There is a peculiar frustration that comes from watching someone play whack-a-mole at a carnival. The player stands ready, mallet in hand, waiting for the next plastic head to pop up from its hole. They strike it down with satisfying force, only to have another emerge immediately from a different corner of the board. Then another. Then two at once. No matter how skilled the player becomes, no matter how quickly they react or how many moles they flatten, the game never truly ends. The moles keep coming, relentless and inexhaustible, until the timer runs out or the player simply walks away exhausted.
This is not merely an arcade phenomenon. It is the fundamental nature of crime prevention in virtually every society on earth.Consider the architecture of our response to criminal activity. A neighborhood experiences a surge in burglaries, so police increase patrols and residents install security systems. The break-ins decrease, perhaps dramatically. Success, we declare. But the burglars have not vanished into thin air; they have relocated to the next neighborhood over, or shifted to car theft, or moved online to exploit digital vulnerabilities. The crime has not been eliminated. It has been displaced, transformed, or temporarily suppressed. We whacked one mole, and another appeared elsewhere.
This pattern repeats across every domain of criminal activity. When authorities crack down on drug trafficking in one corridor, supply routes shift to alternate paths. When financial regulations close loopholes that enable money laundering, sophisticated actors engineer new mechanisms that exploit different gaps in oversight. When cyber security professionals patch vulnerabilities that allow data breaches, malicious actors probe for fresh weaknesses in the endlessly complex digital ecosystem. The mallet comes down; the board resets.The persistence of this dynamic reveals something uncomfortable about our assumptions regarding crime. We speak of “solving” crime as though it were a finite problem, a puzzle with correct answers that, once found, remain settled. We build institutions around this premise: police departments tasked with maintaining order, courts designed to adjudicate and punish, prisons intended to remove dangerous individuals from society. These institutions do valuable work. They respond to harm, they deliver consequences, they protect communities in genuine and measurable ways. But they do not, cannot, strike at the root of why crime emerges in the first place.
Crime is not a fixed quantity of bad behavior waiting to be discovered and eliminated. It is an adaptive response to conditions: economic desperation, social exclusion, addiction, mental illness, opportunity, perceived injustice, or simply the eternal spectrum of human greed and cruelty. These conditions do not respond to enforcement alone. They shift, evolve, and find new expressions. When we suppress criminal activity in one form, the underlying pressures that generated that activity seek alternative outlets. The moles do not stop coming because we have demonstrated superior mallet technique.
This is not an argument for resignation. The whack-a-mole metaphor becomes dangerous when it leads to cynicism, to the belief that prevention efforts are futile because crime simply relocates. That conclusion mistakes the nature of the game. The point of whack-a-mole is not to eliminate the moles permanently—that is impossible within the rules of the game. The point is to manage them, to prevent any single mole from dominating the board, to maintain a tolerable equilibrium through constant vigilance and intervention.
So too with crime prevention. The goal cannot be the utopian elimination of all criminal behavior. History offers no examples of such success, and the attempt to achieve it has produced some of humanity’s most oppressive experiments in social control. The realistic objective is reduction, management, and the continuous adaptation of our responses to match the continuous adaptation of criminal innovation.This requires a more sophisticated understanding of what “success” means in public safety. Success is not a single dramatic intervention that ends a particular problem forever. Success is the gradual, unglamorous work of pushing crime rates downward through multiple simultaneous pressures: economic opportunity that reduces the appeal of illegal markets, social services that address addiction and mental health before they generate criminal behavior, community institutions that create belonging and mutual accountability, and yes, law enforcement that intervenes when prevention fails. Each of these approaches has limitations. Each can be whacked down by political opposition, budget constraints, or shifting priorities. But together, they create an environment where criminal activity faces resistance at every turn—not eliminated, but perpetually contested.
The whack-a-mole player who focuses only on speed, who swings wildly at every emerging threat without studying the patterns of emergence, will tire quickly and score poorly. The skilled player learns to anticipate, to position themselves strategically, to recognize that some moles are higher-value targets than others. They accept that they cannot hit everything, and they allocate their limited attention where it matters most.
Our approach to crime requires similar wisdom. We cannot respond to every violation with maximum force; we would bankrupt ourselves and shred the social fabric in the process. We must choose which moles to prioritize, which harms are most urgent to suppress, and where our interventions are likely to produce genuine reduction rather than mere displacement. This demands humility about what enforcement can achieve and honesty about what it cannot.
The game continues. The moles keep coming. But we play not because we expect to win definitively, but because the alternative—lowering our mallets and allowing the board to be overrun—is unacceptable. The whack-a-mole problem is not a reason to stop swinging. It is a reason to swing smarter, to build better boards, and to accept that our work is never finished.