i know ppl who were victims of lack of enforcement of certain crimes but on the other hand cops investigated when corporations were being targeted.
Opinion | America is swarming with Paul Manaforts
One possible lesson of the many brazen, conspicuous scandals related to President Trump and others in his orbit: The U.S. government has been massively underinvesting in enforcement and prosecution of white-collar crime.
Federal prosecutions of white-collar crime — a category that includes tax, corporate, health-care or securities fraud, among other crimes — are on track this year to reach their lowest level on record. That’s according to data compiled by
Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), whose data go back to 1986.
Prosecutions of crimes related to public corruption are also on pace to set a record low.
Yet we have little reason to believe actual
levels of such crimes have decreased. So why has enforcement plummeted? That’s subject to some debate.
The Trump administration has openly
prioritized prosecution of other crimes, particularly those related to immigration. But the downward trend in white-collar and official-corruption prosecutions predates the Trump presidency. The Barack Obama administration, you may recall, was often criticized for failing to hold corporations and executives accountable in the wake of the financial crisis.
Some argue that big corporations and the wealthy have become too politically influential. Jesse Eisinger, in his excellent book “
The Chicken
Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives ,” blames a culture of risk aversion in the ranks of the Justice Department
