How far does Becker's account (The Outsiders 1963) of the processes underlying the selective enforcement of criminal law help us to understand and explain the policing of domestic violence and white collar crime?

“ The city dweller minds his own business and does nothing about rule infractions unless it is his own business that is being interfered with”

This quotation can help to explain the situation of the Trobriand Islanders and the concept of whistle blowing.

        Rules are the products of someone’s initiative and Becker labels these people who exhibit such enterprise as ‘moral entrepreneurs’. There are those who create the rules and then those who enforce them. Rule creators crusade to bring about certain rules, and when a crusade is successful a new set of rules is created. Agencies and officials are established to administer and amend these rules. The agencies include the police force. For police officers, their view of their job is basically to enforce the rules. If the rules change, so does his or her attitude. The rules are therefore described by Becker to be his raison d’être, not so much the content of the rules. A police officer has a lot of discretion on the job, he or she can quite easily choose which cases to tackle and which to leave, the question is, which are they going to choose? Often they choose the more important cases, like opiate drug users over marijuana drug users because opiate users are more likely to commit drug related crimes. However, they may also choose cases that are more easily solvable and creditable for that officer. This is a brief introduction to show what selective enforcement is, now it is important to look at it from the perspectives of domestic violence and white collar crime.

Selective enforcement in Domestic Violence and White Collar Crime

        Official statistics do not reflect the reality of rule breaking, often due to the fact that enforcement agencies, i.e. the police, choose to do nothing about the infractions. There often exists an interaction between the rule breaker and the enforcer this is termed by Becker as “negotiations”. In this social process, whether somebody is punished may depend on how much power the victim has and how much power the offender has, as well as the power of the enforcement agency.

        Becker’s school of thought concerning selective enforcement included that of “symbolic interactionism”. A quote from Becker on this subject is:

“deviance …is created by society…I mean that social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and applying those rules to particular people and labelling them outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’”

- taken from ‘The Outsiders’, pp. 8-14

In other words, punitive response depends partly on what has happened in the act and partly what other people choose to do about it.

        In both the cases of white-collar crime and domestic violence, there are two stages in the negotiation process. Firstly, one has to make a decision to report to an enforcement agency, this is often highly unlikely in cases of domestic violence. Reasons why will be explained later in this answer. Secondly, a decision must be made by the enforcement agency to intervene. This depends on numerous factors. If we were to look at the law itself, according to the code for crown prosecutors, paragraph 6.1:

“It has never been in this country – I hope that it never will be – that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution”

In R v Metropolitan Police Commissioner, ex parte Blackburn (1968) – Lord Denning said:

“Although the chief officers of police are answerable to the law, there are many fields in which they have discretion…”

The above explains the angle from which selective enforcement can take place within today’s enforcement agencies. Now it is important to look at their responses to domestic violence and white collar crime.

Police response to Domestic Violence

        According to S. Edwards in Policing Domestic Violence (1989), of all the incidents reported to the police, only 2-3% are prosecuted. According to A. Saunders (1988) “Personal Violence and Public Order”, domestic violence is prosecuted at half the rate of public violence.

        In reference to the two stages of the negotiation process, reasons for the non-reporting of domestic violence include the following. Cultural constraints rooted in believing that the man has an authoritative role; economic constraints especially when the man is the bread-winner; physical constraints, for example threats of continued beating or increased beatings; loss of confidence and self-esteem due to continued beatings.

        There are reasons why the police do not respond to domestic violence calls, and do not necessarily prosecute. Sometimes the reason is deservedness; one never truly knows what a relationship is between a husband and wife. Another reason is simply the organisational logic of the police as an organisation. Battered women were not really that high a priority, until the late 1980s and 1990s.

The Reform

        In recent years, there has been a noticed reform in police response to domestic violence cases. The Home Office circular 60/1990 makes certain recommendations concerning response. The forces should:

1. make clear policy statements about how domestic violence should be dealt with;
2. create special units when practicable;
3. only label it as “no-crime” if satisfied that the report was inaccurate or false;
4. arrest where appropriate as charge with other violent assault cases;
5. consider prosecution where a woman appeared unwilling to give evidence on the grounds that many women with appropriate support might change their mind.

Selective Enforcement and White Collar Crime

Limited Reporting

        White collar crime is also known as occupational crime and includes: (a) employee theft of money, goods or intangibles such as the use of telephones, computers and photocopiers for unauthorised private purposes; (b) employee fraud such as claiming expenses incurred for private purposes; and (c) tax and benefit fraud. Each of these aspects will be examined.

        In 1991 Crime Concern calculated internal losses at £500 per employee per year. City Investigations reported that over two-thirds of company frauds were committed by company employees, including managers, accounts officials, salesmen, shop-floor operatives, directors and partners, distributors and drivers. The reasons for the non-reporting of this white-collar, work crime include Becker’s theory of negotiations over self-interest in whistle blowing. This means that often, nobody is personally affected, so the whistle is not blown. However, when someone is personally affected, like in Malinowski’s example of the Trobriand Community, the reaction may be altogether different. This emphasises Becker’s point of how society’s reactions create deviants, if no one points it out, then deviant behaviour is not found. By negotiation, the equilibrium is not disturbed. Also, there is always the possibility of private sanctions, the employer could simply just sack the thief and not involve the police. The enforcers can be seen as an unnecessary hassle.

        When it comes to commercial fraud, there are different reasons for non-reporting. These include the embarrassment of disclosing losses, especially for financial institutions because this could sully their reputation.  For example, the ENRON and Arthur Anderson fiasco in 2002, concerning the falsification of accounts. Often it is difficult to detect exactly what the amount is, and for how long it has been going on, because the offenders seek to disguise losses by deception so that stolen money becomes lost in the collective process, bit by bit, almost unnoticed. What is more, is that these losses would not be covered by insurance, so there is no insurance incentive for reporting. Finally, yet again, employers can deal with the problem internally by sacking.

Limited Proactive Policing

        For crime at work, the media does not really publicise it that much. The attitude of society is more along the lines of, “it happens all the time, it doesn’t really matter”, or “it’s getting even with the large multi-national companies for charging us too much!”, therefore selective enforcement takes place. The police have other priorities, such as what the public want them to be spending time doing. Investigating crime at work would involve resource intensive detection, which would disrupt the level of work output from the company and neither the employer nor the employer want this to happen.

        On the side of commercial fraud, again policing is limited. Reasons include the lack of publicity in the media. Commercial fraud stories are often monotonous and routine, with little “newsworthiness” and therefore are not included as a high ratio in newspapers, although they may be of high value. This again reflects the public’s attitudes, “why waste energy on this when peoples lives are at risk?”

        Secondly, time spent investigating would be much higher than the number of crimes actually cleared up. Investigating corporate crime is often time consuming and the outcome is rarely worth the time spent. So there would not be much point in wasting the enforcement resources. Finally, there is never just one criminal, it is often a group, of high status individuals who have greater opportunity to make policing difficult and “error” prone. It is important to ask whether this limited policing has any consequences?

Impacts and Regulations

        There are impacts on society of this corporate crime, perhaps few individuals are affected, and that explains the lack of whistle blowing, but nonetheless there are effects, financially and physically of this white-collar crime. These include effects on employees, for example health and safety problems, in the form of fatalities and injuries. It is now estimated that there are 17,000 major injuries per annum resulting from this cause.

        The public as a whole is also affected, in the form of the breach of pollution regulations, which results in the contamination of water and pollution in the atmosphere. When companies dump their waste, it is often expensive to do so, and often companies breach the regulations and dump waste in rivers and lakes, and also allow noxious gases into the atmosphere even if it is prohibited. This can cause many problems to plant and animal life and increases global warming and the greenhouse effect. This affects the world as a whole and people tend not to notice it on an individual basis and therefore do not report it to the authorities. Even if the authorities were aware it is often a difficult problem to tackle, hence the introduction of regulation agencies.

        Finally consumers are affected, without even knowing, they are sold unfit food, weighing less than what they paid for, which is often overpriced. In 1985, the times estimated that food poisoning cost 23 million working days per annum and the Audit Commission reported in 1990 that food poisoning cases had risen threefold in eight years. According to the Environmental Health Officers in 1990, 12% of all food retail outlets visited, represented “significant and imminent” health risks to the public and 70% were in breach of some regulation. Again, this is undetected, because how often can one pinpoint exactly what food gave them food poisoning? It is difficult and often becomes accepted and therefore not reported.

        However, to combat these problems, specialist regulatory agencies have been put into action. These include:

1. Factory and Agricultural Inspectorates, this agency deals with breaches of Health and Safety regulations.
2. HMI Pollution and National Rivers Authority, deals with air, land and water pollution.
3. Local Authority Environmental Health Officers which deal with food and drugs legislation
4. Local Authority Trading Standards Officers or Consumer Protection Departments which deals with Trading Standards legislation.

These regulator’s aims are not really focussed on prosecution, but rather at stopping these forms of crimes at the source. Sentences may reflect a number of different aims, they may be directed at deterrence or rehabilitation or simply, they may be based on retribution. Serious offences tend to attract heavy penalties. The ‘harm’ done by offences and their effect on victims are crucial factors underlying sentences assessment of seriousness.

Another type of white-collar crime, which has selective enforcement, is that of Tax and Benefit Fraud. The estimates of how much this fraud accounts for caries between 7.5% of Gross National Product (GNP) to 15% of GNP. However, the European Commission Report (1998) estimated undeclared income in Britain as being worth £58 – 108 billion a year. M. Levi has estimated tax fraud at 5 or 6 times the cost of ‘conventional crime’. Other tax fraud includes Value Added Tax (VAT) Fraud and National Insurance Fraud. Finally, benefit fraud can vary up to £5 billion per annum.

        To understand the reasons why these amounts are so large, one can simply return to Becker’s theory of self-interest. Often individuals are unaffected by these acts and the government is, more so, it is unnoticed and the public at large do not care. To explain the patterns of policing, people view different levels of moral culpability or harm caused. Tax fraud is not prioritised over other crimes in today’s society. Again with Becker’s theory of whistle blowing, nobody is personally affected.

Conclusion

        Howard Becker wanted to transform the questions that criminologists asked, he didn’t want them to ask:

“ Why do criminals break rules?”

but,

“Why do people care about the rule breaking?”

        In other words, societies create deviants by labelling certain people, by pointing fingers, and by laying blame. Rule breaking is a frequent phenomenon, many people speed whilst driving, download mp3 files from the Internet, smoke marijuana and drink alcohol before they are eighteen. How often are these rules enforced? Rule enforcement is very unpredictable. If no self-interest exists, then no whistle will be blown. It depends on the level of harm caused, who is affected and by how much to determine the rate of enforcement. There needs to be a degree of self-interest and initiative, one must be able to define oneself as a victim of a crime. In whistle blowing, one of the key things is the perception of ‘real crime’. Often, domestic violence and white-collar crimes are not perceived as ‘real’ enough. This is when negotiations start.

        In negotiations, the police ask the victims if they want to press charges, we already covered that in cases of domestic violence and work crimes, they victim often doesn’t want to. The police’s perceptions also make a difference, what they think is the cause of the assault makes a difference to the manner in which they react. So why do the police negotiate?

        The police often focus on cases that are solvable and not on those that they do not wish to work on. This bias results in further non-reporting and clarifies exactly what selective enforcement is. The police are powerful in this manner and can make it more or less difficult to complain. Social perceptions of the public towards certain groups can also bias the police. The “rubbish” class is labelled as incompetent, messy and wastes. The police are less likely to react to them, as they lead chaotic lives and are more likely to have bad things happen to them. The “middle” class is likely to receive more attention.

        

        In summary, Becker’s theories can help us to understand the selective enforcement of white-collar crime and domestic violence, and to help us to ask the correct questions about committing crimes. More along the lines of society’s reactions rather than reasons why they are committed by people. We can better understand the reactions of the enforcement agencies and reactions of the public in general. However, are Becker’s theories complete enough? Do they cover enough scope? Would the same rules apply to different crimes, perhaps one’s where society would react differently?

        

Bibliography

Electronic Sources:

www. westlaw. co. uk

www. lawtel. co. uk

Legislation:

Home Office Circular 60/1990

Books:

The Outsiders – Studies in the Sociology of Deviance – Howard S. Becker (1963)

The Police and Social Conflict – Rhetoric and Reality – Nigel G. Fielding

Croall, H (2001) – Understanding White Collar Crime

J Muncie and E McLaughlin – The Problem of Crime

S. Edwards – Policing Domestic Violence

1. Sanders (1988)  - “Personal Violence and Public Order” – 16 Int J Soc of Law pp 359 – 382

1. Cretney and G. Davis – Punishing Violence – (1995)

M. Levi – Regulating Fraud

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