Protect Yourself From Corporate Wrongdoing With This White-Collar Crime Risk Tracker
Only one banker went to jail in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — a stark reflection of law enforcement's lax attitude toward white-collar crime. Meanwhile, America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and most of our prisoners are poor people of color.
To highlight the discrepancy between how we tend to think about white-collar crimes and how we tend to think about "street" crimes, The New Inquiry has made an extremely precise but only halfway-serious interactive map of "White Collar Crime Risk Zones."
Enter your zip code into the map, and you'll find out how high your risk is of encountering crimes like breach of fiduciary duty, buy-in trading disputes and defamation. You'll also get a list of "Potential Organizational Offenders," which might include the names of a few familiar banks. And, hilariously, the map also offers up a computer-generated image of what the "most likely suspect" looks like — an average of the LinkedIn profile pictures of 7,000 financial executives. (Spoiler alert: The "most likely suspect" is a middle-aged white guy.)
The methodology behind the map is totally legit — as the map's creators explain in a white paper, they used crime data from the Financial Regulatory Authority to make their predictive algorithm, and they based their model on existing crime prediction services that police use to target suspects. "These services overwhelmingly target 'street' or 'traditional' crime, such as drug-related activity and larceny, overlooking the rich opportunity in targeting financial crimes with their technologies," the map's creators write in their white paper with extreme archness.
The map is also available as an iPhone app that "will attempt to notify you when you enter a high risk zone for white collar crime." So now law-enforcement agencies have no excuse for not finding and prosecuting white-collar criminals — after all, The New Inquiry just gave them all the information they need to go after corporate bad guys.
