Bewildered

Sir I was a bit disoriented by the title of Christopher Caldwell’s “Harsh policing goes transatlantic”, March 31, since it caused me to start reading his article as if he was discussing something going from Europe to America and not the other way round. My fault, clearly I should have remembered that in a globalized world there is no clear definition of what is here and what is over there.

Having said that Mr Caldwell left me even more confused when after he had in “Financial crime and punishment”, March 24, preached the need to be more lenient with “white collar crime” as we should understand that “it is a less serious crime” then, only seven days later, he now ends with a “get the police out of the business of ‘understanding’ the societies they police”. Of course, again it could just be that globalization causes such a short duration of any ism; or perhaps that since Caldwell’s current article has to do with multicultural problems, we should have read him before as arguing about white white collar problems; or perhaps, just as likely, that it really has nothing to do with his confused writing but only with my confused reading; or perhaps, most likely, that the whole issue is so complex it can only have muddled answers… whatever.