I'm curious if the value of dishonesty has increased as police forces and their efficiencies have increased. In times past if somebody felt sufficiently screwed

I'm curious if the value of dishonesty has increased as police forces and their efficiencies have increased. In times past if somebody felt sufficiently screwed, there was a chance for quite severe consequences. People were armed, detective work was primitive, and local legal systems had a defacto defense of 'he deserved it.' But today you can screw millions of people over and feel pretty safe about it. People are generally not armed, police work is of a much higher quality and a perceived quality even higher than that (CSI effect [1]), and criminal courts don't tend to consider justifiability except in an extremely narrow set of situations such as self defense. It means that, in practice, the worst consequence you can ever expect to face for a bad action is the legal consequence for such. And even if everybody 'knows' you did it, so long as you can pose any sort of a defense to offer reasonable doubt you stand a pretty decent chance of getting off. And highly paid lawyers, alongside a convoluted and ever more esoteric legal system, tend to be pretty good at doing just that. I'm not making a value judgement on systems of past or present. I simply find unintended consequences remarkably interesting. A reasonable argument that better police forces and improved legal systems could somehow drive dishonest and unlawful behavior would rank pretty high up there on something nobody would ever intend. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect