As a result of this controlled delivery, 11 people were apprehended in several cities in France and a large quantity of cannabis resin was seized. Once it reached Séte, in Southern France, the van was closely monitored until reaching the location of the cargo's unloading. On 18 June 2011, the police forces of the Tanger-Med seaport eased the transit of the van. The drug was concealed in an oil cargo, in an "Iveco" van. The investigation established that the head of the criminal organization had appointed a French national to supervise the transport of an unknown amount of controlled drugs.
This operation sought to dismantle a criminal organization specialized in drug trafficking between Morocco and the Paris region, in France. Read my Forbes blog here.On 13 June 2011, the French authorities requested the help of the Moroccan Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale - the countries' national security agency - to organize a controlled delivery. The more people who can gain access to the internet and to other relatively cheap and engaging diversions, like games and social media, the better off our society will become.įollow me on Twitter or Facebook. Or maybe there's no link at all.īut on a purely intuitive level, I can't help but think that the more people we have playing games the better. Maybe the more time people spend playing games, the less time and motivation they'll have to go out and commit crimes. Still, it's also possible that relatively cheap, accessible, and time-consuming electronic diversions keep people occupied who might otherwise be out getting into trouble. Why are violent crimes down? It may not have anything to do with video games. The Norway shooter played a violent video game? Send it to print! Find some correlation and you've got yourself a clickable headline. The news plays to our fears, whether substantiated or no, and since video games first rolled on to the scene, parents have been fearful of the effects violent video games might have on their kids. Why the media keeps spinning this same tale is not particularly perplexing. Most gamers are under 40, and most critics are non-games-playing over-40s." It's not hard to combine the two graphs in your mind's eye and see the two lines cross.Īs The Economist put it several years ago: "The opposition to gaming springs largely from the neophobia that has pitted the old against the entertainments of the young for centuries. Meanwhile, games sales are on the rise in the US (in billions US$): Here's a look at falling violent crime numbers, courtesy of the FBI. Violent crime is at an all-time low in America. Indeed, the correlation between the growth in the gaming industry and the fall in violent crime is startling even if it is only a correlation. Many social and behavioral researchers point out that violence in the home and poverty are better indicators of anti-social or violent behavior.Īdd to this the fact that the gaming industry is now measured in the tens of billions of dollars every year, with global revenue well over $60 billion annually.Īt the very same time as video games started going mainstream, violent crime began to fall.
There are many other studies which come to the same conclusions - or lack of conclusions - about the risk of violent video games affecting behavior in real life. They found that the games had no impact on aggressive behavior whatsoever, and that the group which played no game at all was the most aggressive after the task, whereas the group that played the violent games were the least hostile and depressed.