal $100 million. We have seen cases in the last six, eight months that involve a couple of guys that if they weren't stealing from Medicare might be stealing your car," Ogrosky explained."