Fraud Exposed: What You Don't Know Could Cost Your Company Millions / Edition 1 available in Hardcover
Fraud Exposed: What You Don't Know Could Cost Your Company Millions / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0471274755
- ISBN-13:
- 9780471274759
- Pub. Date:
- 03/14/2003
- Publisher:
- Wiley
Fraud Exposed: What You Don't Know Could Cost Your Company Millions / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780471274759 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2003 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.20(w) x 10.58(h) x 0.92(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fraud Exposed
What You Don't Know Could Cost Your Company MillionsBy Joseph W. Koletar
John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0-471-27475-5Chapter One
CRIME AND THE LAW ENFORCEMENT RESPONSE
The history of modern policing as we know it can be traced to London in 1828 when Sir Robert Peel introduced a bill to provide for a trained and uniformed police force. The force, because of Peel's backing, quickly became known as bobbies or peelers. Encouraged by this development, New York City followed the same path in 1844, when the old Night Watch was legislated out of existence. In 1845 the first shield was introduced. The device has a rather peculiar history. Up until that time the police preferred to patrol in civilian clothes, seeing uniforms as a British custom not befitting freeborn Americans. The eight-pointed, star-shaped copper shield was worn on civilian clothes to denote the wearer as a police officer. These persons quickly became known as coppers or cops. In New York City, formal training and official uniforms would not appear until 1853.
Although there is much detailed history related to the subsequent development of policing in New York City and other locations throughout the United States, from this simple beginning the structure of modern law enforcement was laid. As it grew and evolved, it faced challenges both great and varied: draft riots during the Civil War, bandits of various ilk in the unsettled West; the fear of sedition during World WarI; Prohibition and the rise of organized crime; black marketeering and military preparedness during World War II; the civil unrest of the 1960s; and, of course, drugs.
As the 1960s began to meld into the 1970s, despite the best efforts of law enforcement, crime continued to be one of the leading concerns of the public. In 1968, crime was the number-one domestic issue cited in the Gallup poll, the first time that had ever occurred. Crime rates were soaring, with the FBI reporting the following increases per 100,000 persons in the U.S. population between 1969 and 1970:
Murder Up 56 percent
Aggravated Assault Up 92 percent
Forcible Rape Up 95 percent
Robbery Up 186 percent
Burglary Up 113 percent
Larceny ($50+) Up 240 percent
Auto Theft Up 150 percent
Rader and McGuigan commented on these times in the following manner in 1983:
Either crime has been increasing over the last decade or clocks are ticking slower. In 1971, Americans could expect a murder every thirty minutes, a rape every thirteen minutes and a violent crime every thirty-nine seconds. In 1981, murders were occurring every twenty-three minutes, a rape every six minutes, and a violent crime every twenty-four seconds. Moreover, the average American is experiencing crime firsthand more often. A 1981 study by the Department of Justice found that 25 million American households (30% of the total) were victims of crime. Accordingly, U.S. families are more prone to have a member attacked in a serious crime (rape, robbery, or aggravated assault) than to have a residential fire or have a member injured in an automobile accident, and more likely to have a member robbed than to have a member stricken by cancer or heart disease, the nation's leading health problems.
Were this not bad enough, urban America-Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Newark, and Washington, D.C.-experienced major riots, and significant parts of some of these cities went up in flames. Police control was tested, with the National Guard and even regular Army units being called up to assist. Serious commentators were debating the proper role of the military in assisting the police in the discharge of their duties and the Constitutional issues this would raise.
Thomas Repetto, the head of the New York City Crime Commission, has commented on the state of crime in that city during the era. In 1961, the NYPD reported 390 murders; by 1964, the rate was 637, an increase of two-thirds in just three years. By 1972, the rate was close to 1,700, quadrupling over a single decade. The number of robberies reported had risen from 23,000 in 1966, the first year statistics for such crimes had been kept accurately, to nearly 90,000 at the beginning of the 1970s.
New York City was hardly alone in its crime problems. Meltzer observes that other cities had their issues as well:
Bad as the situation in New York was, it was worse in other cities. In 1987 New York ranked ninth in murder and manslaughter among the twenty-five largest cities. Detroit was first (with a rate two and a half times that of New York), and New Orleans was second in rates per 100,000 people."
The United States was also not faring well when compared to other countries, as Meltzer also notes:
The United States has a higher homicide rate than any other industrialized country. In the 1980's about 20,000 murders a year were committed in the United States. Each year 10 Americans of every 100,000 were murdered. In West European countries the homicide rate was fewer than 2 per 100,000. Taking Australia, Canada and New Zealand together, the homicide rate was less than 3 per 100,000.
At the same time, he advises, the overall level of violent crime in the U.S. was beginning to show signs of declining, by 21 percent in the period 1980-1984.
Some argued that public concern about crime was merely a function of awareness and perception. To quote the old newspaper adage, "If it bleeds, it leads." As the 1980s approached, sometimes-sensational coverage, aided by smaller and more mobile remotes and eye-cams brought crime into our living rooms. Like the Vietnam War, daily doses of near-real-time carnage had a powerful impact on the public psyche. Reality television producers realized that for the cost of a camera crew, powerful entertainment could be put forward without the need to build sets and pay actors and scriptwriters. Even the search for fugitives, one of the most basic elements of law enforcement for centuries, could be transformed into a long-running television series.
Such respect for the power of the media has not abated. At the 2002 American Bar Association meeting of its White Collar Crime Section, two entire tracts were devoted to media matters: "High Visibility White Collar Crime Cases: Will the Media Shape Your Case?" and "Inherit the Wind-Dealing with the Media in the 21st Century." Considering that these topics were competing for scarce presentation time with items such as "International Investigations-The Expanding Extraterritorial Jurisdiction of the United States and the Bill of Rights" and "Grand Jury Reform," it appears the criminal bar is appropriately sensitive to the influence the media can wield. Indeed, the proceedings of this meeting contained no less than 14 newspaper articles that were believed to bolster the argument for the media's ability to shape public perceptions.
Others saw broader societal forces at work, affecting not only street criminals but many institutions and professions as well. The Hastings Center, in an ethics report at the end of the 1970s, noted:
On the societal level, our newspapers and pundits have bemoaned symptoms of a moral vacuum ... a sense of moral drift, of ethical uncertainty, and a withering away of some traditional roots and moorings. There is a concern about juvenile delinquency, about white-collar crime, about a culture of narcissism, about the absence of fixed and firm guidelines for both personal and institutional behavior ... almost all the professions are beset with criticisms concerning the moral behavior of their members ... A recent Carnegie study emphasized widespread unethical practices by college students. The list of public complaints is long, and the professions have seen a comparative drop in public confidence.
Law enforcement budget enhancements were sought, even in times of fiscal austerity elsewhere in the public domain. One writer noted: "[T]he police administrator is faced with the problem of obtaining more productivity from existing levels of resources, knowing full well that those resources will probably diminish in the future in the face of an increasing demand for the output of those resources." The writer concludes that the answer lay, in part, through increased officer productivity measured through improved performance appraisal systems. Again, the answer offered is more arrests.
Another writer saw promise in the developing field of futuristics, the "use and application of forecasting techniques as an aid in law enforcement decision-making." He went on to note, however, "In spite of the advances that have been made in policing in the past two decades, American law enforcement continues to operate much as it did at the beginning of the century." This translates, roughly, into "find the bad guys and lock them up."
Still others sought understanding in the causal roots of criminal behavior:
[A] decline in family influence in an increasingly youthful society; a permissive attitude toward much criminal behavior; the deterioration of many of our major cities and rapid unplanned growth of suburbs; the failure of our criminal justice system to deal promptly and fairly with persons accused of crimes; the failure to rehabilitate those convicted of crimes. Overlapping most of these factors are the opportunities for crime in today's society and the problem of drug addiction.
Gangs, too, began to become a more significant factor in the nation's crime problems. From being present in 54 cities prior to 1961, they had grown to inhabit more than 170 cities by 1980. By 1992 they were present in 766 American cities, including 91 with a population less than 10,000 persons. By 1992, 54 percent of cities with gangs had from one to five gangs present, and an astonishing 30 cities, 4 percent of the total, had over 50 gangs each. Gang violence had a corrosive spillover effect, not only in terms of violence gang members did to one another or rivals, but also to the uninvolved. One study conducted with data from the Los Angeles Police Department indicated that when gang homicides were compared to nongang homicides, the following characteristics emerged. Gang homicides:
More often occurred in the street
More often involved autos
More often involved guns
More often involved injuries to other persons
More often involved victims with no prior relationship to their assailant(s)
In 1980 there were 351 gang homicides in Los Angeles County, a number that would decline slightly for the next several years, before beginning to rise substantially in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Some theories of gangs and gang behavior saw a set of factors as promoting gang membership and growth. As we shall see shortly, these factors are remarkably similar to issues raised by "root cause" theorists of crime in general:
Sufficient number of minority youth, that is ten to thirty
Absence of appropriate jobs
Absence of acceptable alternative activities
Concentrated minority populations
Comparatively high crime rate
Absence of community and informal controls
Given the beginning growth spurt of gang activity in the time frame of the 1960s, it is perhaps less than coincidental that the most famous and successful gang movie of all time, West Side Story, debuted in this era. The artistic merits of that film aside, gangs were rapidly becoming yet another problem for law enforcement to deal with.
More traditional organized crime groups were active as well, prompting the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement to comment: "If organized criminals paid income tax on every cent of their vast earnings, everybody's tax bill would go down, but no one knows how much."
As the 1970s and 1980s passed, the face of organized crime in the United States became more varied. The old group, the mafia or La Cosa Nostra, was in full flower, especially in major cities, but they were being joined and pushed by newcomers on the scene-highly organized and often-vicious gangs from Mexico, China, Cuba, Colombia, and Jamaica.
As a result of these pressures, more prisons were built, often bringing badly needed jobs to communities suffering economic blight. The Federal inmate population alone increased over 600 percent, from 21,266 in 1970 to 131,419 as of October 2001. Overall, at the midyear point of 1998, there were estimated to be 1.8 million inmates in the United States, double the number of a decade earlier. The private sector saw opportunities and responded, with private prisons coming into being. The defense industry, impacted by the effective end of the Cold War, saw growing law enforcement needs as an alternative market for their products and technologies. Legislatures and jurists combined, somewhat uneasily at times, to produce mandatory sentences, sentencing guidelines, "three strikes, you're out" legislation, and other remedies. The number of persons in various forms of incarceration in various jurisdictions began to put a strain on some budgets.
The public's fears also spilled over into other areas, again funding private-sector growth. The Security Industry Association, a trade group, reported that U.S. businesses spent $82.3 billion on security systems and products in 1996. Personal safety products and services sprouted; guard and alarm companies prospered; professional associations thrived; and near-endless meetings, symposia, roundtables, and conferences were held.
Former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton captured the tenor of these times when discussing the earlier stages of his law enforcement career. He noted that in the 1970s the guiding principles of much of law enforcement were the three R's: rapid response, random patrols, and reactive investigation. In many ways, these precepts make perfect sense. Rapid response to a call for service can be vitally important; the sick or injured are tended to sooner, a fleeing perpetrator may be caught close to the scene of a crime, and valuable witnesses and evidence may be secured before they are lost. Much was made of measuring average response times down to the fraction of a second on a citywide basis. Random patrols were meant to discourage criminal behavior by making the criminals unsure when or where a cop would appear. Reactive investigation was designed to place detectives and investigators at the scene of serious incidents. In theory, it made sense; however, structural issues soon came into play.
Many police departments operate on a clearance system. A call for service, measured for speed of response, can be cleared in a number of ways.
Continues...
Excerpted from Fraud Exposed by Joseph W. Koletar Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Preface.Acknowledgments.
Introduction.
Crime and the Law Enforcement Response.
Rethinking the Assumptions.
The State of Occupational Fraud.
Theories of Occupational Fraud.
Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics (and Occupational Fraud).
Thoughts on Occupational Fraud.
What Can We learn?
Internal Controls.
Compliance Programs.
Community, Corporate Citizenship, and Quality of Life.
What's New?
Theories of Social Deviance.
Profiling.
Neuroscience.
Game Theory.
Forensic Professionals as Organizational Pathologists.
Partnerships for the Future.
Environmental and Organizational Intelligence.
Reconceptualizations.
Leadership.
The Next Five Years.
Funding.
Visibility.
Where We Go from Here.
Endnotes.
Index.