Follow The Money

You know the saying ‘Follow the money’.  When it comes to who loses money and who makes money when crime happens, a clear pattern emerges.

Below I’m going to list people and organizations who touch crime.  Many of them are in place to protect and defend the public. Beside that list I’m going to describe how the money flows.

• Judges - Judges get paid no matter who ends up in jail or who goes free. 
• Crown Prosecutors - They get paid no matter what. You attend court for free while they get paid for every minute they are there, whether there work stop any criminals or if they make the crime rate worse. 
• Defense Lawyers - They get paid whether crime goes up or down. 
• Police - They get paid no matter the crime rate. Only their reputations take a hit when crime rises to high levels.  
• Elected politicians - They get paid regardless of the actions they took or did not take regarding crime. Crime costs them nothing financially. 
• Large industry - They make money no matter what kind of crime gets done to their business. Usually, the costs just get passed on to their customers. I’ve actually heard people say ‘Don’t worry, they will never lose money’ when it came to multi-million dollar losses from crime. 
• Insurance companies - They get paid and make money regardless of the crime rate.  Their customers are the ones who have to pay for the costs from claims. 
• Criminals - They get paid to do crime. 
• People who own no property. They have zero risk financially if you a property owner, are a victim. 
• Some small business. Some do indeed get hurt financially.  Many will try to find a way to raise their rates to pay for the losses the company experiences. 
• Security companies - They get paid to install and deliver security. They do not suffer financially if a crime takes place. 
• Criminologists - They get paid to study crime.  They rarely get paid to stop crime. 
• Social Media Companies + Media - They make money when people click and comment on their content.  The scarier the crime, the more outraged people are, the more they make money from ads.  They get paid when there is crime and don't get paid anything when there is just a quiet peaceful community.
• Home Owners - This is the ONE and ONLY person that always suffers financially from crime.

Follow the money, and you see that only ONE party, the property owner, is always directly and financially hurt when crime hits them.  

Here's the main thing to think about with this list.  If those organizations and people in this list actually got hurt financially when crime happened, they would be shouting the solution to stopping it from the rooftops.  

Crime would barely exist if they would lose some of their paycheck because of it.

Especially when the ways to stop it are so obvious, even an outsider to the industry like me, could learn the way to do it after a couple years of study.

As a home owner you are the only player in this 'system'  who has any financial  incentives to make crime stop. 

There are good people in every one of the organizations listed.  Those people often give their time, even their whole careers doing the right thing to help keep people safe.  Still, no matter how many good people are involved, they are only a cog in the big machinery that just keeps on rolling and getting paid for crime to continue.

When I saw this, I knew at Lightcatch we needed to do something different.   If you follow the money for Lightcatch, we get paid when crime gets stopped, and Lightcatch loses money if a crime happens at your home. This is the way it should be.

Images from https://unsplash.com/@alexandermils
Celyn Kang - https://unsplash.com/photos/e-CrwdBNL7k