  As a simple model for criminal behavior, the traditional two-strategy
inspection game yields counterintuitive results that fail to describe empirical
data. The latter shows that crime is often recurrent, and that crime rates do
not respond linearly to mitigation attempts. A more apt model entails ordinary
people who neither commit nor sanction crime as the third strategy besides the
criminals and punishers. Since ordinary people free-ride on the sanctioning
efforts of punishers, they may introduce cyclic dominance that enables the
coexistence of all three competing strategies. In this setup ordinary
individuals become the biggest impediment to crime abatement. We therefore also
consider heterogeneous punisher strategies, which seek to reduce their
investment into fighting crime in order to attain a more competitive payoff. We
show that this diversity of punishment leads to an explosion of complexity in
the system, where the benefits and pitfalls of criminal behavior are revealed
in the most unexpected ways. Due to the raise and fall of different alliances
no less than six consecutive phase transitions occur in dependence on solely
the temptation to succumb to criminal behavior, leading the population from
ordinary people-dominated across punisher-dominated to crime-dominated phases,
yet always failing to abolish crime completely.
