I agree that most museum staff members rise above the temptation to steal artifacts of any kind. But if there is temptation to begin with, then the problem already exists and may be hard to detect. This means that the museum is already operating at a disadvantage. We've all noticed a rather alarming increase in the number of publicized cases of internal theft, corruption or otherwise ethically questionable incidents in museums in the last few years. I don't know what the cause is, except perhaps greed, arrogance, opportunity or a combination of all three. It may simply be a case of more incidents reaching the press. It also speaks to the need for museums and related institutions to look at their ethics and security policies every few years and update them when necessary. Many institutions become too lax with employees after a period of time. People forget about policies or decline to enforce them because of the complications involved in enforcement. It's not so much a matter of how institutions change their policies as a matter of regularly reviewing your policies to make sure they can effectively deal with such incidents. No institution will ever be able to anticipate every unethical act its employees may undertake, but if they keep their policies current and employ rigorous enforcement, that will help. Limiting access, updating security systems, and continuous inventory of collections also will help reduce risk. Tactically placed video cameras (or the belief that video cameras are in place) also help because it's pretty hard to deny doing something wrong when you're on tape. As far as regaining the public trust, that depends on what happened, who was involved, and if there was legal resolution. If some kind of institutional neglect was involved, then regaining the public trust will be that much harder. If the incident could not be avoided or was a rare occurrence, then perhaps there is less to worry about and the public will come around in time. Effective PR on the part of the institution will help mitigate whatever bad press may occur following a theft. In the case of the New York incident, we don't know enough details to know what happened. But it does seem rather odd that so many items could be taken over such a long period of time without anyone noticing something was wrong. When someone on the outside notices the problem first, then you know you have a real problem.

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