The one thing that could be said in favor of white collar crime is that while it usually involved vastly greater loss, it was only money.  Bernie Madoff never took out a competitor with a bullet. He ruined lives with a calculator instead. Whether this is better or worse is a matter of personal taste, but his victims and competition lived to tell about it.

Bill Bratton says that’s changing.

Local crews also have a new source of income. To an astonishing degree, crew members are learning the skills of credit card fraud — stealing with computers, embossing machines, and stacks of blank cards instead of resorting to robbery and burglary. Yet despite their migration to white-collar crime, they show no signs of becoming less violent.

And Colleen Long at the AP runs with this “new” threat:

The Van Dyke Money Gang in New York made off with more than $1.5 million this year — but it wasn’t in gunpoint robberies or drug running, it was a Western Union money order scheme. In New Jersey, 111 Neighborhood Crips used a machine to make dozens of fake gift cards for supermarkets, pharmacies and hardware stores. In South Florida, gangs steal identities to file false tax returns.

These aren’t members of an organized Mafia or band of hackers. They’re street crews and gangs netting millions in white-collar schemes like identity theft and credit card fraud — in some instances, giving up the old ways of making an illicit income in exchange for easier crimes with shorter sentences.

Welcome to the next hysteria.  There is absolutely nothing about these schemes that hasn’t been readily apparent to anyone with a computer for the past decade, if not generation. But at a time when crime continues to be at historic lows, and scrutiny of law enforcement at historic highs, there is nothing more critical than to manufacture the next fear upon which to expand our appreciation of how police are on the job to protect and serve.

“There’s still an element of violence,” Maddalena said. “There’s less head-to-head competition. They’re attacking the government.”

This violence can be more directly related to the crime, not like a drive-by shooting over a turf war that injures dozens. A postmaster killed over a key to open the P.O. boxes in Florida. In a Manhattan case, authorities found a scrap of paper in the pocket of a gang shooting victim that had the identification of another person.

“There’s often violence surrounding the crime, but not necessarily in committing the crime,” said David Szuchman, chief of the investigation division at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan.

And that’s because the same street crews who brought bloodshed to the streets have turned to cyber crime, and bring what?  A postmaster being killed hardly demonstrates that there is “often violence.”  Indeed, it demonstrates nothing more than there being one person killed.

As officials crack down on one type of scam, criminals move on to the next. Gang members learn the craft from each other — but many are also millennials, “raised in a computer age, and they know how to use it,” said Lt. Greg Besson of the NYPD’s financial crimes task force.

The nation’s largest police department has revamped how it responds to financial crimes after officials started noticing street crews with recoded credit cards. Now, the grand larceny division brings in detectives from the gang unit and other divisions to work together.

What’s notable is that this new hysteria links the old school characterization of financial crime, the white collar distinction that one can steal with a pen (now a keyboard) as well as a gun, with street gangs.  The mere mention of street gangs is enough to strike fear into the hearts of many.

That some have turned their attention away from macadam to the virtual street should, in a more rational world, suggest that things are getting better. It’s not like they’re going to hit an old lady over the head to steal her purse.  Instead, they will steal her social security check when she downloads that file about how to claim her gazillion dollar prize.  Sure, she loses money, but at least she’s alive and unharmed. Isn’t that something to appreciate?

So what’s the deal with this nonsensical conflation of violence and computer theft?  The public has lost its zeal for sentences of life plus cancer. Politicians are calling for faux reforms to make us believe that they’re doing something, limiting the rhetoric to the adored non-violent offender at the expense of everyone else. And the public is pretty good with that.

The answer, for the benefit of appreciating how law enforcement is still needed to protect us, is to create the impression that crimes perceived as white collar can still be just as violent as actual violent crimes.  Then we’ll embrace the need for stiffer sentences, more intrusive law enforcement needs to find these killers on computers, greater appreciation of how the police will protect us from those gang members sneaking into our children’s bedrooms at night through their iPads.

The Outlaw Gangsta Crips in Brooklyn made about $500,000 this year in a paycheck fraud scheme that involved obtaining a legitimate paycheck and then using the information to create and quickly cash phony checks before they were taken down. But they also robbed check-cashing stores and were charged with conspiracy to kill two people, authorities said. Most cases are pending.

In Union County, New Jersey, the 111 Neighborhood Crips made tens of thousands in fake tax returns — and four of the 12 indicted this summer were also charged with murder and attempted murder in separate incidents. Their cases are pending.

To the extent there’s violence, it’s neither white collar nor virtual.  You see, you can’t shoot someone through a computer.  But that won’t stop the “plague” of fear being stirred up by these conflated allegations, and by adding violence to the mix of computer crime, they’ve distinguished it from the myth of the non-violent criminal for whom sympathy is growing, and given us a brand new reason to be afraid, very afraid.

And when we’re afraid, we certainly don’t want the police to be prevented from saving us by the evils of encryption and computer privacy.  After all, these are violent criminals. They must be stopped.

H/T Mike Paar