Over the weekend in the Baltimore Sun Tricia Bishop reports on the current state of heritage policing in the United States:
America is the largest consumer of artwork in the world, with a 40
percent share of the $200 billion global industry. It's also the scene
of nearly half of the illegal art trade estimated to be worth another $7 billion worldwide.
Yet other countries pay far more attention to art fraud. Italy has
several hundred detectives on its Carabinieri Art Squad, and Greece,
France, Germany and Belgium all have national units working the detail.
In contrast, the FBI's
Art Crime Team, co-founded by a Baltimore native whose father ran an
antiques shop on Howard Street, is made up of one archaeologist and 13
agents, who work the beat on the side. And the Los Angeles Police Department's Art
Theft Detail consists of just one investigator, a man who is delaying
retirement because he's afraid the division will die if he leaves
without a trained successor.
The piece looks at three of the main groups tasked with art crimes in the United States: The Art Crime Team, the Archival Recovery Team, and Don Hrycyk at the LAPD. As I said in the piece, these folks have an essential job, and given the fact these crimes are still relegated to the status of non-violent property crimes in many cases, they don't rise to the level of illegal narcotics or terrorism or other priorities law enforcement must tackle. But there is a fundamental difference between property and historical objects and art, and more attention should be paid to them. America as a country might be thinking too much about owning and buying these objects, and not enough about acting as stewards.
- Tricia Bishop, Art investigators: Saving the country’s cultural heritage, one recovered work at a time, Baltimore Sun, October 23, 2011, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-history-thieves-20111007,0,443863,full.story (last visited Oct 26, 2011).
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