Nick Rockoff
Erica Christensen
Chris Gutierrez
Kalpan Patel
Brett Kohout
Emre Gurol
As a man dressed in all black approaches the target, officer Hoyt whispers into his microphone, “Everyone stay put until the transaction has been made.” The man quietly removes a couple of hundred dollar bills from his wallet, and offers them to an unsuspecting drug dealer. The drug dealer casually reaches into his pocket and reveals a plastic bag containing a white substance, offers it in exchange for the money, and walks away. Five seconds later, police sirens sound and the man is quickly subdued, handcuffed, and arrested. What this unlucky criminal was unaware of was that the man dressed in all black was, in fact an undercover officer, and that he had unknowingly been the target of a “sting operation.” For over 40 years, modern law enforcement agencies have been using sting operations to catch criminals in the act. During this span, agencies have devised hundreds of different ways to mimic real life situations in hopes of learning about and preventing different types of crime from occurring. Click here to learn about how law enforcement uses money to catch criminals, and how criminals use money to try to hide their tracks.
1 comment:
Money and crime go together like peanut butter and jelly. This paper takes us into the dark world of financial crime as well as the use of money as a lure to catch criminals. The students had access to law enforcement agents who were willing to share with them their knowledge of sting operations. They subsequently broadened their inquiry into other kinds of money/crime relationships: counterfeiting, tax evasion, and so on. The result is a wide-ranging and informative essay that demonstrates the kind of breadth of inquiry that can be possible in an assignment like this one.
I have to admit that my favorite part is the section on bribery: what is the difference between a gift and a bribe? How do gifts and bribes both create new social spaces and new channels of power? If gifts pauperize, as Dickens once said (in Hard Times), what about bribes?
Post a Comment