This has some interesting bounds on it. Smart criminals are harder to catch, but the thing about crime is that it rarely actually pays to commit crimes. Most or

This has some interesting bounds on it. Smart criminals are harder to catch, but the thing about crime is that it rarely actually pays to commit crimes. Most organized crime works by scamming other people into committing the high-risk crimes for you. So at some point the smart criminals realize they're the mark and either become informants or move on to legitimate business. But just as petty crime has its bounds, so does legitimate business. This is why you have big tech companies that built their empires on lies and fraud. The justice system isn't optimized to catch this kind of crime, so it takes longer to get punished, and meanwhile every one of your competitors either learns to commit the same crimes or goes bankrupt. Furthermore the kinds of crimes you can commit once you've built a legitimate business are a lot more subtle and more lucrative. So you have a society with an honest core of people doing the actual productive work, while being scammed by incredibly corrupt CEOs, who themselves distract the honest core with fears of petty criminals so that the justice system continues to expend its budget on cheap wins against the common crook.