By: Zunaira Ali
As the corona-esque mushrooms so do the crimes related to it. Criminals, as pandemic profiteers, exploit the COVID-19 crisis by capitalizing on fear and panic of vulnerable citizens through transgressions. Which causes this global outbreak to not only looped momentous health issues but security issues as well. These Covidiots swiftly took advantage of the virus proliferation and abuse the demand people have for information and supplies. In addition to this, they used this catastrophic situation to carry out their heinous crimes like harassments, burglaries, phishing emails through spam campaigns, frauds, theft, counterfeiting or smuggling of people in Kurdish-dominated region of Iraq for some extra cash.
By now there are handsome amount of cases in which some bizarre individuals threatened their surroundings by coughing and spitting on people, even on some police officer, or on grocery store items so that they allow the spread of this ‘mutated’ virus across their adjoining settings. Individuals like Pfister in Missouri or George Falcone in New Jersey are being charged with ‘terrorist’ threats in the second or third degrees and some are even met with a sentence of up to four years with a fine by city’s courts. Similar to that happens in Chechnya where the leader has suggested some drastic measures i.e. to execute anyone who breaks an isolation order and spreads the disease, unlike, Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro who has an unsettling sense of normalcy to claim that COVID-19 is just a “little flu”. But for some countries like Israel termination of this spreading process is only done by cyber engineering. For that, Benjamin Netanyahu in Shin Bet introduced cyber monitors which were considered as dystopian science some time ago to track coronavirus carriers which have a population as its centre of gravity. According to Yuval Noah Hariri, this bypasses an over the skin surveillance to under the skin surveillance by containing citizen empowerment for the sake of security.
This evolution of crime isn’t halted here but it booms in other areas like forgery where they took advantage of shortages of healthcare and sanitary products as well as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) so that anxious people procure on that. Plus, there is an exacerbation of cyber criminality as millions of people are working from home. Europol report some scams like ‘Grandmother Trick’ or ‘Nephew Trick’ in which fake doctors enter in homes to conduct the coronavirus test just to burglarize the place or to sell fake hand sanitizers, face masks and even testing kits. Multiple Member States of European Union have reported a similar modus operandi for theft especially of oxygen canisters from hospitals.
In the middle of this, hate crimes in varied epicentres are a part of those atrocious acts which are mostly against Asians, as westerners think that they are the one who brought the virus on their land. Ergo, these incidents surge the buying of guns and ammunition in these areas as they have produced a ‘Social Mayhem’ which comes along with panic and fear.
Thus, in this scenario, we all have to realize that in the meantime we are on the same boat, fragile and disoriented, and each of us is in need to comfort the other just like John Rawls demonstrate us in his concept ‘Veil of Ignorance’. Moreover, we have to adopt the ‘Kantian way’ where reluctance of collective good is present rather than our individual preservation and interest.
The writer is a student of Quad-e-Azam University, Islamabad. She can be reached at [email protected]
