Catching the bad boys

is a feature in this morning's paper. There isn't just a single article but multiple articles spread over several pages. 

The law enforcement agencies are gloating over the number of arrests they have been able to make in a "sting" operation involving an "app" and other law enforcement agencies. It all sounds good to hear that more than two hundred people have been arrested and more than three thousand kilos of drugs have been prevented from reaching the streets. People's lives have been saved, executions have been prevented. 

I hope it works. It's a risky business. Getting information that way is fraught with evidential difficulties. It may well stop bad things from happening but how many criminals will end up doing prison time? It may not be as many as the law enforcement people hope for.

And I wondered about something else. What sort of lives do these people really live? Do the criminals get up in the morning thinking about their illegal activities? I suspect it is more likely they get up thinking about getting their children to school. Many of them are probably quite ordinary sort of people in every other way. For them criminal activities are quite possibly simply a job like any other job.

I find that odd. We don't write about people that way in novels. The reason of course is that they would not be particularly interesting characters if we did.