“The State has the power to commit crime and to legitimate its crime”
True or False?

Green and Ward define State Crime as illegal or deviant activities either undertaken by the state or supported by the state. It includes genocide, war crimes, torture and state assassination, even more so McLoughlin and others identify four categories of state crime; political crimes like censorship, security crimes such as genocide, economic crimes such as violating safety laws and social crimes such as institutionalised racism.
Whilst some may claim that the State definitely has the power to not only commit crime but also legitimate it, others such as Stanley Cohen and Zygmunt Bauman argue that this is not the case, stating arguments such as the spiral of denial and neutralisation theory to justify this outlook.

Firstly in favour of the statement, the actual scale which state crime can take the form of highly suggests that it has the absolute power to commit and legitimate its crimes. Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia under the leadership of Pol Pot murdered over two million people, almost a fifth of the country’s population. Similarly, since 2012, the Assad Regime in Syria has systematically been slaughtering its own people who hold the beliefs against Assad’s leadership. In both examples, the states’ monopoly of violence allows them to potentially have infinite power and resource in committing state crime. Kramer in 2006 notes that there is an inseparability of “great power and great crime”, noting that the economic and political elites often found in state leadership positions can affect entire human groups via the creation of criminal systems of oppression and exploitation.

States too benefit from the idea that they have national sovereignty to the extent that international organisations such as the United Nations may be weary of intervening