Chapter 172: No Peace Among Businessmen

“Things have been somewhat bad lately. Try not to go out after dark.”

Not long after William returned to Sabine City, Ferraler came to see him. He casually mentioned a few issues regarding the city’s current public security situation and reminded William to avoid leaving home after nightfall.

Sometimes it almost made a person laugh. The Baler Federation was the most technologically advanced country on the planet and, at least so far, still counted as a highly developed economy. Yet its crime rate was absurdly high.

It was said that the enormous backlog of unsolved cases accumulated every year had already filled several industrial warehouses. Yes, the kind roughly twenty feet high and covering several thousand square feet.

Every shelf was packed with case files and evidence of every kind. But those cases ended there. At least until some breakthrough appeared, none of them would be mentioned again. Eventually they would be forgotten, and then, under the gaze of many people connected to them, these records of sin would be burned into ash.

The firelight from their burning would illuminate the city ... or perhaps just light a few bulbs. We all know coal-fired power generation is only capable of so much.

So unless a case created a major social impact, if it could not be solved quickly, it generally died without a conclusion.

As various social conditions emerged, the crime rate began climbing higher and higher. Among those with nothing to do and an extreme shortage of money, some began taking desperate risks. According to statistics from the Sabine City Police Department, beginning three years ago, the rate of theft cases had grown explosively and had continued rising ever since. Even today, there was still no end in sight.

Every day, dozens of theft cases were entered into police records through the alarm system. Perhaps even more thefts had occurred without anyone reporting them.

Because those people no longer had anything left to steal, there was no need for them to anger the thieves.

It was like the burglary case William had reported earlier. The police had only come to take a statement. They would not assign any police manpower specifically to the matter. At most, they would use their own channels to remind certain fences to keep an eye out for the circulation of stolen goods with highly recognizable features from certain cases.

And even that had been an act the officer taking the statement had done voluntarily because he had a favorable impression of William. If it had been some ordinary person, or even someone a little ugly, they would not have wasted the cost of a telephone call spreading that information. In the end, the case would have simply gone nowhere.

All kinds of violent crimes, robberies, and other serious crimes were also occurring frequently. The city had become unsafe.

“Why not organize manpower to clean out these gang members?” William asked with some curiosity. In his view, reducing the crime rate was actually a fairly simple matter. At least, he did not think it would be too difficult.

Ferraler smiled and shook his head. He only took this as one of William’s somewhat naive ideas as a young man. “You may not know this, but in the first half of the year, for every case the local police station solved, the police manpower and material resources invested translated into a cost of roughly three hundred to one thousand dollars. That includes cases that were stopped in time and cases that remain unsolved to this day.”