Dec
3
The Hood Under My Hood, from Ken Smith
December 3, 2006 |
It’s a Crime What We Don’t Know About Crime
If last year’s crime increase represents the start of a trend and more incarceration is the only available response, by 2014, one in ten Americans would be locked up every year.
That’s a brief look at the crime data for the present and future. Written by those who study crime with an academic viewpoint. From ivory towers.
At the street level where I see the grand picture, down here where people live, there is dirty linen not viewable from the windows in those high academic towers. “What we don’t know about crime” is inferred to be a crime in itself. But we do know things about crime which we claim not to know.
We have crime in business. And we live in denial about it. The local media will focus on crime committed by the underclass and ignore crime by business, unless it is a very giant scheme by a corporate entity which so many already know about that it cannot be left unpublished.
The AARP has published articles about scams that take money away from senior citizens. As a senior of almost 78 years I know I would be more safe in a security retirement center than in a city neighborhood. But we are not in danger so much from thugs as we are from people who wear the garb, the attire, of business and professions, and speak fluent English.
The automobile industry is replete with scams, frauds, deceptions, and I have found no agency monitoring this industry. An auto repair garage has a license to steal. These are business licenses given to entrepreneurs for a small fee. In one hour of scheming they earn the fee back.
“Repair garage” owners have the attitude that since they are regarded as “businessmen” this status gives them impunity from the ordinary rules of ethics. Of course, since the state takes no interest in their nefarious practices they are emboldened to stretch theft to extremes.
Since cars have evolved mechanically to become cyborg machines, with a miniature computer built into two dozen components of the vehicle, I have been unable to do my own repairs and thus have been subjected to fraud and rip-off for many years.
What is worse, community colleges with technical schools have been teaching students how to increase the income for owners when they are graduated to wage-producing positions.
The techniques for increasing profits are not ingenious inventions but are old trade practices developed by criminally-minded garage owners in the beginning of the repair business in America.
But now these techniques are mainstream. Ubiquitous. They exist everywhere, from the gas station guy who only does spark plugs to the cyborg, computerized, technologically perfect spacious garages attached to major automobile dealerships.
The schemes, frauds, deceptions are in small details which can easily be enumerated. Anyone reading this report has been scammed many times by auto repair people, by car dealerships too.
However ubiquitous these scams are - just as ubiquitous is the denial that they exist. They are not monitored by any agency with sufficient staff and power to discipline and shut down.
This theme began with the notion we have crime that we do not know we know about. In just one area I can show crime that goes on unobserved daily, right under the noses of everyone, including the police. And nothing is done about it.
When the underclass takes this all in I suspect many individuals see that crime pays. You can make a lot of money and what’s more you can get away with it. We’ll never reduce recidivism in the underclass with examples of business “crime for profit” staring us in the face every day.
Newspapers are in on the auto scams in that a big chunk of advertising income is derived from the automobile industry. In my view, guilty by association.
Of course, advertising is not causing the ripoffs at the repair garages; but the papers are not going to touch an article about these, nevertheless.
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