The world is in the grips of what some are calling ‘a police body camera revolution’ and Australia is in the thick of it. This might be an unalloyed good if we were confident that all body-worn cameras do is improve police behaviour and community safety. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.

Notwithstanding the seismic shudders that cases like these send through the art world, what is most unsettling about art fraud are not the fakes that we know about, but those that we don’t. In criminology, this statistical and research blind spot is known as ‘dark figure’ crime, which is a suitably ominous way to describe the difficult-to-quantify incidence of a crime that largely goes undetected, unreported and unsolved.

Long ago the High Court made clear that one objective stands above all others: deterrence. I can’t stress how important this word is, how many people it has locked up, how many lives it has destroyed, how much money it is costing us, how crowded it is keeping our prisons, and how poorly it is understood.