A question a little too whimsical for General, so I decided to pose it here.
Perhaps the success rate is too low to make them attractive?
Assuming you are speaking of kidnappings for fun and profit (rather than parents kidnapping their children from the other parent), it’s because they are so difficult to pull off and get away. After the initial crime you have to contact the family, arrange for an exchange, and outwit the authorities; a complex task compounded by the fact that most people don’t keep extraordinary amounts of cash at hand, giving them time to contact authorities and have currency marked. And of course, there’s the kidnap victim, who has to be cared for and can potentially identify the kidnappers. Messy and likely to go every kind of wrong; a cowboy bank robbery is cake in comparison.
That being said, in Mexico and parts of Central America, Russia and former Soviet Republics, and parts of South Africa, kidnapping is far more common than in the US and Europe, in no small part because of the incompetence and corruption of law enforcement officials. In the US or Europe, performing a kidnapping puts you high on the “Most Wanted” list, and a botched kidnapping carries huge penalties.
Stranger
The Iraqi insurgency is substantially funded by kidnappings.
If IRC, kidnapping use to be more common and back in the thirties or forties, the FBI had made catching kidnappers its number one goal.
If this is true and not an Urban Legend, then that would probably explain the small numbers of kidnapping for cash in the USA.
Jim
The problem with kidnapping as a concept is that you’ve got to commit the crime first and then make arrangements to collect the loot at a specified place and time. That sort of gives the police an advantage.
Another aspect is (probably) the downfall of organized crime. The FBI was (as I understand it) primarily created to break up organized crime–this of course leaving us with disorganized crime. When it comes to disorganized crime, the number of gangstas stealing Nikes or picking off convenience stores far outranks assassinations, bribing politicians, and robbing banks. Most crime at the moment is like water, flowing down the path of least resistance. So where one could hotwire a BMW, it is much more likely that an old junker will be hotwired simply because it’s easier and in the areas where most hotwirers live, there are mostly junkers.
I would be fairly certain that most people (per capita of income) kidnapped for the sake of ransom are probably from relatively low income homes, in the US. I haven’t researched this though.
Last I heard (which was years ago) Florida allowed the death penalty to be imposed on kidnappers, unless the victim was returned unharmed.
Wasn’t Charles Lindburg’s baby son kidnapped for ransom, and then killed after the scheme went bad?
It seems to be a big thing in Malaysia. Singaporean businessmen seemed to be routinely kidnapped over there - there was a recent incident in the news. Apparently the businessman had hired bodyguards, but they were useless.
Actually, the FBI was pretty late joining in efforts against organized crime. Hoover was notorious for insisting there was no such thing as organized crime (to the point where questions were raised of him having been paid off or blackmailed). And organized crime never really got into kidnapping in America - it would have drawn too much attention to them so they prefered other more business-like criminal activities.
It’s also likely that the level of economic desperation necessary to make kidnapping look attractive hasn’t been reached in America yet. All the countries cited as having high kidnapping rates have also had very difficult economies with little or nothing in the way of safety nets for the poor.
In Yemen in the 1990’s, kidnapping became a means for tribesmen to press grievances against the government. Generally, the “victims” were treated more as guests than as hostages, although a 1998 incident did produce fatalities.
In this vein, doesn’t kidnapping remain one of the few Federal offenses that can be prosecuted even in cases where no state lines are crossed?
Yes, that is correct. Some excellent reading on the subject on the FBI site of course.
Jim
Not quite.
The baby was killed almost immediately, probably less than a half-hour after being kidnapped. They had absolutely no intention of returning the baby alive, no matter how the scheme went. (That was one of the things that made the public so mad about this–the killing was so pointless–a child that age would not have been able to give any clues toward identifying the kidnappers.)
Of course, there are still people that claim that Hauptmann was not the kidnapper; that the baby was killed (maybe accidentally) by a family member, then they hid the body in the woods and invented the kidnapping story to cover up the baby’s death.
My dad, through his job, knows several fairly wealthy people, and he was saying something a few weeks ago about how stressful it could be to be a parent when you’re “that bloody rich”. In one example, the gentleman has a full security team working 24/7 around his estate (in a small town in Québec), his children have body guards, and pretty much everyone is checked and doublechecked when they come onto the property, simply because that particular person is, in fact, worth enough to make the threat real enough to engage these measures to prevent it.
To my knowledge, there have been no attempts on that family or on any others that my father knows about, but it isn’t as if I asked, either!
In short then: kidnapping is easy, getting away with it almost impossible (at least in the U.S.A.)